by Judith Curry
With the new media, it’s astonishing how much trouble a mild-mannered grandmother speaking common sense about climate change can cause without leaving her home.
I’m at a bit of an inflection point.
After my resignation from Georgia Tech in 2017, I was very busy building up my company Climate Forecast Applications Network. Not to mention busy with several very active Atlantic hurricane seasons.
In 2020, I entered into a contract with Anthem Press to write a book Climate Uncertainty and Risk. The era of Covid isolation seemed like the perfect time to write a book. I submitted the book to Anthem in August 2022; it is still undergoing peer review, which is proceeding very slooooowly. Writing the book was a head exploding experience (I will write more on the book soon, once it actually goes to press).
Now I’m trying to figure out what’s next (in addition to continuing to build my company), and I’m experimenting with several new media options. One might ask what I’m trying to accomplish here?
I like doing wicked science: where complex problems and politics intersect, and public communication of the same. I am appalled at the state of both the scientific and policy debates surrounding climate change. I am hoping that my little voice can help bring some common sense to this situation. The work of my company and also my personal interests are moving me in the direction of energy, agriculture and adaptation to weather extremes. Now that I’ve left academia, I can be 100% my own person; I want to flex my wings a bit, and I want to help people. And last but not least, I need to hone my interview and public writing skills in anticipation of publication of my book next summer.
Blog
Starting ~2018, this blog entered somewhat of a snooze mode, for reasons mentioned above. Posts were mainly by guest experts or Week in Review posts. The Week in Review posts served the important function of archiving articles that might be relevant to my book. Now that the book is submitted, I have been writing more blog posts (no more Week in Review posts).
For awhile, blogs became unfashionable, as podcasts and twitter became ascendant. WUWT remains the only heritage climate blog with a substantial following. Substack.com has been a game changer, providing an organizing framework for long form writing on blogs (where writers can also get paid). I am a paid subscriber to about half dozen Substack blogs, and subscribe unpaid to about another half dozen.
In the climate space, Roger Pielke Jr (paid) and Andy Revkin (unpaid) have moved to Substack. At this point, I plan to keep Climate Etc. as is and completely under my own control, thus avoiding any possible censorship or institutional pressure.
Bottom line: I will be ramping up the number of blog posts. I very much enjoy the community at Climate Etc. and very much appreciate your participation through comments and direct emails to me. I am especially appreciative of the experts contributing guest posts. I feel like I have a community of e-friends from all over the world.
Videos/Podcasts
I am not very good at sound bite interviews, either written or audio interviews. I almost never respond to such requests any more. However, I do like the long-form podcast interview (30+ minutes). I’m being invited to do more of these; I have been putting many of these off to the new year, when the timing will be better to talk about my new book.
In recent weeks I have done two long-form interviews:
- European Institute of Science and Management (EISM)
- BizNews (Africa)
Both are interesting and different from each other. I expect there will be a follow up to the EISM interview; post interview we both realized that we had missed the most relevant topic for our interaction – risk governance.
If you only have time to watch one, watch BizNews, where the interviewer gave me pretty free reign. This interview went viral on youtube, with 500,000 views in 7 days. Intimations of trouble ahead were a “Context” statement on climate change from the UN attached to my interview, designed to tell people the “truth” about climate change (when in fact the statement describes the “truth” of UN climate politics). On day 7, when the video hit 500,000 views, it apparently disappeared from YouTube. Searching for “Judith Curry”, “Judith Curry climate”, “Judith Curry BizNews” did not show the video. Now, you can only find it by searching for “BizNews TV”, and then you can find it on the channel under “Popular Videos”. (note: you can also find it from a google search of “Judith Curry BizNews”)
My BizNews interview was shadow banned by YouTube. They didn’t completely ban it, but made it impossible to find. If the interview had been titled “Climate Change Common Sense” instead of “Dissident Climate Scientist Judith Curry . . .” it probably wouldn’t have been banned (but it probably wouldn’t have gotten 500K views, either)
One lesson learned from these interviews is that I need to make sure these interviews actually make it onto my calendar (I expect an e-calendar invite; problems arise when the invite arrives 10 mins before the interview and I have forgotten all about it). With at least a little advance notice, I can avoid doing the interview in a ratty t-shirt and can lose the eyeglasses with the reflective plastic lenses.
Also, in reading the BizNews comments (about 8K, nearly all positive), seems I need to lose my ‘cackling’ laugh. Also there is irritating rubbing of my nose (noted esp in WUWT comments). Hopefully that will get better as I (hopefully) recover from shingles. I have postherpetic trigeminal neuralgia (bad nerve pain on the left side of my face that is focused on my nose), which has been going on since August (lightweight plastic glasses are more comfortable).
The problem with some of these interviews is that they go on for 60+ minutes. No one has that much time to listen, when they can read the text much faster (which is why I rarely listen to podcasts myself). I guess multi-tasking (listening while driving, walking or at the gym) can work. I’m not a podcast listener myself, other than when driving on long road trips.
I signed up for twitter in 2009, but didn’t really “get it.” I didn’t use my account actively until about 2012. I mostly used twitter as a source of information and links to articles (this is where nearly all of the items for Week in Review came from). I tweeted the CE blog posts, and occasionally retweeted something. Over the years, my account attracted 30K followers. About 2 years ago, I noticed that my number of followers stalled and my account rarely received any notifications of people liking or retweeting or responding to my posts. Oh well.
So around Nov 1, Elon Musk bought and took over twitter. A week later, my follower #s, likes and retweets started growing by leaps and bounds. BishopHill tweeted “First tweet from @curryja that I’ve spotted in ages.” So what happened? Seems like my twitter account was “shadow banned” so no one would see my tweets unless they really went looking. Shadow banning is not as severe as outright banning. Many physicians and epidemiologists were outright banned from twitter for questioning the “party line” on Covid. Tom Nelson (climate science) is now back on twitter after being banned. And what is going on in climate and Covid space is NOTHING compared to what has been going on in sex/gender space.
Elon Musk is having journalists dig into all the old twitter files and emails to understand all of the underhanded censorship that twitter had engaged in. The first installment of the findings can be read here [LINK]; it seems like this effort is being sabotaged internally at twitter [LINK] Despite huge number of twitter employees fired by Musk, it seems like he didn’t fire enough. Here is Part II of the twitter files. Apparently numerous further installments are forthcoming. Us tweeps are just riveted by all this. p.s. things are starting to break fast; here is Part III on Jan 6.
No question that Musk is introducing chaos into twitter, but it badly needed shaking up. Musk’s strategy of break things, try new things, abandon them if they don’t work, and then repeat has made many advertising clients nervous.
A number of celebrities and scientists have left twitter; apparently the idea of Musk and free speech uncensored by left wingers does great “violence” to their souls. Many climate scientists have left, although ones with large # of twitter followers such as Mann and Hayhoe have stayed. The climate scientists leaving twitter have joined Mastodon, which is open source microblogging software, with individuals hosting topical microblogs. I took a look; crazy complicated and heavily siloed.
The brilliant thing about twitter is that it is impossible to keep yourself totally siloed, no matter how many people you block. Close minded, groupthinking, whiny climate scientists are not doing themselves a favor by siloing themselves at Mastodon. But the twitterverse doesn’t seem to be missing them; I hope they are having fun talking to each other.
I am an enthusiastic supporter of what Musk is trying to do, and mostly I am very grateful to no longer be shadow banned by twitter. I look forward to the next installments of the twitter files, which will hopefully explain shadow banning among other things.
Twitter is the indispensable tool for wicked scientists.
The Musk/twitter saga is raising important issues about free speech and censorship, particularly in context of social media. This is not a simple issue. No sane person wants to participate or advertise on a platform with hate speech, threats of harm, violent or pornographic images. But where to you draw the line? This topic is worthy of its own thread; it will be interesting to see how this evolves.
Op-eds
I have been asked previously to write (and have done so occasionally) op-eds by WSJ, Financial Times, Fox News on specific topics. I haven’t been all that enthusiastic about doing these. They are difficult to write, with stringent word limits, and not always on the topic that I would most like to write about at that particular time. Invariably the editor picks a different title, sometimes one that grates and doesn’t really reflect the actual article IMO.
I’ve been asked by SkyNews in Australia to contribute an occasional (once per month) column/op-ed on climate and energy topics of relevance to Australia. The environment in the US is so toxic and noisy on this topic, so writing outside the U.S. makes sense to me. Trust is a big issue for me, I feel comfortable working with SkyNews.
The articles are supposed to be 500-600 words; difficult for me since I’m a long-form writer. I am getting around this by writing a longer essay and then breaking it into parts that are individually coherent but part of a larger theme and longer series. The style of writing is also a challenge, need to use words very economically with simple sentence structures (this is good discipline for me anyways).
My first article was published this week, I should probably do separate threads on these articles.
The faux urgency of the climate crisis is giving us no time or space build a secure energy future
Conclusion
Well lets see how all this goes. At least right now, this is fun and interesting, and I have some small hope of making a difference. More importantly I expect my 2023 to focus on marketing my new book, which is a unique and I hope important contribution to the literature and dialog on climate change.
As always, your take on these matters is most welcome and worth following.
Thanks for all of your good work,
w.
The world needs more Judith!
Amen.
“more Judith”?
That sounds like you want Judith to put on weight!
We all love Judith articles, but we also like good articles by other people selected for us by Judith after she reads them.
I wrote a financial newsletter for 43 years and ran out of steam for more writing in 2020. But I spread the word about climate change and Nut Zero by reading lots of articles and publishing links to the ones I recommend every day. 17 climate science and energy articles were recommended today (I read a lot).
http://elonionbloggle.blogspot.com/
Wasn’t it here that Judith used to post links to articles she recommended? I found that list to be very useful.
I just watched your Biznews interview and an old Power Hungry podcast. You have a new fan. I have so many questions and am excited to read your book in 2023!
Your sky news post has been moved to this link https://www.skynews.com.au/insights-and-analysis/the-faux-urgency-of-the-climate-crisis-is-giving-us-no-time-or-space-to-build-a-secure-energy-future/news-story/b860d3358b65027049b148921f038db6
I just clicked on the link above your conclusion and got an error message. Are you being censored or is this just a bad link?
I think i fixed the sky news link
Yes, you did.
From Melbourne Aust, I have now tried 3 times and failed to properly open the link under blogger David. First time was Sky News, but a dfifferent topic. Second time was Sky News, a firther topic, niether with mention of Dr Curry. Third time was a commercial, seeminly unrelated. It is unusual to fail to find matter that i want to view, so I would conclude possible interference. Geoff S
Your blog and rational approach to the climate issue are so greatly appreciated. So pleased that you will be continuing and expanding your efforts.
Social media has become, or actually has been revealed to be, as curated as the old three networks and a few newspapers. It was possible to bypass curation some thirty years ago, and it is easier now, but curation (cooking content, to be impolite) is still the norm.
“ But the twitterverse doesn’t seem to be missing them; I hope they are having fun talking to each other.”
But the twitterverse doesn’t seem to be missing them; I hope they are having fun talking to themselves.
The world needs your voice. You need some interns, or perhaps better, a “Kitchen Cabinet” of Denizens to quickly knock off some of the Op-Eds.
Judith, You might try using Rumble for you interviews. It’s steadily gaining in popularity and is a free speech platform. You can probably just take the video and post it.
Good suggestion I’ll look into Rumble
“The cloud services business [Rumble] is known for hosting Truth Social and the video platform is popular among American right, and far-right users…”
Yes, I would think it’s a perfect fit for you.
“far-right users”
I guessed right that you were quoting Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_(website)
The far left has taken over many of the institutions that disseminate information (because many of them don’t do actual work during the daytime.)
But when the truth is brought to the surface it becomes mainstream. On equal footing truth always wins.
See here how Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murry handed the NYT their butts in the recent Munk debate on whether we should trust MSM.
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Here is the link.
JMurphy relies on garbage sources like Wikipaedia and the New York Times. These outlets are little better than state run media and perveyors of cultural Marxist memes and narratives. You need to read Barri Weiss’ resignation letter from the Times. It tells the story of an institution that no longer cares about facts and the news.
Judith
I watched your excellent interview on BizNews. Your common sense and credibility was evident. Those attributes can’t be manufactured.
Somehow I also came up with a video presentation by Michael Schellenberger on why renewables aren’t going to save the planet, which reinforced your concerns expressed in the interview about making a premature transition to renewables.
I’m not sure how someone who espouses such wise positions on the devastating effects of premature transitions can be characterized as far right, but then some leftwing extremists probably believe Mother Theresa would have attended Proud Boys rallies.
dpy6629, Barry Weiss set up Common Sense on Substack and has recently created a larger body, The Free Press, which you can access via e-mail. Worth a look. My niece who used to run the UK’s ITN is a Weiss friend and fan.
Joe Rogan would be an excellent venue.
Thanks for the link, Ron. I tried to find this elsewhere on my own. However, the problem with the format of this debate is not whether we can “trust” the mainstream media; it is whether there is any source (the Gateway Pundit? Social Truth? Fox News?) that is more reliable. You need to read a variety of sources.
On March 28, 2020 (a few days after COVID lockdowns began, the WSJ published an op-ed calculating that the pandemic could be over after 20,000 deaths. Their nonsense has persisted through the GBD (which had no practical plan for protecting the vulnerable and clinical trials for vaccines that could do this were underway at the time). A February 2021 article predicted that herd immunity would arrive by March. (Cases rose and peaked in mid April.) Now Florida has a Surgeon General who wrote for the WSJ who APPEARS to be an anti-vaxxer who believes in ivermectin!. Last week the WSJ celebrated the end of China ZERO COVID policy without mentioning the cost: projections of 1.5 million deaths, 200 million detected infections and overflowing hospitals, all in a few months. While the Chinese may not follow the plan assumed by these modelers, the WSJ had always ignored the cost/benefits that accompany every decision to reduce restrictions. There is no “free lunch”. There is also little benefit to lockdowns that merely postpone the death of a percentage of the population doomed to die by the pandemic.
My take home message is that there is no one you can trust with complete confidence, especially with a new generation of reporters raised to be activists in university cancel cultures. The only thing worse is the Right. Run from anyone who tells you (as Limbaugh did) that they or their side are the only one you can trust. And Trump was wrong about the MSM publishing corrections: Corrections are proof that a newspaper still cares about what is TRUE and recognizes the even the best reporters working under a deadline are not infallible. And sometimes they need to be fired.
Hi Frank, I enjoyed your post the other week. On your above comment I agree on most. One must look at multiple sources of information, both friendly and hostile to one’s political home.
“There is also little benefit to lockdowns that merely postpone the death of a percentage of the population doomed to die by the pandemic.” I think hindsight is on the side of Sweden and Florida. I agree. Scott Atlas and Jayanta Bhattacharya were correct from the start, which is no surprise since this was their area of expertise. It was not Fauci’s. According to Atlas’s book it was Birx that was the really mistaken one and most responsible.
On Covid origin, the strongest physical evidence of lab origin was the novel furin cleavage site, which was known to be a dangerous sequence increasing virulence and ability to cross species. If the non-bat typical codons were not enough of a smoking gun then it was the fact that Peter Daszak was shopping the idea of inserting a FCS into SARS in 2018 to DARPA (US advanced weapons research). And he was going to use the Wuhan lab and Dr. Zhengli Shi’s team. The only thing more insane that the US taxpayers and academic institutions giving China GOF technology (ex. chimeric viruses, humanized mice for serial passage and gene splicing) is that Daszak thought it was a win-win for him to pitch outsourcing bioweapons research to China.
Ron wrote: “Scott Atlas and Jayanta Bhattacharya were correct from the start, which is no surprise since this was their area of expertise.” Clearly Jayanta Bhattacharya was NOT correct from the start. On March 24, 2020, he predicted herd immunity after 20,000 US deaths. We reached 20,000 deaths on April 9, 2020! This has to be the worst projection in history and made during the worst public health crisis in a century. He made his estimate by extrapolating from non-representative samples that only 1 in 100 cases of COVID was being detected. However, IF that many cases were being missed, then we never would have discovered that COVID was a communicable disease. If an average infected person transmitted to only 4 others, we would only trace the path of transmission in 4% of the cases. At the Washington Choir Superspreader event on March 10, 2020, 53 of 61 choir member became sick. Bhattacharya (and friends) almost certainly wouldn’t have made such a gross mistake they weren’t strongly philosophically opposed to lock-downs and isolated in the Hoover Institution. In my dreams, I’d like to hang Bhattacharya’s 20,000 deaths prediction from the top of Hoover Tower, just like some of my peers hung IMPEACH NIXON from a similar landmark a “few” years ago. I stupidly believed Nixon when he said, “I’m not at crook”. If you don’t confront your mistakes, you are doomed to repeat them. It sickens me to think that someone so wrong has become an idol – but most people want their deepest beliefs confirmed, not the truth.
The Left encouraged us to “Follow the Science” and ignore the cost to our children and our economy. That was equally bad.
In this case, Bhattacharya and the GBD crowd continued to grossly over-estimate the number of people who were immune following a mild or asymptomatic undetected infection. Early in a pandemic, a few percent false positives in seropositivity assays can cause you to grossly over-estimate the percentage of people who are immune. In the spring of 2020, Bhattacharya’s study of seropositivity found about 10 undetected infections for each infection confirmed by PCR, but by the fall of 2020, surveys showed only 2-3. Ioannidis made somewhat the same mistake calculating IFR and ended up claiming COVID was no more deadly per infection than ordinary seasonal influenza (which kills an average of 37,000 per year. COVID was killing about 15 times as many – despite lockdowns totally eliminated the normal seasonal flu epidemic in the 20-21 winter. In the case of the GBD, the further we were from herd immunity, the higher the cost in deaths we would suffer before reaching herd immunity. I clearly remember Nic Lewis struggling in one post here at Climate Etc with data showing that the percentage of seropositive people in Sweden hadn’t changed in two months, while the number of cases confirmed by PCR had doubled. Nic’s analyses failed mostly because he had bad data. However, in discussions Nic provided me with the latest changing estimates for undetected cases.
As final proof that some people never learn, around February 20, 2020, the WSJ published another op-ed calculating the pandemic would be over “by March” based on 6.7 undetected cases per case confirmed by PCR. However, cases then ROSE modestly until mid-April even though most Americans were being vaccinated during this period! Since about 50% of the population here and in Israel required vaccination before the alpha variant began its final decline towards extinction, in the spring of 2021 we were roughly halfway to herd immunity and another half million would need to die if we followed the GBD strategy (assuming no effective way to protect the vulnerable). Today, there are projections that 1.5 million Chinese could die from the GBD strategy (ending Zero-COVID).
Both Ron and Frank discussed: “There is also little benefit to lockdowns that merely postpone the death of a percentage of the population doomed to die by the pandemic.”
There are many over-simplifications in this statement: 1) When hospitals overflow, people die unnecessarily. That adds to the toll. We doubled hospital capacity between spring and fall of 2020, which is why you rarely heard about this problem in late 2020. 2) In reality, we developed vaccines that prevented about 50% of the deaths would have occurred reaching herd immunity with the alpha variant. 3) What happens if the public panics as the death toll increases? The shelfs in the grocery stores were already half-empty. What happens if truckers or meat packers stay home in fear, like our teachers unions did? (Fear of death was somewhat irrational for those under about 55.) By keeping “essential workers” on the job, other workers at home and the pandemic therefore under control, modern society didn’t break down. To be honest, I’m not aware of any place where THIS pandemic caused a breakdown in society, but if a deadly disease like Ebola or SARS1 were out of control, society likely would break down (IMO). You can be philosophically opposed to all lockdowns (our unenumerated right to “pursue happiness”), in which case a SARS2 as deadly as SARS1 or smallpox would be “destined to kill” 100 million without lockdowns. You can be philosophically opposed to mandatory vaccination, but that means you accept a world with smallpox, polio and a half-dozen nasty childhood diseases. Our founders were wiser than this and our governments have long been given the power to quarantine and require vaccination. I think we have been spoiled by successes we take for granted today. 4) No leader in the real world is likely to every stand by and watch millions “inevitably” die, if there is some hope of doing something about it – even at great cost to the economy.
IMO, China’s Zero-COVID policy was a tremendous success. If other nations had been as successful, may be the whole planet could have contained SARS2 as we did with SARS1, MERS and Ebola. The Chinese mistake was not using the time they bought by “flattening the curve”: to prepare as rapidly as possible for the end of lockdowns, and not buying more effective mRNA vaccines and protecting the vulnerable. The more transmissible Omicron variant is proving harder and costly to contain, but it is much less deadly. After vaccination, this summer South Korea and Taiwan relaxed their extremely successful test, quarantine and trace policies and suffered from an enormous number of cases, but few deaths. They got things right, but it required quarantine of those only suspected of being infected, which may not be constitutional here. (I thought paying people $1,000 to quarantine (under the supervision of a small phone app like the ones used by South Korea) might work here.
Ron wrote: I think hindsight is on the side of Sweden and Florida. I agree.”
I disagree. DeSantis should have waited a few more weeks and removed restriction after any vulnerable person had the opportunity to receive at least one dose of vaccine. That would be the “protect the vulnerable” strategy in action. Of course, those who advocated protecting the vulnerable didn’t mean it, they just wanted lockdowns ended as soon as possible!
Compared with its similar neighbors, Sweden arguably didn’t “get it right”. However, what made Sweden different than almost everywhere else was that the number of new cases in March 2020 was not doubling every 2-3 days, as it did in almost every other developed country. Our reproduction rate was 3.5 (new cases from each infected case) and theirs was 1.7. Look it up at ourworldindata.org. They didn’t have to lockdown NOW or face 8-fold more cases in a week and 50-fold in two weeks. I don’t know why this was (bad data? different behavior?), but it is a fact that makes Sweden totally irrelevant to the US (IMO).
Atlas was hanging out in the fantasyland of a maximum of 20,000 deaths, while Birx was “getting it wrong”. IIRC, Atlas didn’t come to DC until fall.
One final comment about “protecting the vulnerable”: We couldn’t even protect the vulnerable American President. Without experimental therapeutic antibodies – which weren’t yet available to the public – he likely would have died.
Finally Ron wrote: “On Covid origin, the strongest physical evidence of lab origin was the novel furin cleavage site, which was known to be a dangerous sequence increasing virulence and ability to cross species. If the non-bat typical codons were not enough of a smoking gun then it was the fact that Peter Daszak was shopping the idea of inserting a FCS into SARS in 2018 to DARPA (US advanced weapons research). And he was going to use the Wuhan lab and Dr. Zhengli Shi’s team. The only thing more insane that the US taxpayers and academic institutions giving China GOF technology (ex. chimeric viruses, humanized mice for serial passage and gene splicing) is that Daszak thought it was a win-win for him to pitch outsourcing bioweapons research to China.
As I’ve noted before, the furin cleavage site initially found in SARS2 wasn’t the consensus sequence a genetic engineer would likely have used. IIRC, the furin cleave site is mutated to a more effectively cleaved site in later variants.
FYI, a furin-cleavage site was genetically engineered into SARS1 almost two decades ago. That work was published in 2006. So your conspiracy theory about Dansak wanting to do so appears wrong. Note that these researchers inserted an RRSRR sequence, not the furin cleavage site found in the original SARS2.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682206000900
“To determine whether proteolytic cleavage of the S glycoprotein might be important for the newly emerged SARS-CoV, we introduced a furin recognition site at single basic residues within the putative S1–S2 junctional region. We show that furin cleavage at the modified R667 position generates discrete S1 and S2 subunits and potentiates membrane fusion activity. This effect on the cell–cell fusion activity by the S glycoprotein is not, however, reflected in the infectivity of pseudotyped lentiviruses bearing the cleaved glycoprotein. The lack of effect of furin cleavage on virion infectivity mirrors that observed in the normally cleaved S glycoprotein of the murine coronavirus and highlights an additional level of complexity in coronavirus entry.”
Finally, you should know that the statistically-significant weighted geographic center of the first 175 COVID infections in Wuhan was at the infamous Market. That market sold wild animals that we now know can be infected by SARS2. (IIRC, today here in the US, deer might be able to infect humans, if we had wild-animal markets.) No wild animals in the market were ever tested for SARS2, because they were gone before the market was sampled. Likewise, farms where wild animals were raised have been closed. (It seems to me the Chinese don’t want their people and the world to learn that this pandemic started because they ignored the lessons of SARS1.) Environmental swabs (that could have picked up excrement from wild animals) positive for SARS2 were scattered throughout the market, but were geographically centered on the location where wild animals were sold. Finally the earliest human samples sequenced showed a Type A and a Type B virus, but no common ancestor in humans. This is consistent with two independent crossovers events from animals to humans in the Market, but not with the lab leak hypothesis nor with the Market only being important as the site of a superspreader event (that would amplify only one strain). Finally, I’m sure you know coronaviruses from bats in Laos that are more closely related to SARS2 than RaTG13 have been found and use exactly the same amino acids in the receptor binding domain to bind to ACE as does SARS2. The only thing missing from the zoonosis hypothesis is the furin cleavage site, which is found in three of four major classes of coronaviruses, but not the beta family. Finding this cleavage site in the other three families, however, proves that such a site can evolve independently or be transferred by homologous recombination.
It is my expectation that a decade from now there will be dozens of books with conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID, just like there are about the grand-daddy conspiracy theories, the Kennedy assassination. Of course, most of these are nonsense that destroyed public trust in our government. The books that are still of some value are those that weave the basic facts about the assassination into their narrative. Oswald purchased a sharpshooter’s rifle like the one found on the top floor of the Texas Book Depository with shell casing with Oswald’s fingerprints. Oswald carried a rifle-sized package to the Depository the morning of the assassination. Oswald fled the scene and shot Officer Tippett when he was approached. Experiments show that if Kennedy was shot from behind, his head (counterintuitively) could have moved back as in the Zapruder film. There is room for a second shooter (a conspiracy), but it most likely involved Communists. Oswald was a highly-motivated Communist who supported Castro and visited the Russian embassy in Moscow weeks before the assassination. Yes, JFK’s autopsy was badly compromised (just like the “autopsy” of the Wuhan Market). IMO the theories about JFK AND Wuhan of any lasting value are those that incorporate important these uncontested facts.
You seem to be trapped in a web of conspiracy theories that don’t address all of the facts. You may want to expand your range of source material.
Thanks for dispelling all the misinformation and conspiracy theories with your incisive opinions.
I like RealClearPolitics because they publish a wide variety of information. Their investigative unit has done really good work in exposing the deep state/media/big business collusion to interfere in our elections. You seem to really have a “both sides can’t be trusted” attitude that is quite biased. There is a vast difference between Ben Shapiro and Joy Reed or The View. Shapiro is a much more honest.
I don’t know Frank why you are focusing on outlier articles that got herd immunity wrong in 2020. The real focus here should be on the public health establishment and science itself which lied to us on virtually every important issue. There was a flood of fraudulent and badly biased studies and censorship of papers and opinions that were contrary to the official lies. These people need to be fired in mass much as Musk did at Twitter.
You are also smearing the Florida attorney general as being an anti-vaxxer. What I have heard for example in DeSantis’ event on vaccine investigations recently was just a careful and very dispassionate recounting of publicly available data.
It is indeed malpractice that our “authorities” recommended that healthy people under 50 get vaccinated. For this group, the serious side-effects were more likely than them getting seriously ill from covid. You can easily find the video of this Florida meeting. Battacharia was also there.
This pandemic will go down in history as the biggest and deadliest Western elite failure since WWI. Not to mention this era brought a social credit system to the West with government and big tech colluding to censor and shut down opinions or rigorous science the government dislikes. And then there is the politization of the FBI to go after people on trumped up charges, such as peaceful pro-life activists. The use of swat teams in these circumstances is a gestapo tactic designed to intimidate and persecute people.
Frank, You have spoken of this before at this blog and gotten taken down for a very biased view.
Focusing on a few articles that got things wrong in the spring of 2020 is irrelevant. The real issue here is that public health authorities and many scientists lied to the public about almost every important issue related to covid. They censored and in some cases got people fired for disagreeing with them. They shaped public opinion around pseudoscientific narratives. There need to be mass firings and accountability.
You should not smear Florida’s surgeon general either. What I’ve heard him say is very restrained and data driven. It is true that it was malpractice to recommend that healthy people under 50 get vaccinated given the rate of serious vaccine injuries in the trials. Suggesting that children get vaccinated was really really bad science that harmed these children. DeSantis is going to investigate this and probably end up trying to recover damages.
Franktoo – do you not realize the citizens of China have been rioting over COVID lock-downs? Their economy has taken a huge hit because of this and poor people tend to die earlier. Finally, China has now realized that net-zero won’t work, and are starting to back off it. Blazing success? NOT!
Frank, You are just very biased on covid19. You smear those who said protect the vulnerable by saying they didn’t mean it. That’s mind reading and inaccurate.
All you have to do is look at the deaths per million people to see that Florida despite a population skewed toward the elderly did only a little bit worse than New York and New Jersey which had very draconian and costly lockdown policies. Indeed if anything what this pandemic proves is that Americans are quite unhealthy because of the obesity epidemic. Obese people are likely to develop diabetes and a host of other serious diseases making them very vulnerable to covid. This is the shameful part of this is that our public health authorities de-emphasize our most serious problems while recommending draconian policies with lots and lots of collatoral damage. Are you aware of the mental health and suicide crisis among our young people? It’s well documented that locking them in their houses was a prime cause.
Franktoo comment “Experiments show that if Kennedy was shot from behind, his head (counterintuitively) could have moved back as in the Zapruder film.”
fwiw – in the zapruder film – you can see brain matter spewing forward in the two to three frames prior to the frame which shows his head rocking backward. The pro- second shooter from the front proponents ignore those two frames.
> Nic’s analyses failed mostly because he had bad data.
No.
Nic’s analyses failed because he failed to properly model a number of variables, notably behavioral variables such as Swedes going to second homes in rural areas.
His failure to account for uncertainties is what made his data “bad.”
Finally, Ron before hopefully leaving you in peace, Joseph Lapado perhaps the most extreme of the anti-lockdown gang promoted by the WSJ, has now become Surgeon General of Florida. He now appears to be an anti-vaxxer. At his hearings, he resisted agreeing that mRNA vaccines work. He has been exaggerating the real, but small, risk of cardiomyopathy for male adolescents and young men. Now he is outright appealing to the anti-vac crowd by filing a lawsuit against the vaccine manufacturers. Both the sponsors of a clinical trial and the FDA independently analyze and present side effect and efficacy data from clinical trials to the expert committee that advises on drug approval. The database is populated by nurses and doctors who don’t know which patients received drug (instead of placebo), not by employees of the sponsoring company. If DeSantis is in the grip of other advisors who are Trumpy conspiracy theorists, he probably won’t get my vote.
Lapado is also a big advocate of ivermectin and other “repurposed drugs” for which there is only anecdotal evidence of efficacy. Today, with vaccination, therapeutic antibodies and Paxlovid that really work, there is no reason to take ivermectin. If you hadn’t heard, ivermectin just failed to show any benefit in another properly designed double-blind, random-assignment clinical trial. As I predicted…
https://www.kumc.edu/about/news/news-archive/jama-ivermectin-study.html
IMO the risk of cardiomyopathy following infection by COVID is likely larger than the risk following vaccination. In both cases, cells inside your body express spike protein on the surface that induces neutralizing antibodies (and antibodies to other viral proteins in a real infection). In the case of vaccination, limited expression of the spike protein occur in a small area of your arm and the nearby lymph gland. In a real infection, uncontrolled expression of spike protein occurs in lung, heart, nerve and other tissues with ACE2 receptors.
In a clinical trial, a vaccine may be randomly given to 10,000 volunteers while another 10,000 from THE SAME GROUP randomly get placebo. That way we accurately know that there is perhaps an 0.1% greater chance of mild cardiomyopathy in the vaccine group than the placebo control. However, we do not infect 10,000 volunteers with SARS2 and reliably compare them to another 10,000 who receive placebo. Instead we cult consult a large database that contains data on the average incidence rate of cardiomyopathy by age and sex. However, for cardiomyopathy triggered by the immune system, the incidence rate might vary widely with the number and nature of the inflections that are circulating locally. So we have a vaguer idea of how often COVID infection causes cardiomyopathy than we do for COVID vaccination
Ron –
> I think hindsight is on the side of Sweden and Florida.
What are the criteria you’re using for assessment?
I think across-country and across-state comparisons are extremely noisy and not at all reliable (due to the myriad confounding variables), but if those are your standards of assessment, it doesn’t seem to me that either Sweden or Florida did particularly well in terms of Covid morbidity and mortality.
What’s most interesting to me, however, is how you can predict how people will evaluate those comparisons by looking at their their political orientation. Not at all unlike climate change in that regard. The pattern plays out across so many different polarized contexts with a lot of uncertainties. It would be nice to hope that might change but if anything, it seems to me the pattern has become all that much more widespread.
On the damage done to young people by pandemic restrictions.
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/01/pandemic-stress-physically-aged-teens-brains-new-study-finds/
> by pandemic restrictions.
Classic example of exactly what I was talking about.
dpy: I’ve read some of Lapado’s complaints about vaccination. He tells you about the risk of cardiomyopathy from vaccination, but he doesn’t consider you the greater risk of cardiomyopathy from COVID. An mRNA vaccination is a little like a controlled infection of COVID localized to your arm (and the nearest lymph gland). In both cases, neutralizing antibodies are made to spike protein budding out on the surface of infected cells, but in the case of a real COVID infection this is happening in lung, heart and nerve cells too. And antibodies are being made to a half dozen viral proteins, not just the spike protein. Cardiomyopathy is caused when some of these antibodies attack heart tissue. No one has died from cardiomyopathy following vaccination.
When you think about the parallels between vaccination and infection, a vaccination is almost certainly much safer that an infection. 1% of school children infected with omicron were sick enough to be hospitalized, though few died.
When we do clinical trials on a new vaccine, randomly assign 20,000 volunteers to get vaccine or placebo and then scrutinize them closely, which allows understand the incident of side effects at a level of one in 10,000. However, we don’t give 20,000 volunteers SARS2 virus or placebo and accurately track the side effects including cardiomyopathy of a COVID infection at the level of 1 in 10,000. So we don’t have a great idea of how often cardiomyopathy is a problems in people suffering numerous problems from a COVID infection.
As best I can tell, the rest of the developed world isn’t advancing childhood vaccination as much as the FDA. Maybe their cost benefit analysis isn’t as favorable as the FDA’s. At worst, this is an analysis that ended up in a gray area, however the advisory panel of outside doctors has been unanimous in approval of vaccines for children. This isn’t come kind of conspiracy to sell more vaccine that is putting our kids at risk.
One possible result of this is that pharmaceutical companies will never again invest in trying to create a new vaccine. (The feds are already providing insurance for children who suffer side effects from recommended vaccinations). And even if they did, people will be too scared to use something the DEEP STATE has approved. We are going back to the dark ages of smallpox, polio, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough etc. And all because DeSantis hired a doctor is still pushing ivermectin as a treatment for COVID.
You are wrong that mRNA vaccines didn’t stop transmission of the alpha variant. And vaccination wiped out COVID in Israel – which was the first of Vaccination 50% of their people by March 1, 2021. Look up the data. Vaccination slowed transmission of Delta. And with a fresh booster, vaccination slows transmission of the early omicron strain.
Lest anyone be fooled by Frank’s attempts to imply vaccination of young men as justified and to attack what is happening in Florida, here’s a recent article showing it is not ethical to do so, just as the Florida SG has been saying.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
It’s becoming a pattern, Frank seems to me to be so biased politically he seems to resort to cherry picking more often than he accuses Trump of doing.
Frank –
Paul Offit has been one of the scientists involved with vaccine approval who’s been more on the skeptical side when we consider the full spectrum of views. I find what he says as a pretty good touchstone to use when looking at the varying expert opinions. Here’s a very short piece where he discusses vaccines and kids. It’s easy to find videos where he discusses that issue in more depth but I’m linking this one because it has (very general) information in print form:
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/doctor-covid-19-vaccines-kids-203304588.html
Offit seems to be pretty middle of the road, politically, so mahbe some of the people who view COVID through a politically tinted lens will find him credible:
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/doctor-covid-19-vaccines-kids-203304588.html
Here’s Offit recently (in podcast form) on boosters (and the bivalent booster):
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4u4S6LvxoG9zamLIxG4VjA?si=7By59cmiSw6gFK4knfeq0A
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4u4S6LvxoG9zamLIxG4VjA?si=7By59cmiSw6gFK4knfeq0A
Sorry – that second link was supposed to have been to a podcast with Offit from further back, rated to boosters. Intbink it’s always interesting to see how people’s opinions change over time (or don’t change over time) as more evidence becomes available.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7HWcK20t6oCpC7vCtvsmAY?si=UMujDsB9Q4CPglKaekuJ-w
Re the bivalent boosters – I think it’s important to recognize that the evidence is still coming in. There’s is evidence coming in that points in different directions regarding their efficacy, and imo, people who make definitive, sweeping statements re their efficacy display a “motivation” to get out over their skis.
Joshua, Dr. Paul Offit is the author of the book “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All.”
He has been the number one industry advocate for childhood vaccinations over 15 years, slamming vaccine hesitancy and indoctrinating new pediatricians (to not think twice about giving 26 inoculations from infancy to year 5) as his profession. When Offit has a reservation about a child vaccine we should listen.
Ron –
> He has been the number one industry advocate for childhood vaccinations over 15 years, slamming vaccine hesitancy and indoctrinating new pediatricians (to not think twice about giving 26 inoculations from infancy to year 5) as his profession.
Indeed, he’s strongly opposed to the advocates who associate vaccinations with autism – do I recall correctly that you think there is such an association?
> When Offit has a reservation about a child vaccine we should listen.
I wouldn’t really characterize his view as “reservations,” but I do think he’s a good touchstone in that he’s relatively reserved.
“I wouldn’t really characterize his view as “reservations,” but I do think he’s a good touchstone in that he’s relatively reserved.”
Thanks for the link. Offit specifically said that he does not promote the vaccination for children but since it is recommended by the CDC he does not refuse it for parents that ask for it. This from the most aggressive vaccine advocate in the country.
Offit also points out that less than 40MM bivalent booster shots have been given out of the 170MM purchased by the government last summer. He says the data on the bivalent booster versus and combination of prior vaccination without the booster gives only 1 month of limited protection and no difference in outcome for severe disease. Thus it is a failure in terms of any public health objective. And therefore, he does not think that we should continue “chasing variants” unless a new one springs up that is particularly deadly and resistant to the original Wuhan 1 vaccine.
Offit represents the best face of the vaccine. The skeptics point to studies that show negative efficacy for boosting and an alarming increase in all cause mortality for the last two years versus historical data, implying possible broad and varied impacts of vaccination of health, especially cardio.
On the early childhood vaccines contributing to autism debate, it’s a hugely complex topic but perfect example of institutionally motivated campaigns to refine a simple public message.
For example, I found this 2011 NPR interview with Offit where he is asked about why the CDC never does a study of vaccinated versus unvaccinated to look for an autism signal. He answered that they did 1000 child (a small number) where they compared vaccinated to less vaccinated and found no signal. He was talking about DeStefano (2004) which looked at the MMR vaccine, scheduled to be given at ~18 months. Three years after that interview the first coauthor of that study, William Thompson confessed to autism researcher Brian Hooker that the CDC had in fact found a significant signal for autism in relation to age that the MMR was administered, particularly among African American toddlers. The result was two years of internal CDC debate that culminated in all of the coauthors meeting in a remote location and throwing half their data into a trash can to dilute the statistical power of the study enough to ignore the signal. This story was documented in the now banned and blacklisted movie, Vaxxed, which I found here on a Duckduckgo search.
https://rumble.com/v1x0jwa-vaxxed-the-movie.html
Ron,
Here is you:
https://judithcurry.com/2017/08/20/reviewing-the-ccsr-discussion-thread/#comment-856969
I am not sure what kind of complexity you are trying to conceal your vax stance, but you do you.
“I am not sure what kind of complexity you are trying to conceal your vax stance, but you do you.”
I was trying to conceal complexity or my stance. The science is extremely complex cutting edge developmental neurobiology. I am pretty sure it is beyond the scope of Climate Etc, though we have an amazingly tolerant host.
Paul Offit in the 2011 NPR interview saying we know that autism can’t be caused by vaccines is either talking outside of his level of knowledge or is lying.
Just because there is a proven genetic marker for one kind of autism, Rets syndrome, does not mean that autism is genetically predestined. The theory I am following is that environmental influences at specific critical developmental points can alter gene expression (with epigenetics) in harmful ways. There are identified pathways related to Rets that are implicated in this. There is way too little research being done on this due IMO to the huge liability should vaccines be found to have been even a partial contributor to the exponential growth of autism from 1980 to present, from one in a ten thousand to one in fifty. I suspect there are some big reckonings in the offing for the autism story.
There is much more harm being done to humanity from autism than from climate change.
Ron,
You realize that when I mention a molecular neurobiologist I am referring to Frank, right?
The exponential growth of diagnosis is tightly connected to the development of the diagnosis itself. Still, you succeeded in peddling Wakefield crap without mentioning him. Better than hide under irony, e.g.:
https://judithcurry.com/2018/08/25/week-in-review-science-edition-85/#comment-879687
Please consider revising the concept of environment in that context before going forward.
Well played!
> Just because there is a proven genetic marker for one kind of autism, Rets syndrome, does not mean that autism is genetically predestined.
Classic. Just ’cause environment might influence the development of autism, does not mean that vaccines cause autism.
Nor that autism might be caused by monkeys flying out of your butt.
What would help, Ron, is evidence that vaccines cause autism.
But why let a lack of evidence get in between you and a good old fashioned conspiracy theory, eh?
I have a longish comment in moderation giving copious source material on the issues raised here regarding covid and documenting the junk science that has predominated including from the CDC.
“Ron, You realize that when I mention a molecular neurobiologist I am referring to Frank, right?”
If Frank is interested in having a high level discussion on potential epigenetic pathways that are under investigation for possible contributors to autism I am happy to discuss. But I won’t attempt to educate one without a biology background.
Also, I respect Frank as being someone open to persuasion with new knowledge.
If others are interested in getting up to speed on hearing the vaccine safety advocates mostly censored point of view the movie Vaxxed is very easy to watch and understand. I would start there, not the neuroscience biochemistry. https://rumble.com/v1x0jwa-vaxxed-the-movie.html
Ron –
I just want to say that I love that as a climate “skeptic” and frequent “skeptic” contributor to this blog, you’re all in on a film made by Andrew Wakefield.
It’s just perfect.
Almost as good as that guy who frequently commented here on COVID, who was all in on the theory that 9/11 was an inside job.
Or maybe it is just as good.
Joshua, I think it’s great the you and Willard keep a dossier on all the CE contributors in what you think is a noble calling as a foot soldier or whatever you want to call yourself. You seem to rarely put forth anything of substance to the hard sciences, so neurobiology discussion is definitely out of bounds.
I don’t dispute Wakefield has a much maligned reputation. Being in the way of governments collaboration with big pharma is not a career move that many will take or survive. I honestly think he did it accidentally in genuine medical pursuit without thinking through the big toes he was stepping on. However, it was thanks to Wakefield (1998) that the CDC embarked on prebunking the autism – MMR connection by commissioning DeStefano the following year. Imagine their horror when instead of putting the nails in Wakefield’s coffin it supported his claim. We would never know anything about that if it were not for the dogged persistence of Brian Hooker developing the relationship with Thompson over months of phone calls that he later began to record. Also thanks to Thompson for having the conscience not to destroy his copy of the data and instead save it for the occasion that someone like Hooker would come calling.
But also we must thank Wakefield again and his being able to make a movie for you. It’s only 90 minutes but I doubt you will view it because as you mentioned a few days ago you are not interested in ever risking changing your mind on something.
BTW, Fahrenheit 911 was a liberal conspiracy theory IIRC.
I prefer *ninja*, Ron, but if you want to get technical, it’s *ronin*. Only Freedom Fighters have an army.
There is no need to keep any dossier, btw: a simple search for your name and autism was good enough. A bit of background on anti-vax dog whistles also helps. That, it is great that you become more open about this, otherwise readers might get the impression that you are Just Asking Questions.
Your openness gives you a higher ground, a bit like Sean:
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/22/1144926308/fox-news-sean-hannity-dominion-lawsuit-trump
It is important to own what we are doing, here and elsewhere.
Ron –
> I don’t dispute Wakefield has a much maligned reputation.
Lol. A basic component of conspiracy theoriesis is that the denial of the conspiracy is part of what proves the conspiracy. You won’t deny he has a much maligned reputation. That’s precious!
I watched at least thirty minutes of it. Indeed, it’s heartrending. The pain of a parent watching their child deal with severe and disabling autism must, at least in such cases as when the children self-harm, be overwhelming.
What struck me about the movie, though, was how the producers assume complete credulity on the part of the audience. Different views on controversial aspects of the issue are never presented, or even gestured to. The music is evocative and the images moving, and who, when watching something like that, would be so cruel as to wonder if their might be another side to the story Wakefield presentes?
What kind of person would be skeptical about what they present?
Who would be a skeptic?
Joshua, did you see this part:
‘I have waited a long time to tell my story and I want to tell it truthfully. I was involved in deceiving millions of taxpayers regarding the potential negative side effects of vaccines. We lied about the scientific findings.’ – William Thompson
It was in the first minute of the movie. That apparently was in an email Thompson wrote to Hooker. The two had over 40 phone conversations before Thompson fully spilled the beans.
African American boys were found to have a 340% higher likelihood of autism over that same demographic that skipped or delayed the MMR shot (but may have had many other shots).
https://www.hippocraticpost.com/infection-disease/vaxxed-make-mind/
Searching the confession I also found that the movie was effectively banned as I suspected by not finding it. Robert DeNiro asked to have the movie screened at his Tribeca festival when it came out in 2016. The organizers objected and he let it be pulled despite having an autistic child himself. When asked by the Today show hosts if he thought his child had been effected by vaccines he admitted that his wife saw the original regression being associated with vaccination.
Searching DeNiro I see he was going to do his own movie on autism and vaccines in 2016 but we never saw it come out.
https://financialpost.com/opinion/junk-science-week-robert-de-niro-gets-vaxxed
Joshua and Willard, until Frank stops by I am going and try to walk you through some general points on autism.
Autism is more widely diagnosed currently than in the past. That is true. It’s recognized as a spectrum of cognitive disorders, autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The claim that we just didn’t notice these disorders in the past, and that accounts for the exponential statistical curve, is not true. Think of autism like cancer and the fact that there are many types and causes of cancer.
In fact, cancer and autism may related in that they are both manifestations of errant signaling in gene promoters. Broadly, there are three causes of disease: environmental, hereditary and infection. Some diseases are caused on one of these exclusively but others like cancer can be caused a combination of these. That makes them much harder to understand. I believe autism is mix of the first two.
Around 1970 Rett Syndrome was recognized when two young girl patients that were unrelated happened to be in the doctor’s waiting room at the same time. They had an identical list of abnormalities. Twenty years later it was well established that there was a hereditary link. Rett is under the ASD classification and thus was an indicator the autism is genetic. Perhaps being aware of this is a way I can see Paul Offit feeling he is truthful when in the 2011 NPR interview he said, “But it doesn’t even make sense that vaccines would cause autism, given what we know about autism.”
Ron –
> Joshua, did you see this part:
I saw that part. The material from Thompson was secretly recorded. He was never interviewed for the film. If he long wanted to tell a story of vaccines causing massive amounts of autism in children, why wasn’t he interviewed? Why isn’t he out there now telling his story all over the place?
Given all the attention paid to this issue, why haven’t there been a slew of researchers presenting data that show an association between the MMR vax and autism?
Why aren’t there a slew of researchers showing the details of a biological link?
> African American boys were found to have a 340% higher likelihood of autism over that same demographic that skipped or delayed the MMR shot (but may have had many other shots).
Then why is autism less prevalent among African American children? Perhaps because they are vaxed at a lower rate? Perhaps because they have less access to medical insurance and medical care? I doubt those factors would explain a 19% lower rate of diagnosis if they are much more likely to have autism as a result of being vaccinated.
I could find conspiratorial explanations for these questions plausible.
Or I could think of benign answers to questions like why didn’t they mention in the movie a change in diagnostic criteria for autism concurrent with an increase in the number of diagnoses (when they discussed the increase in the number of diagnoses)?
If I weren’t a skeptic.
The problem with conspiracy theories is plausibility. Yes, it’s possible that the MMR vaccines are causing a massive increase in autism diagnoses, and tons of doctors and researchers and public health officials and politicians are conspiring to cover it all up.
The question for me is whether such a conspiracy is plausible.
However, by 2011 it was well known that Rett was not purely hereditary, and there were many causes. The common denominator is a mutation in the MECP2 gene, which is in charge of turning on and off other genes associated with nerve development. The gene is on the part of the X chromosome that is missing in the male Y one. This partly explains why Rett is predominantly a female disease or males with XXY chromosomes.
This seems to be the opposite pattern for most ASD, which is associated with boys 4:1 over girls. But it is not really once the closer look is taken and investigators found that males with Rett are dead at birth or soon after, meaning that Rett is much worse for males, so much so that it is immediately fatal. tbc…
Ron,
When I asked you to dust up your concept of environment, you are supposed to get the secret handshake. It certainly was not a signal for more condescension. Unless you are willingly playing dumb?
That is definitely possible. But then I am at a loss to explain your lack of mention of the M word. You know what is the M word, right?
No, not measles.
Meanwhile, have you ever considered the link between conspiracism and autism? I have yet to see any evidence disproving the causal mechanism one way or the other. It is an important question, and I think we should discuss it in a manner that would be fair and balanced.
Leave no stone unturned. A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men cannot get out. As above, Saul Bellow.
Joshua, you are asking very good questions. I will try to begin to answer them.
“Given all the attention paid to this issue, why haven’t there been a slew of researchers presenting data that show an association between the MMR vax and autism?”
The reason is there are likely many causes of autism. Wakefield’s 1998 paper was to try to get researchers a base upon which they could ask for funding to investigate it. He and 12 coauthors looked at 12 kids that has very similar gastro disorders and also cognitive symptoms. Wakefield was the top child gastro doctor at the prestigious London Hospital. Eight of the 12 studied subjects had the MMR vaccination in a proximate time of the onset of symptoms, according to the paper.
The paper was the first like it after many parents had noticed their child no longer walked or talked after the 12-18 month visit to the doctor to get shots. The were suing in vaccine court and losing due to lack of evidence. So the paper had huge legal implications. A private investigator named Brian Deer was assigned to investigate Wakefield, and after seven years alleged fraud by claiming inaccuracies in the paper’s data. Wakefield was ultimately suspended from practicing medicine due to alleged ethical violations, not getting the proper permission from London Hospital to use his privilege’s and his coauthors to use their facilities. Ten coauthor’s saved their careers by disowning the paper and begging for its retraction. One got his credentials back in court after a million dollars and then years and a finding of being wrongfully punished.
On top of all that, in case anyone got the idea of doing research the CDC did it for them with DeStefano. Many other countries followed suit with similar studies, all of them designed to find no association, none of them comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated.
Joshua, my first reply to your questions is currently in moderation. I am trying to break them.
“Then why is autism less prevalent among African American children? Perhaps because they are vaxed at a lower rate? Perhaps because they have less access to medical insurance and medical care? I doubt those factors would explain a 19% lower rate of diagnosis if they are much more likely to have autism as a result of being vaccinated.”
Great questions. Remember DeStefano was designed to hopefully not find any associations. If autism was more prevalent in African Americans the study would not show this because it was comparing autism prevalence between MMR vaxxed versus not. The reason that the MMR was affecting a racial group is unknown to me and could be genetic or environmental or both. But it was not followed up due in part obviously to the CDC’s eradication of this evidence.
My brother, who brought this all to my attention, actually does have a theory as to what caused the African American signal in DeStefano. It’s very technical and will wait to see if Frank wants to come in.
“Or I could think of benign answers to questions like why didn’t they mention in the movie a change in diagnostic criteria for autism concurrent with an increase in the number of diagnoses (when they discussed the increase in the number of diagnoses)?”
There is certainly bias and when one has limited time they like to focus on their supporting points. I think the debunkers are more dishonest when they say that all of the increase in autism is just better diagnosis. Certainly a scientific debate would be healthy but one side, the one with power and money has the luxury of stifling that debate, with the help of (well meaning) foot soldiers.
Joshua,
You might be flabbergasted:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5789217/
Who would have thunk?
“The problem with conspiracy theories is plausibility. Yes, it’s possible that the MMR vaccines are causing a massive increase in autism diagnoses, and tons of doctors and researchers and public health officials and politicians are conspiring to cover it all up. The question for me is whether such a conspiracy is plausible.”
Plausibility is directly proportional to one’s background knowledge on the topic and overall view of political environment’s affect information flow. I happened to think there is good historical patterns for coverups, even of big things. That in fact it is very hard to expose big coverups precisely because they are extraordinary. And as the great Carl Sagan often said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
First the establishment holds the microphone. They can put out straw men arguments of what the skeptics are claiming to debunk non claims. In climate the common talking point is that climate deniers are a 3% minority. And then they call all scientists that question the most extreme projections climate deniers. You are well of how dishonest that is and yet see it all the time. Well, the case is even worse for the vax skeptics. They do not even have a microphone with the conservative media because the issue is not political left or right.
I would say that the MMR is likely not the cause of 97%-99% of autism. There is not one cause of cancer, yet we certainly don’t argue about removing carcinogen exposures.
Willard –
Indeed. The critical link:
> Whereas intervening to treat an existing condition is easy to understand, the notion of prevention is intangible.
Not that I think that there’s a causal mechanism for “skeptics” being more prone towards conspiratorial thinking than anyone else (let alone, numerically, a significant differential association), but nor do I think that it’s purely coincidental that Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, and COVID vax conspiracy theorizing, and belief in a stolen election are so popular in the “skept-o-sphere.”
More generalized vax conspiracy ideation is like an icing on the cake. Which is why I appreciate Ron’s openness about his beliefs just as I appreciated it when that dude from a while back was explaining here at Climate Etc. why 9/11 was an inside job. He was into the “Plandemic” stuff as well. It’s such an interesting soup.
Ron –
> Plausibility is directly proportional to one’s background knowledge on the topic
Perhaps I wasn’t being clear. I’m not evaluating the plausibility of different scientific theories. I wouldn’t be in a position to do that. I’m evaluating the plausibility that so many people would be conspiring to hide the cause of so much unhappiness.
> and overall view of political environment’s affect information flow.
I’m closer to agreement there, but even still there’s an issue of plausibility for a massive imbalance in how politics affect information flow. That’s why, while I recognize real issues with something like government entities interacting/intervening with social media platforms, I don’t buy many (not necessarily all) of the “political” explanations. The bottom line for me there is a basic principle of perspective-taking, or cognitive empathy if you will. The political explanation would lead one to conclude that “others” in an out-group are conspiring to silence “us” in an in-group. Another explanation would be non-political – that government and people managing social media platforms are concerned about misinformation. I don’t see that there are bright lines to distinguish these determinations. So when I see people with absolute certainty going towards political explanations (or 100% politics free explanations), I am skeptical. The theory of motivation reasoning would absolutely predict that people will find purely political explanations, that find the causal mechanisms firmly in the evil out-group dynamics, which explain how the in-group is victimized. The fundamental attribution error is another interesting frame.
> I happened to think there is good historical patterns for coverups, even of big things.
I don’t disagree. And surely some things that would have been dismissed as improbable by many at one time have later turned out to be not the least bit implausible. That’s part of the mix. But it’s clearly a logical fallacy to say that the existence of that phenomenon in the past justifies any particular current conspiratorial belief.
> First the establishment holds the microphone.
See. There we go. That’s the kind of evidence I look for in someone’s thinking:
The president has tweeted more than 20 times claiming […] there is a link between vaccines and autism.
Arguing that everything that you don’t understand is a conspiracy theory is not distiquishable logically from calling everything you don’t understand a conspiracy.
So Joshua and Willard, I would present that by your own arguments of forming beliefs purely out of bias is exactly what you are guilty of in your thinking.
Mindreading and straw argument smears are the tools of those who don’t have facts.
From your linked paper on the origin of autism myths:
“The MMR vaccine is administered to 12- to 18-month-old children. At this age, the first signs of an impending developmental condition, such as autism, start creeping in and become noticeable. The idea that “vaccine precedes event, hence vaccine causes disease” fits the cognitive bias to search for patterns and is much more comforting than the notion of coincidence or bad luck. A simplistic explanation, such as the claim that the emerging but still weak immune system of the toddler is overstimulated and damaged by the vaccine, adds credibility to the cause-effect sequence. At the same time, the current and future benefits of the vaccine are much more difficult to imagine and process.”
This is pure patronizing BS. But let’s take the one fact mentioned that autism’s onset typically coincides with the 12-18-month window of vaccination by coincidence. There is no footnote for this fact because even it is BS. Autism can manifest any time from birth to adolescence. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.674009/full#:~:text=About%20a%20quarter%20of%20children,usually%20between%2018%E2%80%9324%20months.
My point here:
> Whereas intervening to treat an existing condition is easy to understand, the notion of prevention is intangible.
Was that the difficulty of addressing prevention, or “mitigation” if you will, is inherently more complex than pointing to the immediacy of an increase in fuel prices (importantly, as distinguished from costs). There’s a built in cognitive bias – one that overlaps with immediacy bias, that interacts with understanding risk that plays out over a long time horizon, that interacts with the abstract aspect of risk from climate change (after all, how “real” is a change of two degrees over the course of a few decades in terms of day to day life?).
I think that Judith is right that climate change is a ‘wicked” problem – even though in my view she has a very selective focus in her concern about the wicked elements – in that it’s quite a hodgepodge of biases related to risk management.
Ron –
Please compare and contrast:
this:
>At this age, the first signs of an impending developmental condition, such as autism, start creeping in and become noticeable.
and this:
> Autism can manifest any time from birth to adolescence.
Holy non-sequitur, batman.
J,
You do not understand. Ron knows the vaxx and other conspiracies inside out. You don’t. That’s why they look more plausible to him than to you.
You are just an ignorant slot.
Sure, you might know that we tested his pet theory and, well, it is hard to confirm when reduced vaccination did not prevent autism from skyrocketing. But at least the hypothesis was not invalidated. Perhaps nothing will. Or if it were, it would still have raised questions. Important questions, about trust and integrity.
Just like Covid, of which you know nothing about.
If we could all exude integrity like Ron does, the world would be a better place. If only children could live like in the old days, where licking lead paint was OK. Wait, did I mention industrial metals?
Damn.
> Arguing that everything that you don’t understand is a conspiracy theory is not distiquishable logically from calling everything you don’t understand a conspiracy.
I don’t argue that everything I don’t understand is a conspiracy.
I argue that when people say there’s a massive conspiracy (say, collusion among researchers, doctors, and public health officials to hide an enormous amount of harm to children caused by a causal link between vaccines and autism), they’re saying there’s a conspiracy.
Conspiracies happen, Ron. You’re proud of your beliefs and I think that’s commendable. So if you believe in conspiracies I think you should be proud of your conspiracy theories.
Frank, RealClearPolitics is non partisan and gives a good selection of opinion. RealClearInvestigations has done a fantastic job on the Russia hoax and laptop and Bobolinski suppression — collusion by our government to spread disinformation to affect an election.
The long winded discussion of conspiracy theories shows more about how shallow thinkers use rhetorical devices to avoid having to do actual research or inform themselves on the underlying science.
As Musk said, all the conspiracy theories about Twitter were true. He could have added Big Tech and legacy media to the list. Our elites use “conspiracy theory” exactly the way Joe McCarthy used “Communist.” It’s a smear that allows those with nothing to say to write long word salads.
Frank seems to have left, but here’s a new paper that might explain why the vaccinated seem to be more susceptible to covid infection.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.ade2798?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Frank,
You might like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealClearPolitics
When a Murican tells you they are independent, you could bet they are libertarian.
Bee careful: These guys are no doubt in on the conspiracy:
https://twitter.com/kischober/status/1606002981513662478?t=JsCv23Ez-1GEMRW5U_BsbQ&s=19
Also, more related details Tweeted at the preprint stage:
https://twitter.com/kischober/status/1546417329856253954?t=YJ7Yw3DgmI3Zcbo4BhFX5Q&s=19
Joshua, the paper you found on Twitter that you likely don’t understand is exactly what your earlier link to the Paul Offit podcast in This Week in Virology was talking about, which you likely also didn’t understand. The claim is simply that the best immunology is getting the first two Wuhan 1 shots and then getting a either a breakthrough infection or a booster at least 4 months later.
The relevant question for today is whether the government should be pushing more boosters and chasing variants. Or whether in light of this great news about vaccine success they should still maintain a policy that ignores the benefit a breakthrough infection, or any natural immunity, or to ease up on their fascist zero tolerance of vaccine hesitancy among government employees or ones in need of an organ transplant.
Dave, they were actually being nice for awhile until I had to go out and they got impatient and jumped to their default John Oliver impression. Something about Joshua and Willard reminds me of Beavis and his partner. What was his name? I had to turn it on for 5 seconds 20 years ago to be sure my kids were not going to be allowed to watch. Willard and Joshua were unsupervised apparently.
And btw, Ron –
For those of our friends here inclined to have said “It’s just a bad cold,” or “It’s about as virulent as the flu,” or “They’re way over-counting COVID deaths.”
We estimate 14.83 million excess deaths globally, 2.74 times more deaths than the 5.42 million reported as due to COVID-19 for the period.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05522-2
@ https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-984185
Good article, Josh.
And Ron –
I’m sure you’ll enjoy this. Please don’t forget to come back and Ronsplain it to me after you’ve listened:
youtu.be/hIqmg4tIJ6c
Josh, you have me confused with someone else. I never downplayed Covid. I probably still have a mark on my nose from wearing an N95 mask for a year. I drove an hour to get the jab two times.
The excess deaths can be read many alternate ways:
1) Deaths from Covid that went undiagnosed or unrecorded.
2) Deaths from the shutdown of medical system, places to exercise, rise in substance abuse, depression caused poor self-care, etc…
3) Deaths from the vaccine effects.
In regard to #1, there is the more of the reverse situation of people dying with covid due to being tested for covid for all hospital admittances regardless of reason. This was according to Offit’s words in your linked podcast.
The other part of the Beavis and Butthead routine is to find snippets from super reliable peer reviewed sources like Twitter and Wiki and misrepresent them. The thread on the preprint by one of the authors does not say what Joshy says it says. It does say these results are unusual and we need to rethink some things about the vaccines like timing.
I think Frank what Ron meant was that Battacharia and Atlas were right about the policy issues from the beginning. I also think that is true.
Everyone made big mistakes in March 2020. The best work was Ioannidis’ work on the Diamond Princess that proved the strong age dependence of covid deaths.
The proof on the policy front is just that there is not a lot of corellaton between covid fatality rates and strong lockdown policies.
Frank, you really have such a strong political bias against the “Right” whatever that is, you are blinded to the growing evidence of censorship and disinformation by the media colluding with government. This is not a Fox news problem.
FWIW:
> Thus, the immune response seems to become less harmful for the person and more effective against the virus with subsequent vaccinations and class switching from IgG1 to IgG4 might be part of this.
https://twitter.com/johnjljacobs/status/1606375708384759809?s=20&t=Ya0qI8pmFmnnS5LGlGYITA
dpy6629: You’re absolutely right that I’m prejudiced against the “protect the vulnerable” crowd … because they didn’t offer a viable plan to protect the vulnerable! Hxll! We couldn’t even protect our president!
Around the time of the GBD, I dug up data for nursing homes. You were 6 times more likely to test positive if you lived in a nursing home than the average American. And the elderly outside of nursing homes had to protect themselves.
At the time of the GBD, knowledgeable scientists knew that Phase III studies were underway vaccines with promising activity in animals and antibody levels in Phase II. They offered great promise of being able to “protect the vulnerable” in a few months. However, the Trump administration’s time table was to complete vaccination sometime in the fall of 2021! Why weren’t they screaming about “protecting the vulnerable” via quicker production of vaccination?
When vaccine was rolled out, half was devoted to protecting “essential workers” and half to the elderly. The GBD crowd wasn’t screaming about “protecting the vulnerable first” then. “Protecting the vulnerable” only seemed to be important in the run up to the 2020 election (or am I too cynical).
If you want to do a fair comparison of Florida and NY deaths, skip the NY and NJ deaths in April. Those deaths were already inevitable when NY locked down and began struggling to deal with a pandemic they had been left blind to. When I eyeball the NYT’s data for NY, it looks like about half of the deaths occurred during the spring surge. Rather than opening up immediately in 2021, DeSantis should have said we will remove restrictions (except for schools) just as soon we have “protected the vulnerable” by vaccinating everyone over 65 who wanted it. Full protection required 5-6 weeks after the first dose, but I’d have given him credit even if he skimped on the full period.
(As best I can tell, something good did happen in Florida, because their fatality rate per infection was relatively low despite the elderly population. However, Miami-Dade led every urban country in the nation in terms of confirmed infections in early 2021, which is not surprising given DeSantis’s policies.)
Yes, I’m reasonably aware of the increased suicide rate and huge educational setbacks our children have suffered. I greatly admired Mitch Daniels for saying Purdue existed for its students and needed to be open beginning in the fall of 2020. However, he demanded and devised a plan that allow them to do so SAFELY including serious student pledges to abide by the rules. No member of the Purdue community died of Covid. That can-do attitude was missing in our public schools.
Blaming obesity is pretty stupid. There was certainly nothing that could be done about obesity once the pandemic broke out. The obese generally can’t lose weight even when offered compelling monetary rewards because obesity is caused by failure of the systems that regulate appetite and weight. Even if we could have forced them to lose weight, the diabetes and heart and circulation problems that actually cause most of the increased death wouldn’t go away.
Frank this is really easy. You offer nursing home workers double the pay to live on site. Those who can’t do this are tested every day before entering the facility. Now you need a lot of test for this, but by summer of 2020 we had a lot of tests. They were in some cases corruptly used on relatives of politicians, such as Chris Cuomo.
What is almost criminal is sending covid positive patients from hospitals into nursing homes because you hated Trump so much you didn’t want to use the hospital capacity he provided. Cuomo deserved to get fired.
I don’t know why something so obvious is a stumbling block for you to at least look at the writings of Battacharia and Ioannidis.
Maybe you suspect they might have been right.
Blaming obesity is no more stupid than blaming alcoholism for liver cancer. That you say this is itself not very smart.
Frank
A lot a misrepresentation of the data – NY/NJ v Florida
In Nov 2021, I did a a calculation of cumulative per capital deaths for the 65+ age group. (I used the 65+ age group since that is where 90+% of the deaths were occuring. )
All the states fell within a very narrow range 1130-1180 per 100k. Florida was at 1135 per 100k . The exceptions were HI, WA , VT NH and ME Which were much lower.
NY & NJ on the other had was much higher 1350-1400 per 100k.
Point being, most if not all the agenda driven data posted by the CDC is crap.
Look at the raw data to avoid being fooled
CKid: Rising CO2 is causing warming far faster than the Milankovitch cycle can develop an ice age.
Sea level was already rising when the tide gauge record began from the end of the LIA. However, there was relatively modest warming until about 1970. Since then we have been warming at roughly 0.2 degC/decade. So it isn’t surprising to me that acceleration is associated with the beginning of satellite altimetry.
I’m fully aware of all the problems that accompanies early satellite altimetry: The correction factors for converting the time for the return of the radar signal into altitude are enormous. I’m not sure other systematic errors won’t be found in the future.
My take: SLR right now is about 1 inch per decade. If SLR is going to reach 1 m by the end of the century, it will need to accelerate at 1 inch/decade/decade. When and if such acceleration is observed, then we can start worrying about 1 m of SLR. Until then, the observed acceleration from altimetry is actual consistent with the IPCC central projection of about 0.6 m of SLR. The alarmists don’t publicize this agreement.
A side note, Judith, there is a new shingles vaccine that is very effective. Much better than the older one. It takes 2 doses but I did it based on my brother’s painful case of shingles.
Well I have been investigating shingles vaccines for last several years, trying to figure out timing etc. Then covid-19 struck, and 1st booster shot my immune system to hell. Shingles is one of my ‘adventures’ over the past year.
Judith,
To be fair, the first booster association could possibly just be coincidence. Herpes viruses are strange, elusive organisms that are good at hiding in a dormant state, and appear to be triggered often by other infections or even emotional states. The fact that shingles arises in later years, after having chicken pox as a child, strongly suggests that something about aging triggers outbreaks. I’d be more suspicious if someone who was young had their first shingles outbreak after a COVID booster. In any event, there isn’t a lot we know about what triggers the various herpes viruses to present after long periods of dormancy.
For Covid-19 mRNA treatment, see:
The Frontline Critical Care Doctors:
I-Recover Long Covid Protocol
https://covid19criticalcare.com/treatment-protocols/i-recover-long-covid-treatment/
I-Recover Post Vaccination Protocols.
https://covid19criticalcare.com/treatment-protocols/i-recover/
@EthicalSkeptic is raising the statistical alarms over massive increases in most cancers and deaths. At least 420,100 Excess NonCovid deaths since April 2021. He projects Excess NonCovid deaths to exceed all Excess Covid19 deaths by Nov. 2023. e.g., his post Dec 7th
https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1600573747500646400
Two articles:
Houston, We have a problem (Part 1 of 3)
https://theethicalskeptic.com/2022/08/20/houston-we-have-a-problem-part-1-of-3/
Houston, CDC has a problem (Part 2 of 3)
https://theethicalskeptic.com/2022/10/24/houston-the-cdc-has-a-problem-part-2-of-3/
All Covid vaccines depress your immune system at least temporarily (some evidence that is permanent) which makes a shingles or herpes outbreaks much more common.
Since the vaccines are not safe and do not precent deaths, there is no reason for them. They have no effect on the Omicron common cold virus falsely called a Covid variant.
These were the least safe vaccines in the history of vaccines and may have been the least effective too.
Based on excess deaths before AND after the vaccines, they were a medical disaster. I have read over 200 articles and studies on those vaccines since Spring 2020 and stand by my claims.
The linkage between climate “skepticism” and belief that the vaxes are causing a surge in excess mortality is interesting indeed.
Reminds me of the linkage back in the day between climate “skepticism” and certainty that polls were being skewed to make Obama look more popular than he really was before the election in 2008
Then Obama outperformed his polling and so many climate “skeptics” stepped up to explain how they believed what they believed ’cause they believed what they wanted to believe.
Haha.
Just kidding.
One way to get behind getting the shingles vaccine is Google it and, “If you live long enough”
You should not get the vaccine if you currently have shingles disease. It would serve absolutely no purpose.
Welcome back. Many of your guest writers are over my head, esp. the charts/graphs. Not their problem, but mine. As a philosopher and author, I like “simple” statements that build to a crescendo. And, of course Occam’s Razor. My problem is I can’t wrap my mind around climate change. Complex, yes, but I’m looking for a simple explanation..1st grade reader, maybe 😀Looking forward to your posts…Jerry
Jerry, you don’t need to wrap your mind around climate change: Since the end of the Little Ice Age the world has grown slightly warmer and wetter, which has been a boon to the biosphere and mankind.
Over the last 100+ years no climate metric has become more deleterious: Actual long-term data shows that hurricanes, storms, floods, droughts, tornadoes, wildfires & etc. have not become more frequent, intense nor of longer duration and sea level rise has not accelerated in recent times. Those data are readily available at the WUWT site and from individuals such as Roger Pielke, Jr.
Climate disaster speculation is based upon proven faulty climate models fed with unrealistic scenarios of future CO2 emissions. The UN IPCC global climate model predictions have been shown to be inaccurate and even their “hindcasts” don’t reflect actual, measured climate metrics over time. Their predictions of significant feedbacks to minor theoretical CO2 warming is disproven by the absence of their predicted tropospheric “Hot Spot.”
I really like what you wrote. Simple and understandable. I get it ! Keep going writing the “first-grade reader”. It’s obvious human is abusing the term “science” from theory to law. Abusing the scientific method from observation to data. This is so true with climate change to Covid. Have the “scientific imposters” have no shame !
David Fair: You are clearly going too far here. There is ample evidence that the increased in water vapor accompanying warming amplifies the warming from rising GHGs. That can be seen most clearly in the seasonal cycle of warming in GMST (before anomalies are taken). If you aren’t aware GMST rises about 3.5 degC during summer in the North Hemisphere, which due to the asymmetric distribution of land warms far more than the Southern Hemisphere. We have been monitoring the seasonal increase in LWR emitted a planet that warms 3.5 degC every year for 30 years:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1216174110
Figure 1 clearly shows that our planet doesn’t emit 3.3 W/m2 per degK of surface warming (the dotted line) like a gray body at 288 K and with an emissivity of 0.61 would be expected to do. Less heat escapes because of increased water vapor and that is partially compensated for by greater warming at higher altitudes than at the surface (lapse rate feedback). Observations are consistent with a combined WV+LR feedback of about +1.1 W/m2/K through clear skies, just what climate models predict. Observations say there is less LWR feedback through cloudy skies than models predict. Everything to do with SWR is a mess because changes in reflection of SWR lag surface temperature change, but models are inconsistent with each other and observations in this regard.
Furthermore, your assertion that the rate of SLR hasn’t accelerated is dubious. The rate of SLR appears to have varied or oscillated in the past. Relatively little warming occurred before 1970, but the steady warming of about 0.2 degC/decade since then has almost certainly resulted in an acceleration in SLR since that is overwhelming the noise of the past. You might also want to remember that 6 deg of warming at the end of the last ice age produced 120 m of SLR – over 10 millennia. WIth less land covered with ice caps at risk as ice has retreated poleward, I wouldn’t expect 20 m of SLR per degC of warming, but today’s 1 degC of warming may be accompanied by 2 or 4 m of SLR when the situation stabilizes. The question about SLR is not if, but how fast.
OK, Franktoo. Alot of words on radiative forcing, but no discussion of the measured absence of the UN IPCC CliSciFi model-forecasted tropospheric Hot Spot. If actual experiment contradicts a theory (significant WV feedback), the theory is wrong.
UN IPCC climate model results are not sufficient to fundamentally alter our society, economy and energy systems. Dr. Curry used that statement of mine in a presentation to a lawyer group awhile back. Show me where I am wrong.
Frank, so much for a first-grade reader version. LOL
Seriously, forecasting SLR based on the glacial cycle is a bit hazardous. Remember, that according to the cycle we are very near the point where rapid reglaciation happened in past cycles. The Little Ice Age (~1500-1820) was possibly a for-tremor. Increased CO2 warming is without a doubt battling Milankovitch influence cooling a present. To know the effect on precipitation versus melt in the poles is a guess, IMO. Remember, that warming increases water vapor but the gradually lessening Earth tilt makes poles more extreme and prone to precipitate it – glaciate.
Franktoo, in rereading your comment I note your SLR discussion lacks data support. Long-term tidal measurement stations show inter-decadal variations in the rate of relative SLR which you seem to refer to as “noise.” Those measuring stations show long-term SLR of less than 2 mm/yr. with no recent acceleration of SLR.
Satellite (4 over the last 30 years) measurements, with many adjustments, indicate a 3.4 +/- 0.4 mm/yr. gross (open ocean) SLR with a calculated 0.084 +/- 0.025 mm^2/yr. acceleration over that period. [Note the assumed acceleration accuracy of +/- 0.025 mm^2/yr. vs assumed SLR accuracy of +/- 0.4 mm/yr.]
All of those calculations are derived from instrument/systems accuracy in the centimeter range. Since each individual satellite measurement is unique, the statistical rule of large numbers doesn’t apply. [1) Figures don’t lie but liars can figure; and 2) Lies, damned lies and statistics. Mark Twain said it all.]
Frank
There are too many studies indicating little acceleration, if any, to make any estimates of runaway SLR. The satellite data have many uncertainties and the acceleration associated with the initiation of the system in early 1990s is a little bit too much of a coincidence to place much credence into the numbers.
Just for the sake of debate, let’s assume that the next century doubles the previous century SLR of ~7 inches. We have the means to adapt to those numbers. Especially since those areas at greatest risk are already encountering rates of subsidence, in some cases multiple of GMSLR. Further, a study found that of those locations studied with subsidence issues, 78% were human caused. Thus, some of the small acceleration we have experienced might have been introduced from that factor alone over the last 200 years.
Models predict what they are programmed to predict
The programmers must support the consensus ECS from the 1979 Charney Report, or the slightly modified ECS by the IPCC a few years ago, if they want model funding and a paycheck
CAGW is not based on models
The models are based on the false CAGW belief.
In fact, since they make wrong predictions, they are just computer game propaganda, not real models of the climate of this planet. Always wrong predictions of doom are not science. They are a devious form of leftist politics.
Always enjoy your rational, analytical approach to issues, amid the media and political hysteria.
Stay at it Judith ….
Robert, +1. Judith, +100
Looking forward to the book!
The link to your SkyNews article reaches SkyNews but not your piece.
“https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/11/26/theres-no-emergency-dissident-climatologist-dr-judith-curry-on-climate-change/”
I bookmarked Judith Curry’s interview on SkyNews on the WattsUpWithThat blog.
Here it is.
Thank you.
Thank you Judith! Unlike the old twitter police, I believe that a person of good intent should want to promote the whole truth, whether or not parts of it help or harm a particular cause. You are a bright and capable person of good intent. So sorry you were shadow banned, Let’s hope that the current short term trends toward openness continue and your visibility increases.
free rein, not reign.
Judith, here is a quick, first-blush, Intro of proposed simple “first-grade reader”:
‘Climate change is typical on planet Earth. Once, the surface was covered by water. Once, ice covered much of the surface. Once, the surface uplifted and land masses separated. Once, oceans became deserts, tropics, and polar caps. Once upon a “time”.
Causes are mostly unknown, but speculation are natural events like winds, volcanoes, earthquakes, meteor impacts, temperature, earth axis tilted, sun radiation, are a few’….
Judith, you pick it up and finish the “simple first-grade reader” for a best seller 😀
My forthcoming book is targeted at the educated non-scientist. It should be understandable by anyone with some college education (or a smart high school student). My internal reviewers were mostly non scientists. Its not light reading, but it should be understandable.
GREAT ! Look forward to your “12-grade” reader 😀
Go transhuman and use GPT-3 for state-of-the-art propaganda.
Ms Curry,
Check out a recent conversation with ChatGPT on the topic of humans and climate change. Posted by CACOR [a non-governmental organization dedicated to intelligent debate and action on global issues.]
“TDD: What is climate change?
ChatBot: Climate change refers to long-term changes in the average weather patterns that have been observed over several decades. These changes are primarily caused by the increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which trap more heat from the sun and cause the Earth’s surface temperature to rise. This can lead to a wide range of impacts, including more frequent and severe heatwaves, droughts, and storms, as well as rising sea levels and changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation.
TDD: How bad will climate change get?
ChatBot: It is difficult to predict exactly how bad the impacts of climate change will be, as they will vary depending on a number of factors, including how quickly greenhouse gas emissions are reduced and how effectively we are able to adapt to the changes that are already happening. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the United Nations body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change, has concluded that the effects of climate change are likely to be “severe, pervasive, and irreversible” if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced. This could lead to a wide range of negative impacts, including more frequent and severe heatwaves and storms, droughts and water shortages, loss of biodiversity, and sea level rise, which could displace millions of people.
TDD: Are we on track to reduce emissions?
ChatBot: I’m sorry, but I am not able to browse the internet, so I am unable to provide information on current emissions levels or whether or not we are on track to reduce them. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, and my knowledge is based on the text that I have been trained on, which has a fixed cutoff date. I can only provide information on general concepts and knowledge that was available up until that date.
TDD: Will we reduce emissions sufficiently to limit climate change?
ChatBot: It is difficult to say whether or not we will reduce emissions sufficiently to limit climate change, as this will depend on a number of factors, including the actions that are taken by governments, businesses, and individuals around the world. There is currently a great deal of international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to a more sustainable, low-carbon economy, and many countries have adopted ambitious targets for reducing their emissions. However, it is also important to note that there are still many challenges to overcome in order to achieve these targets and limit the impacts of climate change.
TDD: What are some of those many challenges you mention?
ChatBot: There are many challenges to overcome in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit the impacts of climate change. Some of these challenges include the following:
· The high cost and technical difficulty of transitioning to low-carbon energy sources, such as renewable energy and nuclear power.
· The need to change the way we use and manage land, including through practices like reforestation and improved agricultural and forestry management.
· The challenge of reducing emissions from the transportation sector, which is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
· The need to change the way we build and design our cities, including through the use of more sustainable materials and energy-efficient buildings.
· The need to reduce emissions from industry, including through the development and deployment of new technologies and processes that are more efficient and less polluting.
· The challenge of convincing individuals, businesses, and governments to take the necessary actions to reduce emissions, including by changing their behavior and supporting policies that promote sustainability.
Overall, addressing climate change will require a significant and sustained effort from many different sectors and stakeholders, and will require both individual and collective action.
more at:
https://canadiancor.com/breaking-news/cacor-member-david-dougherty-recently-had-a-conversation-on-climate-change-with-a-new-chatbot/
You think that’s cool wait till you see how it writes malware!
Judith … I received this vaccine for shingles. I believe it works even if you have contracted it. Two shots. Well worth it.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/shingles/public/shingrix/index.html
Good luck with the book!
Twitter is indeed a very disturbing story. They had become essentially state run media with weekly meetings between top Twitter executives and officials in the FBI and even the DNI. This is very illegal and the Supreme court ruled on it 30 years ago. It is unconstitutional for government officials to deputize private entities to do things the government can’t do, such as censoring speech. I hope those who were banned or shadow banned sue those responsible, especially people such as Jay Battacharia, who suffered real damaged to his career and income.
In fact, the state sponsored “news” was often a lie and amounted to interference in elections. This is really banana republic stuff and shows how deeply corrupt our elites in media and the deep state have become. The majority of the state media narratives around covid were blatant falsehoods, such as the vaccination kept you from catching covid or that if enough people got vaccinated, the pandemic would end. The most pernicious lie that amounted to malpractice was that young healthy people should get vaccinated. These people had essentially zero chance of dying from covid and a higher chance of suffering serious vaccine caused injuries.
We need accountability and the FBI and DOJ need the same mass firings Musk has done at Twitter.
My best case scenario is that Twitter takes off a prefered platform for distribution of news and information and increasingly takes market share from the state run “mainstream” media who are forced to lay off their mostly partisan hack “journalists.”
I was never a Twitter user, but the apparent outcry from the left since Elon has taken over has been incredible. I saw a part of a clip of Whoopi Goldberg having a whinge on her show about what Elon has done to Twitter. “Goldberg said she was tired of “attitudes” that have been blocked and are now back on the site. ”
So its OK for some people to control what they want you to know but give some one that’s not aligned to their belief and all hell has broken loose?
Yeah some stuff shouldn’t be on there but if someone has a counter view that challenged the accepted view, i.e. climate change it’s not allowed? Shadow banning – sounds insidious. Add you-tube to that list of social medial that wants to control what you see, read and hear. And the biggest bogey of all, GOOGLE.
Judith, I was happy to hear that your new book is coming out soon and very much look forward to getting my own copy of it hopefully “soon.” Writing the book is a great achievment, getting through peer review takes time and I hope that it is not because your views, positions and opinions are considered too balanced and science based and insufficiently “alarmist.” I imagine your work in Australia will be made available to us here in the U.S. e.g., via Climate etc. and other venues, appearances, presentations etc. All the best. .
I miss the Week in Review posts but look forward to reading more blog posts.
Keep stirring the pot. I, and I am I sure there are others here, who recall your brave, noble and righteous act of inviting Steve McIntyre to give a talk at Georgia Tech. Who knew that such a simple means of adding to the scientific dialogue would bring such changes.
I am giving Koonin’s book as a gift this Christmas. I am looking forward to giving yours next Christmas.
I appreciate that these platforms are evolving and maturing. I was delighted to see that Roger Pielke, Snr will soon be contributing on his son’s Honest Broker site. I will look forward to your posts.
As someone who searches for a sense of balance in the often tedious and conflicting ‘climate change’ debate, I always find your views to be refreshingly sane and reasonable. It is difficult to grasp why so many readily adopt and nurture, ‘gloom and doom’ future scenarios with so little supportive evidence. Given opposing ‘expert’ views on the topic and one-sided media reports, many become confused. It would seem self-evident that nobody fully understands something as vast and complex as global climate. Yet unfounded certainty seems to prevail. By providing informed, understandable counterpoint to alarmist rhetoric, you are doing a great service to those who value a reasoned, ‘down to earth’ viewpoint. Keep up the good work.
Judy, it looks like getting out of academia was a liberation for you. Academia used to be one of the public spaces where people was freer. The times that we live in.
You are definitely making a difference as one of the most authoritative voices in the residual skeptical climate scientist community. And you are helping many others like me to keep the debate alive until the time comes when others recover their senses slowly, and one by one. I just hope that when that time comes your legacy is properly recognized.
It is good that the electronic versions of your book are priced within the reach of your target audience. Academic books are usually not priced for human beings.
Hi Javier, the publisher wanted to price the e-version at $35, which i thought was outrageous. I offered to personally purchase 100 e-copies (I will give them to my clients), if they would reduce the cost to $25. They agreed. The issue is that academic books don’t sell many copies, which is why prices are higher (of course I hope my book will be an exception to this.).
For a good story on that:
https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/sep/04/academics-are-being-hoodwinked-into-writing-books-nobody-can-buy
My solution to this is to run all interviews at times 2 speed and to turn on the auto-generated text display.
You may of noticed; Without the 100% biased censorship the Alarmist crowd is in full retreat on Twitter. Well done you and Elon.
So glad you are continuing with the blog…I visit it daily and look forward to hearing your logic and you help me in my understanding of the issues. Thanks
Judith : I don’t suppose that in your book you have exposed the fact that claims about radiation from the atmosphere warming the already-warmer surface would require a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which refers to every single one-way passage of radiation because there are no interacting systems creating a “net” effect of increasing entropy.
FLOG, OzNonScientist, The Sun warms the surface, and no law of thermo is broken in Q=k(Thot^4-Tcold^4) and no heat flows from cold to hot…. The “radiation” from the atmosphere normally being the (-Tcold^4) portion and the surface being the (+Thot^4) part….Read up on Planck’s law, do an example calculation on parallel plates of different temperature yourself until you realize how “back-radiation” works. Educate yourself…you can string together good sentences, I’m sure you’ll catch on.
Judith
It is not radiation from water vapor, CO2 etc that raises the global mean surface temperature well above what the solar radiation could achieve, but rather it is the process of maximum entropy production (resulting from the Second Law of Thermodynamics) which, in a force field like gravity, creates the non-zero tropospheric temperature gradient we see in every planetary troposphere. This gradient (aka lapse rate) is the state of thermodynamic equilibrium because unbalanced energy potentials have all dissipated. We can very easily understand this fact (known by physicists since the 1870’s) because when the state of maximum entropy exists then the sum of molecular potential energy + kinetic energy is constant over altitude. Since PE increases with altitude it is blatantly obvious that KE must decrease, temperature being proportional to mean molecular kinetic energy as per the Kinetic Theory of Gases. I don’t know why climatologists still have not learned this basic fact. Instead they add atmospheric (back) radiation to solar radiation thinking incorrectly that the surface temperature (and any increase therein) can be quantified using the sum in Stefan-Boltzmann calculations. No physical experiment anywhere confirms that can be done, but rather, experiments prove it can’t be. Thus all climatology models are based on false physics. That’s what you need to understand Judith and explain to others.
Clausius’s most famous statement of the second law of thermodynamics was published in German in 1854, and in English in 1856. “Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.”
Note: “connected therewith, occurring at the same time.”
Similarly, in Wikipedia “Laws of Thermodynamics” …
“The second law of thermodynamics states that in a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases.”
Note: “interacting” being similar to what Clausius said.
In regard to the one-way passage of radiation from the cold troposphere to warmer regions on the surface, no other thermodynamic system “interacts” with such radiation or is “connected therewith” or “occurring at the same time.” So it cannot cause an effective transfer of thermal (kinetic) energy into the surface as such would decrease entropy and thus violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
If you want to know what happens to the electromagnetic energy in such radiation, Prof Claes Johnson correctly explained the resonance process wherein that energy does not get past just raising electrons through quantum energy states and then being re-emitted as identical photons when the electrons revert to the ground state. That energy never accelerates the whole molecules and so does not increase kinetic energy or affect temperature at all. Back radiation CANNOT raise a warmer surface temperature even by the smallest amount. Nor can back radiation slow the overall rate of surface cooling because it can have no effect on non-radiative cooling which will accelerate and compensate for any slowing of the cooling by radiation.
So the overall rate of cooling is not slowed by back radiation, but it is slowed at night by the energy in nitrogen and oxygen molecules which can only get to Space if those molecules collide with water vapor, CO2 etc molecules that then radiate the energy to Space, acting like holes in a blanket.
OzScientist – the passage of radiation is two-way not one-way. All bodies radiate, and if you have a warmer body and a cooler body then the cooler body will still radiate in all directions (no-one told it to stop because there was a warmer body somewhere), and that includes towards the warmer body. The warmer body will absorb the radiation (no-one told it to ignore the radiation because it comes from a cooler body). The whole issue in the 2nd law is about net transfer in a two-way system: the transfer from cooler body to warmer body is less than the transfer from warmer body to cooler body. The transfer from cooler body to warmer body is not zero.
And if you want to know how the surface distinguishes between photons from the Sun around noon on a clear mid-summer day and those from back radiation, then you need to understand that the Planck function for the cooler source is fully enveloped within and under the Planck function for the Sun. Thus there are photons (represented by the area under the cooler Planck function) that are identical in energy to those represented by the same area for the Sun. So, when you understand quantum mechanics you will understand that only these photons can resonate because their energy exactly matches that required to raise a target electron through one or more quantum states. If some of the Solar radiation has photons that do not match, those photons carry on into a complicated process that does lead to warming due to an increase in translational molecular kinetic energy. Only the photons between the Planck functions can do this warming. Since the Stefan-Boltzmann calculations used by engineers to quantify heat transfer are based on the difference between integrals of the Planck functions, such a one way effective transfer of kinetic energy from the Sun to the surface is quantified by the area between the Planck functions – in agreement with engineers’ calculations. There is no net effect of any two-way heat transfers even though the math seems to imply such. The one-way heat transfer is quantified by the area between the Planck functions. Of course, if the source is cooler than the target then there is one-way heat transfer the other way.
Earth’s atmosphere is very thin to have any measurable (significant) greenhouse warming effect on Earth’s surface.
Thus we can say – there is not any GHG warming effect on Earth’s surface.
–
On planet Venus – it is very much different. Venus has a very thick atmosphere – thus on Venus we observe a very strong GHG warming effect on the Venus’ surface.
–
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Nevertheless, Christos, our atmosphere is thick enough to absorb all of the photons at the wavelength best absorbed by CO2 within 1 meter of travel. In truth, our atmosphere is total opaque at most thermal infrared wavelengths.
However, CO2 emits strongly at strongly at exactly the same wavelengths it absorbs. After traveling 1 m upward the photons absorbed by CO2 have been completely replaced by new photons emitted by CO2. However, higher in the atmosphere where it is colder, more photons are absorbed from upwelling radiation than added to upwelling radiation (that was emitted from lower where it is warmer). That produces the GHE.
If there were no temperature gradient in the atmosphere, there would be no GHE.
Franktoo:
“Nevertheless, Christos, our atmosphere is thick enough to absorb all of the photons at the wavelength best absorbed by CO2 within 1 meter of travel. In truth, our atmosphere is total opaque at most thermal infrared wavelengths.”
–
“absorb all of the photons at the wavelength best absorbed by CO2 within 1 meter of travel.”
– It is impossible!
–
Our atmosphere is invisible, but we can not do without it.
–
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Ok!
OZ: Standard QM and radiative transfer calculations have been throughly tested in the laboratory and in the atmosphere. If Claes’s new mathematics makes predictions about “back radiation” that differ from QM and laboratory observations, then his mathematics is wrong. If they produce the same result, it doesn’t make any difference.
In the real world, a SINGLE 10 or 15 um photon from the sun or the sky contains no information about the temperature of the molecule that emitted that photon. Nor does it have anyway of knowing the temperature of the molecule it encounters on the surface, so it can’t “decide” whether to be absorbed or reflected. Individual molecules have kinetic energy (which changes about 10^9 times per second due to collisions, but they do not have a temperature. In thermodynamics, temperature is defined as the mean kinetic energy of a large group of rapidly colliding molecules. A molecule has NO TEMPERATURE and no way of assessing the mean kinetic energy of the molecules around it to decide whether to emit or absorb a photon. The whole idea that the 2 LoT prevents a photon from the cooler sky from being absorbed by the warmer surface is totally absurd at the level of molecules and photons. Individual molecules and photons obey the laws of QM, not the 2LoT! It turns out the 2LoT is a consequence of large numbers of molecules and photons obeying the laws of QM!
Temperature and heat are properties that only exist for large groups of molecules. Heat is the net flux of energy between two groups of molecule that have a defined temperature. That net flux is always from warmer to cooler.
“ I am appalled at the state of both the scientific and policy debates surrounding climate change. I am hoping that my little voice can help bring some common sense to this situation.”
In 2100 there will be a few voices in the wilderness which will be remembered. I’m pretty sure which ones.
One of the interesting things about twitter is that between 2010 and 2021 they had only two profitable years. Clearly, they were doing something wrong.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income-of-twitter/
How did Musk get persuaded to pay so much for Twitter?
1. The two profitable years were very profitable.
2. He wasn’t afraid to make huge changes while p****ing people off.
Is it possible they were being subsidized surreptitiously during the unprofitable years in order to survive?
Twitter was a public company listed on the NYSE. A surreptitious subsidy would be pretty difficult to hide.
One hell of an intriguing post this. Tks. A familiar predicament in some ways.
A couple of comments if allowed:
Have just downloaded video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEh5JyZC218 from Jordan Peterson on Covid. However the second half is on the present state of the academic/political unholy alliance, as I see it. Good for later reference in my case (but I recommend). Takeaway: the change from the academic search for truth to a form of religiosity, and Peterson’s psychological angle.
YouTube videos: they seem to disappear, and in my case search is near futile. Suggest record and keep link. One goes directly to it when given.
Re “–my personal interests are moving me in the direction of energy, agriculture and adaptation to weather extremes.” Therein lie enough ‘wicked science’; in my case I think worse than your view. Energy and Agriculture, two elements most everybody have come to consider as god-given rights that can/are to be, had at the flip of a switch or trip to a supermarket. No one anymore would look back a hundred years and recall that these did not exist then, and today’s high risk of/if losing those ‘rights’. (Echoes of RIE’s Dragon Kings and Black Swans).
I link to a page of mine as example. It has a link to a video that is not found in searches. Second: the value of science/technology in agriculture, admittedly in the distant past, yet not available in such direct manner today, from basics. But also proof of the visitation of a Dragon king in 2346bce, the 4k2 event. That was an outlier in the data. It was put in context here (the key): https://judithcurry.com/2018/06/28/nature-unbound-ix-21st-century-climate-change/
And explained here: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0907/0907.4290.pdf
My page: https://melitamegalithic.wordpress.com/2017/02/24/first-blog-post/
I wonder what Hypathia would say of the present. Anyway, Good luck.
Dr. Curry wrote: “Searching for “Judith Curry”, “Judith Curry climate”, “Judith Curry BizNews” did not show the video.”
I comes up number one with a Duckduckgo.com search. I just noticed this same thing recently vaccine safety sites disappearing from Google index (and thus virtually censored).
Same on the Canadian presearch.com which I trust more and use now for about 1 year.
Pingback: JC navigates the new media - Climate- Science.press
If you want a giggle, check out Babylon Bee’s video on ex-Twitter employees interviewing for new jobs.
I am happy to see you are still active in the climate science field. It’s refreshing to find someone with a reasoned, rational approach amidst a lot of needless hype. Best wishes for 2023.
It would be interesting to hear from JC’s former colleagues about her post Georgia Tech success.
Judith …
In your Sky News piece, towards the end you say:
“Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.”
Why the word … ‘need’? You point out that the earth is not warming according to the IPCC’s predictions, we know sea level has not accelerated to their expectations, extreme weather events are not related …
The word ‘need’ used in an environmental context suggests, at the very least hints, at a danger. This goes against the thrust of your piece, which argues that we should be careful of the dangers of embarking on public policy which is ill informed.
I realize you’re on a high wire. I’m not saying you should take the position that CO2 doesn’t cause warming. Just that if you’re trying to reach the unwashed (like me) in an article or book, be careful when you use CO2 in a sentence and the word need. That word is what got us into this mess, as it evokes emotional responses.
Again, thanks for all you do.
Judith wrote at the conclusion of the Sky News article:
“Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.
However once we relax the faux urgency for eliminating CO2 emissions and the stringent time tables, we have time and space to envision new energy systems that can meet the diverse, growing needs of the 21st century.
This includes sufficient energy to help reduce our vulnerability to surprises from extreme weather and climate events.”
I think this is the most important message and needs to be the conclusion of every article. It tells the reader the bottom line: yes, fossil fuels are a limited resource that humanity needs to eventually replace; no, there is not an existential threat to humanity nor evidence of weather becoming more extreme. There is time, thus our resources should be put toward resilience by strengthening infrastructure and building codes.
Ron … in your last sentence:
“There is time, …” I couldn’t agree more.
When we say ‘need’ there can be this expectation of danger and not much time to resolve it. When time is no longer pressing then there is no need for a massive effort to avert a danger … because there is no danger.
Energy other than fossil fuels will undoubtedly be developed and used. What we ‘need’ to do is to stop creating boogeymen narratives, which only feeds into the extremist game of emotional ping pong.
I respectfully disagree here. Even if a new design for nuclear reactors made it impossible for them to suffer from a loss of coolant pumping meltdown, it would take 50 years to test, conduct safety trials and build enough of these to replace a significant fraction of our future electricity needs If we use electricity to replace fossil fuels in cars and elsewhere our electricity needs are likely to double.
Unfortunately renewables can’t provide reliable electricity until we find a way to store electric on a grid scale and building such storage with likely be an enormous task. If we aren’t building Judith’s “new energy systems” right now they aren’t going to prevent the emission of lots of CO2 before the 2070’s.
Frank, right now our nuclear technology is not being made a priority. Put the trillion-dollar green budget into it and it will take 5-10 years rather than 50.
You point out rightly that the grid will also need to power transportation. This is not an argument for wind and solar, especially without energy storage on scale. The environmental impact of solar-wind on 40X scale is not well appreciated.
The clear way to power the 22nd century and beyond is nuclear fusion. It needs to be center stage at Davos and COP.
We have time for it. We don’t need to lock down our economies.
Franktoo … You said:
“… they aren’t going to prevent the emission of lots of CO2 before the 2070’s.”
If you’re correct, are you saying that is a bad thing? So far, CO2 has supposedly doubled from preindustrial times, yet there has been no manifestation of negative consequences. In fact, every time someone expresses a negative consequence it is proven wrong … from polar bear extinction to catastrophic sea level rise to extreme heat to increasing storm activity. While there has been some warming, it only appears to be beneficial. I would be very interested if someone could point out factual negative consequences from increasing CO2 levels that would justify the massive social investments/social policies we’ve witnessed.
I am not saying that the 1862 California flood returns soon, but it seems to be a bigger danger than rising CO2 levels. And we are woefully unprepared to cope with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862
THANKS JUDITH. I share your hopeful expectations that Musk will increase free speech and encourage more visible discussions and return the scientific process to the truth seeking debates that advance our knowledge.
In addition to Twitter files, it would be nice to see New York Times files, Washington Post files, Facebook files, YouTube files, and so on.
JM: So she posted on liberal twitter and got shadow banned. At least the right has much more respect for free speech.
“This interview went viral on youtube, with 500,000 views in 7 days.”
We like to think we can see signals. Such as a coming transistion. That video was a signal. You’re good.
Judith, I look forward to following your communications ventures, and to your new book.
THANKS a lot.
I watched your interview on BizNews very carefully. Here is why I found it very useful. I have been disappointed by the continued use of RCP 8.5 by the IPCC. I have been following the ECS story about the IPCC adoption of the Sherwood paper, the good work by Nic Lewis and others and the reduction in ECS estimates towards a current level of around 1.8. The IPCC still seems to favour 2.0-4.0. Then we have the CMIP5 models followed by CMIP6 that runs even hotter and still uses RCP8.5.
I used to wonder why the IPCC doesn’t just correct their models to run less hot. After COP27, and Guterres claiming that we were on the Highway to Climate Hell, the answer became clear. They don’t want to. All the science is alarmist for good reason. It drives the UN redistribution of wealth project. Add that to the various claims by UN officials since the Eighties, including Strong, Edenhofer and Figueres and the UN objectives are very clear. I remember mentioning them in a post on this site.
As well as redistributing wealth from the richer countries to the poorer ones, the UN wishes to change the financial status quo. Pushing the richer countries into fuel poverty makes a pretty good start. Net Zero will finish them off.
But worse than all of that, the UK climate policy (and energy) is effectively managed by the IPCC. The government has signed up to the UNFCC and its science which means that our scientists follow it faithfully if they want to retain funding. We have a Climate Change Committee that turns IPCC emission warnings into action plans for ministers.
I recently wrote to some Members of Parliament pointing out much of the above. (No reply yet.) I am not a climate scientist or an academic. I have retired from R&D in industry. I was beginning to feel slightly alone and exposed since I figured out most of the above based on information from a few blogs.
Then within days I saw your BizNews video. You talked about the UN political agenda. It effectively confirmed my thinking. You told it as it is in a very matter of fact manner. It made me feel much better. Thank you for that.
I have explained in detail why that worked for me, but I feel that all of this goes to the heart of the matter. Most politicians have no idea about any of this. They need to be told in simple terms that the UN uses alarmist science to drive its political agenda. Governments like the one in the UK are falling over backwards to facilitate the UN plan which aims to impoverish our nations.
In the video, you referred to the UN and IPCC activities almost as an aside. But they are driving the whole problem, are they not?
“redistributing wealth from the richer countries to the poorer ones”
It is so unfair that some (countries or people) are rich and some are poor. In the name of Socialism, everybody should be poor.
When it is acknowledged Earth’s atmosphere is very thin – it will become obvious, Earth doesn’t have any greenhouse warming effect.
–
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
I think is that the present UN & IPCC want to redistribute other people’s money, so it is about their power trip. Don’t touch their own personal fat salaries though!
Well I just searched for my BizNews video on youtube, and it appeared!!!
It’s the Musk-effect. You’ve been un-banned. LOL!
Common sense is not so common.
— Voltaire
I am always interested in the information you supply. It is pragmatic, polite and as far as I can ascertain unbiased. That is probably why certain groups don’t like it. You are also not too stuck up that you can’t poke fun at yourself.
Thanks for continuing this blog- it is a much needed breath of fresh air. I think that when the dust settles over twitter that it will end up in a much better space (I hope and pray). I am in the medical field and it has become so one sided that when i see how many people who were ardent fans of twitter lose their minds i wonder how they got along beforehand. And i also wonder where they will go now that they have demonized Musk and twitter as abetting far right, unsafe, and toxic ideologies. (Don’t you just love the concept of “microaggressions?”) Someday, when i no longer need my job i intend to start a blog on this madness that has overtaken the medical world.
Speaking of which, I am also a person surviving with trigeminal neuralgia (did not come as a sequel to shingles, whether that is better or not is debatable). Until one experiences that level of pain it is hard to explain it to someone else. I am hopeful that yours will subside and you can hopefully return to some version of life without it. I suspect, like with cancer, that surviving or not, one will always have in the back of one’s mind that it is still there lurking and ready to come out again when you least expect it.
As a long time reader and great fan, thanks for continuing your work, i wish you nothing but the best, and hopefully great success with all your endeavors working to return sanity to this space.
Hi Barry, thanks for your comment. Your experiences with TGN are helpful. Actually I think that post-herpetic is not as bad as what you have, i have been managing ok for the past month. I suspect yours is much worse :(
Judith – you have done a fantastic job bringing sanity into the climate issues, but in your Sky item I find “Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.”. IMHO that one totally incorrect statement undoes a lot of the good work.
Heritage blog. I like it.
Very refreshing to read this. With Musk taking over Twitter and the ubiquitous censorship now exposed, hopefully people will wake up to what’s happening. I am not optimistic.
Great to hear you plan to do more posts, we’ve missed your reviews, insights and opinions. I enjoy finding video interviews (mostly find them on WattsUpWithThat), so nice to see you are looking to find a home for regular video posts. I agree, Rumble is a good choice. FYI – I follow Roger Pielke, Jr substack. It works well as he posts at least once a week. Makes for an easy follow -not too long and not too short. He also provides links to papers for additional deep dives, which are very helpful.
Just a suggestion, perhaps you can have followers provide topics for you to write about. I am interested in your views on California climate propaganda and energy transition craziness. I am sure this will create interesting and long lists.
Is your book available for pre-order? I want one.
Thank you for all you do.
I get an e-mail from RP Jr almost every day. Always interesting.
Glad an eccentric billionaire pulled back the curtain so light can once again shine on your wicked science Dr. Curry. Thanks for staying the course through all the storms . . .
When people suggest that the carbon sink will diminish, I like to ask “why do we think the earth will be so much more resource limited than it has been throughout earth’s history?”
Judith,
My wife for 59 years caught shingles while in hoispital. This continued to a severe case of post-herpetic neuralgia to her left face that has persisted as continuous, severe pain for 8 years now. We have explored every medical path we can find, with not one positive outcome. The last resort, surgery, is stalled because of difficulty in determining which nerve is affected and the tough consequences if the wrong one is damaged. Medicine has no answers here in Australia.
I am sorry to report that consequences of post-herpetic neuralia can be severe and permanent, while hoping that your case is short and not severe. There is a vaccine to “prevent” shingles in the first place and we often recommend ion blogs that people take the vaccine. Of course, untold damage to public acceptance of vaccines has been caused by the Covid-19 exercise, which each day emerges more as a corruption of proper science combined with extravagant public relations lies.
Over the years, I have been in almost perfect agreement with your writings on good science and truth, as demonstrated in climate research. I feel sorry that similar stories have arisen from Covid. I wonder about the nauture of the next event after global warming, climate change, Covid, is set to be maukled by post-normal science rubbish instead of deeper study of wicked problems. Geoff S
Geoff, I have been having some success with naturopathic remedies (large doses of B12, alphalipoic acid, lysine, and also cold infrared laser. Email me if you wife is interested in any of this.
“Abstract
Background: Reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus (VZV), which causes herpes zoster (HZ, synonym: shingles) in humans, can be a rare adverse reaction to vaccines. Recently, reports of cases after COVID-19 vaccination have arisen.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35470920/
“We report 10 incidences of herpes zoster reactivation within 7-21 days of getting the COVID-19 vaccination. Transient immunomodulation following vaccination, similar to that seen in COVID-19 illness, could be one explanation for this reactivation.”
https://www.cureus.com/articles/94568-reactivation-of-herpes-zoster-virus-after-covid-19-vaccination-is-there-any-association
Judith,
Thank you for the offer, but in this home we do not use alternative medicine. Geoff S
Don B: I read the first paper on the link between mRNA vaccines and shingles. Very strange. Paper looks roughly a million vaccinations and matched controls and shows an incidence rate in 60 days of about 0.1% in the controls and 0.2% in the vaccinated. The 0.1% rate agrees with the expected lifetime incidence of shingle and the 0.2% rate is definitely significantly different. However, the vaccine trials of the Pfizer vaccine used 20,000 controls and 20,000 vaccinated taken from the same population of volunteers (not matched). There should have been about 20 cases of shingles in the control group and 40 cases of shingles in the vaccinated group, But the papers on vaccine safety and efficacy don’t explicitly mention shingles as a side effect. It could be hiding in the “any serious adverse event” category: 126 of 21621 for vaccine and 111 of 21631 for control or in the “severe” category 240 vs 139. I’m a little surprised they got away with such vagueness.
In any case an mRNA vaccination is like a controlled mini infection of COVID in muscle cells expressing only spike protein while a real COVID infection is uncontrolled, gets into here, lung and nerves and expresses spike protein and many others. Almost certainly the risks from natural infection are greater than the risks from vaccination. That generalization likely includes cardiomyopathy and shingles. So, if you have an 0.1% chance of experiencing shingles in any 2 month period (with shingrix) and an 0.2% chance in the 2 months after vaccination, then you almost certainly have an 0.2% chance or greater of experiencing shingles after an mRNA vaccination. However, the increased risk of shingles is ignored in the background of serious problems that can accompany COVID. FWIW
Sorry to hear of the shingles. I caught it when I was in my thirties and I was out of circulation for 2 or 3 days then was able to travel home and it disappeared after a week or so.
Obviously it affects people in different ways but I am a life long vegetarian so diet might be a factor.
Tonyb
Geoff Would you consider medications for COVID-19 early treatment based on real-time analysis of 2,338 professional medical studies? See the publications collected and categorized at https://www.C19Early.com
“Analysis of 47 COVID early treatments, approvals in 80 countries, database of 1,986 treatments”
Judith,
After listening to your EISM and BizNews pieces, it was excellent to hear so clearly about some of the historical origins of prevailing political attitudes. The Man on the Clapham bus is more receptive to plausible tales, able to be checked, that conform with his vague memory of what happened back then.
Despite trying since 1970, when I first became involved in the nuclear industry, I have never been able to uncover the significant history of Australia’s policy to oppose nuclear power. Anyone know the inside story?
Related to this, much of the public commentary just now is about banning fossil fuels. Even young children are pledging to help fight fossil fuels. Again, what is the inside story here? It is evident that once CO2 was declared a global threat, moderating fossil fuel use was a logical consequence. So, who wanted to be cosy with promotion of CO2 as a global threat? Scientists I knew at the time were of a cautious class, who would not declare such a threat until a great deal of measurement and observation showed it to be. Yet, seemingly out of nowhere and quite quickly, we faced solidified plans to uproot in short time one of mankind’s most beautiful developments of resources.
Maybe we are now on the start of a time when serious scientists are starting to say “Look, I was too enthusiastic when I joined the bandwagon. I did not imagine that agreeing that CO2 was a threat would lead to so much serious, even deadly, action as is happening now. Therefore, i wish to alter my support for the move to ‘renewables’ or whatever their proper name is.”
Do we see signs of this awakening? Geoff S
Too few, if any.
You write,
“At this point, I plan to keep Climate Etc. as is and completely under my own control, thus avoiding any possible censorship or institutional pressure.”
Please do so as it is the ONLY way to protect your blogs integrity as I know this from experience and be very careful who you chose to help you moderate as Tony Heller learned from experience to the point that he had to let go of his old blog (able to transfer the database) to start a new one without that moderator who got control of the original one in order to regain control of his blog.
Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo covers how much of the Inflation Reduction Act goes to China. Also, note the silence of the Media regarding the Twitter revelations. Silence is complacency. We need an Elon Musk to emerge in the Climate Science Field.
Consensus is all-too-often created through censorship, suppression, greed, and opportunism. ~David French
Very glad the blog is continuing; thanks for all your efforts.
Yes, very glad the blog is continuing. Those that provide articles and interaction remain the best so that includes here, Notalotofpeopleknowthat, WUWT and Jonova
Tonyb
Judith
Glad to hear that you will be publishing more blog posts in future.
I’m sorry to learn that you had been shadow-banned on Twitter; it is appalling what lengths many people in positions of power (of one sort or another) who profess to support democracy will do to subvert free speech.
Yes Nic, in the USA its much worse than that. Taibbi’s latest blog post is titled “Twitter, the FBI subsidiary.” This collusion to interfere in an election is clearly illegal under US law. Taibbi is a leftist but an honest one. He’s also recently called out the American media as being corrupt. I have a blog post I sent Judith for next year on the damage done to science by the last 6 years of political warfare. It’s worse than most people realize.
I have always assumed that in the UK, media is much more diverse and not a de facto arm of the government.
Comments seem to not be working yet again
Judith –
You’ve been fooled, apparently. You see, Musk is actually in league with the deep state. You have to get with the chess in the three dimensional level crowd.
https://maajidnawaz.substack.com/p/elon-musk-wants-to-microchip-your
Dr. Curry ==> I agree on podcasts — I’d much rather read the transcript and spend 1/4 the time. When I am forced to listen to a podcast, it is always “in the background” while I write or read something else (I can do two things at once, one 100% and the other about 75% but not three .. so I can’t watch a video podcast and listen and write…)
I hope you will see that your interviews and podcasts are transcribed.
Dr. Curry – I endorse Kip’s recommendation for transcriptions.
I encourage you to evaluate Nuance’s Dragon Speaking Naturally Transcription software capabilities. Best.
“Powerful transcription that’s ready for work
If you’re a mobile professional—or anyone on the go—who relies on a digital voice recorder or smartphone to capture notes and memos, use Dragon’s robust transcription features to turn your recordings into text quickly, easily and accurately. Dragon can even transcribe another single speaker’s voice from pre‑recorded audio files or from podcasts to maximize flexibility and drive productivity.” https://www.nuance.com/dragon/transcription-solutions.html
On a related note, some cracks appear in the Net Zero Asset Managers group.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/vanguard-defects-from-the-climate-club-net-zero-asset-managers-pledge-11670618508?st=6sdmnoro93vvg5q&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
I’m one of those persons who likes to print off newspaper articles to read at leisure.
Would it be possible, Judith, for you to post on your blog the Sky News articles you do, so we don’t need to wade through all the advertising guff?
yes i think i should do full blog post on each of these articles
A Google seach ” judith curry on climate change” brings up your interview for me, (listed second after an advert for ‘climete active super!))
Thanks for the video link, Mark.
Dr. Curry, the only thing I would have added is that many do not realize that sea level rise has been at a steady rate before and after the LIA. This is not a human-caused warming thing for the most part. And even activist scientists would hesitate to state that it is. So we need to face it as a separate problem from warming.
SLR, like any problem that may be exacerbated by warming, will not improve just from a cease in fossil fuel use so the problems will need other solutions regardless of fossil fuel prohibitions.
“… undergoing peer review, …”
I’m kind of hoping for something more like an autobiography than an academic treatise, but best wishes for whatever it is. And FWIW don’t forget the movie rights.
On the issue of Twitter banning, I’d like to note that Willis Eschenbach and Steven Mosher still have their accounts suspended.
I just got mine back. I even got an apology. All they need to do is apply.
don’t give up on week in review. i like your personally invested posts very much but the week in review was valuable. There are others who undertake similar listings but yours seemed filtered by topical interest and instincts rather than looking for bits with your favored results and was well organized and widely informed.
It may be with everything else you have on your media calendar, this bibliography exercise can’t be sustained at the same level, but consider this thanks for the years of bread crumbs you have left and actually hoping the concept won’t vanish completely amongst the more directed offerings.
Brian
PS – Substack seems OK for a mixed feed of podcasts and posts, but I still like blogs.
PS – I don’t like blogs to the exclusion of longform podcasts. I’ve never tried to time out whether reading transcripts of interviews is more efficient although I understand there is some tool that allows you to listen to podcasts at higher speeds. I haven’t bothered yet because I mostly listen while driving for work so I can’t be reading anyway. And the natural space in our conversation means I can use those gaps as part of my multi-tasking in turning over and thinking about what i’m hearing. But when I just want to run through content or refind a particular spot I would think a fast play option very handy.
And if they weren’t busy shadow banning people. Youtube still has the easiest function i’ve found for sharing a file at a certain time instead of sending the file along with some note saying advance to x:xx:xx time to hear what i’m talking about.
Good morning, Judith. Thanks for Climate Etc. and the climate information it provides. What are your thoughts about the Climate Discussion Nexus out of Canada? What do you think is the Ultimate aim of “Scientists” such as, Michael Mann are? Do they really believe what they claim?
JC Your posting to skyNews. My opinion is that it should be written for 5th graders. The material is spot on but I’m not sure it means a lot to the casual reader. You’re the best, carry on!
Doug MacKenzie
The Sun’s direct radiation reaching the surface of Earth does not warm the surface to the observed global mean temperature. Such radiation is on average equivalent to about 168 w/m^2 and, by the Stefan-Boltzmann, that cannot produce a global mean surface temperature above about -40°C. The parallel plate experiments assume a vacuum between the plates. In contrast, there is also non-radiative heat between the surface and the atmosphere. I have written peer-reviewed material on Planck functions some of which is summarised in this comment: https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-983222. My other comments explain how and why you are mistaken about “how back radiation works.” I suggest you read all such comments and don’t reply with assertive statements containing not a word of relevant physics in which I doubt you are qualified.
Mike Jonas
Of course radiation is two-way. Of course “cool” bodies radiate – anything above 0K does so, but radiation from a block of ice won’t warm you. You haven’t explained what you assume happens when you use the word “absorb” so I suggest you read this comment to help you understand the difference between an electron’s energy and the translational kinetic energy of a whole molecule. https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-983222
Christos Vournas
The height of a planet’s atmosphere has plenty to do with the temperature at the base of its troposphere and in any solid surface there. The Sun’s radiation supports an equilibrium temperature at the so-called radiating altitude and, from that altitude down to the base of the troposphere the temperature gradient is closely quantified by the quotient of the planet’s acceleration due to gravity and the weighted mean specific heat of the gases. Water vapour in Earth’s troposphere reduces the magnitude of the gradient by about a third, but on Uranus the actual gradient is only about 5% less than the theoretical one. So the Venus surface is hotter than Earth’s surface because the radiating altitude is a bit hotter and the distance between that altitude and the surface is several times what it is for Earth. Even the base of the 350Km high nominal troposphere of Uranus is a little hotter than Earth’s mean surface temperature and that is because its troposphere is so high. There is no solar radiation reaching down there and no solid surface absorbing back radiation.
To all:
There is no need to reiterate to me the teachings of Pierrehumbert et al that are based on false physics. The flux of radiation does not correspond to the effective transfer of thermal energy because, as I have explained in peer-reviewed writings, much of the radiation merely raises electrons through one or more quantum energy states. Only in a target at 0K would all the electro-magnetic energy be thermalised. There is no correct law in physics which says heat is always from hot to cold even in a force field. Experiments with centrifugal force prove there can be heat from cold to hot such as happens radially in a vortex cooling tube. To understand this you need a correct understanding of entropy and the fact that tropospheric temperature gradients are the state of maximum entropy which we physicists call thermodynamic equilibrium. I stress that the gradient is an equilibrium state: if it is disturbed by weather events it will tend to repair itself. The process whereby that gradient (aka “lapse rate”) tends to return to its normal value happens at the molecular level and has nothing to do with rising “parcels” of air from a surface supposedly heated by a combination of solar radiation and atmospheric radiation. Climatologists incorrectly quantify the global mean surface temperature by using the net total of radiative and non-radiative processes in Stefan-Boltzmann calculations. That law only ever applies for a single source and simple experiments prove that it does not give the temperature achieved by the sum of radiation from two or more sources. But that is what climatologists think it does, so that is where their “physics” gets it all so horribly wrong. I have pointed out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not apply to the net effect of independent processes – only to interacting processes occurring at the same time – see this comment: https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-983221 and, if you disagree, suggest a new statement thereof in the Talk pages at Wikipedia and let me know when they accept it.
Hi Doug.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, 10 AM EST, The U.S. Department of Energy said it would announce on Tuesday a breakthrough in ongoing research on nuclear fusion, long heralded for its potential as a source of clean, essentially limitless energy.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-announce-nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough-11670881298?st=ex1a4kdv9zlj0vg&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Should be interesting …
Good post, Bill, I should have been more thorough reading the comments! Late to the party in my post below. But I’m sensing fusion is now closer to reality than anyone can imagine. It’s easy to understand this after so many decades of Pollyanna promises. The next technological revolution of humankind is getting near.
https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-makes-history-achieving-fusion-ignition
From their site: https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/building-to-a-solution-elements-of-a-fusion-breakthrough
“This is a Wright Brothers moment,” Hurricane said. “Our result is a significant step forward in understanding what is required for (fusion) to work. The fusion energy generated was about five times the energy absorbed by the capsule and about 70 percent of the laser energy shot at the target. We got off the ground for a moment.”
It may be a critical junction in the development of fusion energy, but it is not;
1. Energy out > energy in.
Read closely their announcement. Because of inefficiencies in the amount of energy that the lasers direct at the target vs what is absorbed by the target, the energy out is only 70% of the laser energy shot at the target.
2. A readily scalable project. This is a very expensive setup, and only achieves (if they are able to deal with the inefficiencies of item 1) about 1 MJ which is about about 400 times less than a nominal sized power plant.
I am a strong supporter of fusion research, and think that this could be a big milestone, but they have a great deal of work to do to make this a project that can be done as a viable plant. Further, I think a bit of caution is in order in terms of how quickly this can be made into something economical. We have had to wait for about 30 years to get to this point, the remaining work may go faster or slower than that, but we really don’t know. Finally, if they were ready to implement the first power plant today, construction of all the plants necessary to convert over and bringing them online will take at least 10 years.
There is also the stigma of nuclear power to deal with. I do not see the resistance to nuclear power going away just because this is fusion instead of fission. The fear of nuclear power is not fact based so one can’t guarantee that fusion will be universally accepted. I can see one making several emotional arguments against fusion power. One such argument is it doesn’t make emotional sense to develop a sun on the earth, what could go wrong?
Your linked article is from Nov 2, 2021. Did you post the wrong link?
From the DOE link posted above:
“On December 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it.”
“LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE).”
Comment in moderation.
Your link is from November 2, 2021. Is that the link you wanted?
Possibly not, but the idea is still the same from what I understand, the output may be a higher percentage, but it is still not 100%+ of the input. It would be nice to get the link to their actual announcement, not some presser that losses the resolution of what they actually accomplished.
Awesome! Now inertial confinement fusion is only 50 years away!
From the DOE link posted above:
“On December 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it.”
2.05 MJ input
3.15 MJ output
They succeeded. Now time to commercial construction is probably at least 10 years away.
But … they succeeded.
How long were they able to produce this power? Wasn’t it on for only a few seconds?
We are a lot further away then 10 years from a fusion power plant.
Rob … you could be right about the time it will take for a commercial plant. Yet, this was a ‘first’, so let’s see how much progress comes after this hurdle.
Exciting times! I’m glad you are widening your scope, as finding you in 2015 completely changed the way I thought about climate change. I’m sure reaching more people would have similar effecfs
Dr. Curry, I really enjoyed the determined, enthusiastic tone in your post. Your reasoned voice is exactly what’s needed to broaden what has been myopic, politically channeled discourse about climate, and energy within most of the broader media.
Relative to your personal interest moving in the direction of energy you might find this article posted yesterday about Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s fusion breakthrough interesting: https://news.blackchronicle.com/us-scientists-boost-clean-power-hopes-with-fusion-energy-breakthrough/
Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works has also been making significant progress towards the realization of fusion, here’s a fascinating video: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29074/skunk-works-exotic-fusion-reactor-program-moves-forward-with-larger-more-powerful-design
The pedigree of success behind the science of these institutions makes it difficult to not take them seriously, Skunk Works in particular is seeing the imminent commercialization of fusion, their enthusiasm is engaging. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29074/skunk-works-exotic-fusion-reactor-program-moves-forward-with-larger-more-powerful-design
This is the video link I meant to post in the last link above. Skunk Works fusion technology, they’re a believer that it will happen sooner rather than later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=UlYClniDFkM&feature=emb_title
Looks like Elon’s Jet likes some privacy:
https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/the-elon-musk-jet-tracker-claims-hes-shadowbanned-on-twitter/
Funny. Cue shrieks of “See what the leftists do…um…Elon will save free…um…they’ve ALL got it in for us!” from the pseudo-skeptic glitterati and the adoring fans. Priceless.
Good on him.
Good on the plane or Elon? And for what? Wanting privacy?
JMurphy – it’s his plane and his business. I don’t blame him at all for getting rid of the nuisance. In this age of violent activists, it’s just good common sense to do so.
Elon disagrees with you:
“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk”
Until, of course, that account is shadowbanned and then un-shadowbanned when found out! Those lovers of freedom and free speech don’t like it when it applies to them, do they, especially when they get caught out playing the same games. Is free speech only acceptable when it means you can write crazy conspiracy theories about being hidden on search engines and then claim to be a fighter for freedom when it appears that you were visible all along, just not important enough to be near the top of search results?
Finding inconsistent practices by anyone is easy pickings. Each case is unique and depending on the specifics, one principle may override another in one case, while not in a second case.
Weak tea, JMurphy. You, Williard, and Appel revel in these sorts of banalities. At the end of the day, they are meaningless swats at the climate ball.
If I were Elon, I would just ban this id-eee-ot flat out, and announce it to the world.
Don’t be such a snowflake, JM.
Let the Realest Man (or the second Realest one, Bernard Arnault now being on top) manhandle all the things at the same time:
https://globalnews.ca/news/9344194/musks-twitter-trust-safety-council/
Good for him!
The Trust and Safety Council was nothing more than the Ban Conservatives Wherever Possible Committee. The Chinese would have been very proud to have such a tool.
[JIM] Good for him. It’s his plane and his business.
[ALSO JIM] The Chinese would have been proud of such a tool.
Never change, Jim.
jim2 wrote: “If I were Elon, I would just ban this id-eee-ot flat out, and announce it to the world.”
So, does this only apply to Elon or also to any wealthy person who owns a company or country (think Saudi Arabia)? They can ban who they wish to (because they can) but the freedom to know/of speech must apply to everyone else/ordinary people (because they don’t own their own company/country)?
Seems that some people don’t want to learn from history or deliberately want to take us backwards!
Who was it who said that China would be proud to have such a tool?
JMurphy – if the guy is putting Musk in danger by tweeting the jet’s location, Musk should kick him off. The id-eee-ot in question can still say whatever he wants, just not on Twitter. Just like they kick off child porn slugs, violent terrorists, violent anyone, there will always be exceptions. Self-preservation ranks high on my list and can result in may exceptions.
Well, Jim, I am glad that you agree with Twitter’s decision to ban teh Donald.
‘Twas their business and a matter of security, right?
Willard, how could jim2 agree with that decision against the Donald. Don’t you know that right-wing firebrands are freedom fighters (especially when they are literally telling people to fight against a democratic vote) but little people who want to reveal all about the air habits of rich people and/or tyrants are threats to safety. You know, they might allow an anti-freedom freedom fighter (i.e. Someone who is not rich or doesn’t own their own business/country) to, um, somehow threaten the safety and relaxing-without-a-care-in-the-world business (while fighting for freedom) of a self-concerned rich/dictator person. Come on, open your eyes to the troof! (Or go to Tumbler or Truth Social for help in finding it under those liberal rocks).
JM,
I heard you speak of freedom fighters. You might like:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2017/05/13/freedom-fighters/
Jim is a dedicated Freedom Fighters. Freedom comes first. Consistency comes second.
Never ever let Freedom be constrained by your moral principles, OK?
OMG JMurphy. Trump wasn’t a danger to anyone. The FBI lead a raid on the Capitol and some actual Trump supporters joined in. Trump certainly wasn’t there and didn’t tell them to do it. You are so typical of the disingenuous left. You have a PhD in FUD.
Wait, Jim.
The guy who tweets about Elon’s jet would need to be next to it to be dangerous?
I have seen better special pleading in my ninja career. Including from you.
Yes, Trump was not leading the charge, Williard. Give an example of a press conference, phone call, or speech where he told people to storm the Capitol. You can’t because he didn’t. And don’t cherry pick and isolate one sentence or some other non-sense for which you are infamous.
When it comes to decision making; a vigilant, flexible, adaptive approach is superior even if it leads to what you appear to consider a bugbear: inconsistency.
A rigid algorithmic approach is dangerous. See Long Term Capital as an example. But I think it is obvious to many people, probably even you. It’s just not convenient for your political manipulations.
Getting funnier now! Not wishing to go deep into Godwin’s Law but I hear there are also strange people who say that man Hitler never mentioned doing any harm to a certain religious grouping (yeh, go on, show the actual words, huh. You can’t so he’s innocent, ok) so he didn’t do it and certainly didn’t want or encourage his fan boys to do any such thing either. Jim2 logic: innocent.
Lots of words there JMurhpy, but no content. So you can’t find anywhere Trump told anyone to bust into the Capitol? Told you so.
Yes, jim2, innocent like that German dictator!
And now he’s banned/suspended journalists. Was it William Wallace, Donald Trump or Elon Musk who proclaimed “Freedom”? (Hint: not trump or musk – they only want the freedom to ban who they don’t like…)
FREEDOM! (to post rightwing conspiracies and complaints about liberals)
Unlike Wallace, Trump did not lead a rebellion. On Jan. 6, it appears the FBI led it – there’s more than enough evidence for that.
Trump merely spoke the truth as he saw it. It is not criminal to allege the 2020 election was rigged. He had every right to say it. If some of his supporters, led by the FBI, walked into the Capitol, some with the aid of Capitol police, it isn’t his fault. He should not be expected to remain silent due to the FBI and a few crazies. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
Freedoms have a price.
Guys the proof on this is quite conclusive and is in the Twitter files. Internally, everyone at Twitter said Trump didn’t violate their rules but he was banned anyway.
Try this, Jim:
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension
Otherwise search for One Single Proof, a classic trope from your kindred spirits. You might also like:
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-business-dac21de7abb6167bb604f5317aeda10a
Got to love the smell of freedom in the morning.
Williard, whining doesn’t become you. So, Musk runs the company. I seriously doubt you can find any utterance by him saying free speech on Twitter is an absolute. In fact, you can find many instances where he has made rules about no violent speech, no child molesters, etc. So, we already knew he wasn’t a proponent of ABSOLUTE free speech.
He has implemented another rule, a very level headed one IMO. No doxxing.
I doubt you would want to be doxxed and then possibly swatted. To me, this appears to be a rule that all Twitter users should appreciate.
Earlier in the evening, Musk’s network threw reporters from CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times, among others, into a seven-day suspension for allegedly disclosing the location of his private jet.
…
Musk dropped in on the session as well, after it accumulated thousands of listeners, to say tersely that anyone who doxxes — gives personal location information about another person — will be suspended. The journalists countered that they had not posted any real-time flight data, as he alleged, but by then the billionaire had quit the call. The dialogue drew more than 40,000 listeners at its peak.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-16/musk-disables-twitter-spaces-after-clash-with-journalists
Maybe I’m just dense, but don’t see the climate connection.
Geowhizz, Musk is one of those elite persons who use their private jets a lot and don’t like to be reminded about how damaging that is to the environment. Also, patriotic freedom fighters for liberty (while not suggesting that anyone actually does any physical fighting, of course – that would not be cool and you can’t prove they wish that anyway; they’re only words and, anyway, they didn’t say it in those exact words, i.e. Fight like hell (*whisper : don’t fight really *) – usually like to criticise the elites who use their private planes. It’s OK for musk to do it, though. But you’re not allowed to know about that and you’ll be suspended from twitter if you mention his private jet.
dpy6629, um no, everybody at twitter was not saying that.
Latest twitter files dump shows extensive collaboration between the FBI and DNI to censor and control speech and interfere in an election. It is settled case law that the government officials were violating the law. And it shows that Twitter was really essentially state run media, just as in many totalitarian regimes.
Jay Battacharia had an excellent interview about his banning by Twitter. He is quite upset that the public was denied a robust debate about covid science and policy. We now know that public health officials and many scientists lied to us. They claimed that vaccination would prevent spreading covid. They claimed that masks work when all the evidence shows at the most a very weak effect and the existence of side effects. They lied about the side effect profile for young healthy people of the vaccine vs. the very very small risk from covid. There was also a flood of zombie studies and fraudulent papers. This I think puts the last nail in the coffin of public confidence in “the science.” There is no such thing. Science is a process and in viral epidemiology, uncertainty is usually higher than the signal.
But climate science pioneered this censoring and smearing strategy. It is done by corrupt NGO’s and often anonymous online mobs of activists who are usually totally ignorant of the science. It is not surprising then that that template is now going to be pulled out by “scientists” in almost every important public dispute about policy.
No amnesty, accountability is needed.
JMurphy, Have you read any of the reporting on the Twitter files? Taibbi is a fellow leftist so you should find him credible. The Times is lying about the contents of this reporting too as Taibbi himself has pointed out often.
gmurphy should like Matt Taibbi as he is a fellow leftist, albeit an honest one which may distrurb our local anonymous activists. His latest post is titled: “From the Twitter Files: Twitter, The FBI Subsidiary.” Turns out Twitter was serving as essentially a state run media outlet, colluding to interfere in an election. This is actually worse than the corruption in the Gilded Age, because at least then there were tens of thousands of newspapers with a variety of editorial positions.
> Twitter was serving as essentially a state run media outlet,
Not that these issues shouldn’t be interrogated; they should be.
But equating 150 emails over 3 years to “essentially state run media outlet” may be just a tad hyperbolic.
Just a tad.
Here’s a recent Greenwald post. Another leftie but an honest one.
“The rapid escalation of online censorship, and increasingly offline censorship, cannot be overstated. The silencing tactic that has most commonly provoked attention and debate is the banning of particular posts or individuals by specific social media platforms. But the censorship regime that has been developed, and which is now rapidly escalating, extends far beyond those relatively limited punishments.”
Let me ask you Joshie, does the bother you at all, or are you comfortable with a Chinese style social credit system?
I read that there were weekly meetings between FBI and DNI officials. That’s more often than my CFD team meets. In the spirit of Joshie’s persona, I’ll ask him to find the source. Certainly collusion to interfere in an election is quite accurate. It’s also illegal.
From Taibbi’s piece today.
“After countless fits and starts, and enough plot twists to fill a dozen pulp novels, I’m finally comfortable enough reading the documents to see the outlines of the animal I came to hunt. Every day, the Twitter Files reveal more about how the machinery of state censorship works. We learn more and more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags social media content in a neverending, cyclical process. The state isn’t a bit actor in a mostly-private “content moderation” movement. It’s the central player, clearly the boss of the whole operation, and clearly also the driving force in its expansion, a truth we can show in pictures.”
This is something most Americans don’t want and it is unconstitutional.
I’ve known people that were the target of FBI surveillance for years because of their open advocacy for their political beliefs. I’m not going to sneer at delving into whether or when this type of FBI activity is or isn’t defensible.
But you left out another part of Matt’s tweets:
Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
That’s right. 150 emails over 3 years, that you pearl-clutch your way into equating to “state-run media.” Your kind of hyperbole is perhaps the worst way to deal with these issues, because it’s reducing real issues to leveraging cheap political point-scoring. It’s hard to get into the meat of these discussions when people are fanning themselves on their fainting couches.
Matt’s “reporting” on this borders on self-parody and leads people to equate questionable FBI activity with “state run media outlet” because apparently they can’t tell the difference between questionable activity and “state run media outlets.”
But I hold him responsible, not the drama-queens for doing what drama-queens do.
Matt has unquestionably been a Musk-run media outlet during all of this, publishing a curated trove of information surrounded by melodramatic window dressing. It was made clear at the beginning, when he forgot to mention that the information “handled” at the Biden team’s request were pictures of Hunter’s junk. But it’s not surprising, as Matt’s been a huckster since his days back when he was in Russia harassing female reporters in essentially tabloid publications. It’s hard to blame the marks when someone so experienced in grifting is involved.
150 emails, but what other communications channels were there? We probably haven’t discovered all of them yet.
The FBI alerted Twitter in weekly meetings ahead of the 2020 presidential election to anticipate “hack-and-leak operations” related to Hunter Biden by foreign state actors, providing the company a pretext to immediately bury the New York Post‘s laptop bombshell when it broke just weeks ahead of the election.
Organized by FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, as many as seven D.C.-based FBI agents held weekly meetings with Twitter and Facebook executives during the 2020 race, Chan testified in an ongoing lawsuit, the Post’s Miranda Devine reported. The lawsuit, launched by Republican attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana, alleges that the White House and federal agencies colluded with tech companies to censor speech along ideological lines on social-media platforms.
https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-held-weekly-meetings-twitter-134909110.html
Your long and almost content free comment, Joshie, illustrates the fact that most lefties are quite viscous to Taibbi and his recent work because he is an honest lefty.
Matt has spent vastly more time looking at the source materials than you have, so he is vastly more credible than you are Joshie.
I read that there were weekly meetings between Twitter and FBI and DNI officials.
I’m a little bit surprised that you are acting as an apologist for this kind of unprecedented spying on and censoring of Americans at the behest of the FBI. Or maybe its just that your typical persona is purely reactive. Whatever Nic or Judith or I say, you cavil and quibble.
It will be interesting to see what else comes out.
I think there’s certainly room to have a discussion about what is or isn’t legitimate engagement between government and social media platforms. I hope that what we saw happening between Fox News and the Trump administration could be a part of that discussion, but for any reasonable discussion to take place people would have to stop trying to leverage the whole thing for political expediency and I don’t see that happening anywhere.
The drama-queening in both sides won’t get the job done
As much as I have criticism of Bari Weiss for the quality of her participation in this dog and pony show, I’ll give her credit for at least not being totally hypocritical in all respects.
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1603788344470556674?t=M8r9RmpuhR3M6JC5JA0I2g&s=19
You saw Jim what Joshua did. He quoted out of context 1 item and them minimized it, ignoring the wealth of information about how widespread the coordination. He then attacks people who are concerned and then says “its a both sides issue.” This is simply not true and is a really dispicable way to justify illegal collusion.
And of course, Taibbi has spent vastly more time on this than Joshua and therefore his opinion is vastly more credible. Does anyone care what an anonymous internet persona says about Taibbi and the quality of his reporting? I don’t think so.
David’s hero:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-who-terrorized-women-correspondents-in-moscow/2017/12/15/91ff338c-ca3c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html
A real champion for free speech, this one is:
The controversy still rankles Taibbi. “I wrote some absolutely disgustingly offensive stuff, but particularly in my case this was almost 100 percent a pose, as I’m kind of a recluse and wallflower in my private life,” he said. “The drug aspect was real, but a lot of the rest of it was done for effect, to be deliberately offensive, because the conceit of The eXile was that it was the unvarnished tourist guide for the plundering Ugly American — if conquistadors wrote Time Out, for instance.”
Back when Taibbi was interviewed for the Vanity Fair piece on The eXile, he grew so enraged with the journalist, James Verini — Verini called Taibbi and Ames’s eXile book “redundant” and “discursive” — that he cursed Verini out and threw coffee in his face.
Taibbi’s a real peach:
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/02/exile-201002
Just goes to show, there are vile grifters like Taibbi on “the left” just as there are on “the right” and suckers who fall for their gifts all across the political spectrum.
Classic ad homonym Joshie! How about the substance? You tried to minimize collusion to interfere in an election. I thought that was tantamount to being anti-democracy
At any rate, what’s important isn’t really whether Taibbi’s a grifters or a total dick, what matters is that he’s not actually reporting here, hes curating a message at the behest of Musk.
He’s using Twitter to push an agenda, just like the problem he’s putatively “reporting” on. Again, the perfect example, although there were many, was when he left out obviously important context when he Tweeted about material being “handled” at the request of the Biden team. The only viable explanation for why he left out thst context was that he was spinning narrative.
Its amusing to see how perfectly Taibbi is exposing the faux concernabout media bias from people whose concern is actually entirely selective and nothing other than an excuse to push their ideological agenda.
It’s certainly not a shock to see some “skeptics” fall right in line.
What will be interesting is to see if there are any “skeptics” with enough conviction in skepticism (without quotes) to push back.
Maybe Frank might. Hard to imagine any others will. Let’s ass what happens.
Where is the proof that Taibbi is curating a message on behalf of Musk? I must have missed that part.
I also haven’t found any inkling that the Trust and Safety Council of Twitter had a list of transparent rules and procedures used to determine who gets banned. From what I’ve read, they just discussed among themselves then pulled the trigger.
Joshua, this is fallaciously attacking the person. So far it appears as if Taibbi’s conclusions are very carefully sourced. You should stop smearing people who find collusion by our own law enforcement to influence an election a huge scandal. You also haven’t responded on the fact that its clearly illegal. Why only 4 years ago Russian collusion (even though it didn’t make much difference) was an impeachable offense and the worst sign of authoritarianism. Why can’t you just admit that without lashing out at what is clearly the truth? Could it be that you are extremely biased and actually don’t mind too much what happened?
Jim is right that your Musk smear is just totally unsourced and you have no evidence which is usually the case.
This is not a both sides issue despite your emotional attempt to deflect from the facts.
I miss Hunter Tompson. These new kids are just egotistic arsonist. At least I don’t think Musk is paying Taibbi so I’ll remain neutral until I see a billionaire go to jail for their crimes.
> Where is the proof that Taibbi is curating a message on behalf of Musk?
I already described, twice, what I think is the most obvious example. An actual reporter, as opposed to a message curator, wouldn’t have left out the critical context as to what was “handled” in response to the Biden team’s request. If you can’t see that, then there’s no point in any further elaboration.
And of course, it’s prolly just coincidence that all of the “Twitter Files” messaging curators are strong advocates for a particular agenda.
If you think it’s just a agenda-free, free speech agenda, then you might look at Musk’s long history on “free speech” in China, and elsewhere with regard to his critics.
It’s always amusing to see self-styled “skeptics” be so credulous when it fits their ideological orientation. Unlike all other politicians, Trump isn’t pursuing his own self-interest, he’s just fighting to make America great again. Unlike all other corporatists, Musk isn’t curating messages in his own self-interest, he’s must crusading for “free speech.”. Unlike all other members of the media, Taibbi isn’t trolling for substack subscribers or advancing his ideological agenda, he’s trying to advance truth to power.
See – this is why I love you boyz.
> Where is the proof that Taibbi is curating a message on behalf of Musk?
I already described, twice, what I think is the most obvious example. An actual reporter, as opposed to a message curator, wouldn’t have left out the critical context as to what was “handled” in response to the Biden team’s request. If you can’t see that, then there’s no point in any further elaboration.
And of course, it’s prolly just coincidence that all of the “Twitter Files” messaging curators are strong advocates for a particular agenda.
If you think it’s just a agenda-free, free speech agenda, then you might look at Musk’s long history on “free speech” in China, and elsewhere with regard to his critics.
It’s always amusing to see self-styled “skeptics” be so credulous when it fits their ideological orientation. Unlike all other politicians, Trump isn’t pursuing his own self-interest, he’s just fighting to make America great again. Unlike all other corporatists, Musk isn’t curating messages in his own self-interest, he’s must crusading for “free speech.”. Unlike all other members of the media, Taibbi isn’t trolling for substack subscribers or advancing his ideological agenda, he’s trying to advance truth to power.
See – this is why I love you boyz.
If you think it’s just a agenda-free, free speech agenda, then you might look at Musk’s long history on “free speech” in China, and elsewhere with regard to his critics.
It’s always amusing to see self-styled “skeptics” be so credulous when it fits their ideological orientation. Unlike all other politicians, Trump isn’t pursuing his own self-interest, he’s just fighting to make America great again. Unlike all other corporatists, Musk isn’t curating messages in his own self-interest, he’s must crusading for “free speech.”. Unlike all other members of the media, Taibbi isn’t fishing for substack subscribers or advancing his ideological agenda, he’s trying to advance truth to power.
See – this is why I love you boyz.
> whine doesn’t become you
Alright, Jim. Let me raise you:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/01/12/the-big-cancel/
You made interesting comments in that thread. Want me to recall a few? Dare to continue licking jackboots.
Meanwhile, spare a thought for a journalist without a livelihood for having tweeted non-threatening information:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/twitter-bans-freelance-journalist-1.6689156
Lest anyone think that Bari is doing journalism rather than serving as a court scribe.
This isn’t reporting:
“What’s surprising is how thoroughly Twitter misled the public, insisting that they didn’t suppress disfavored users and topics when they absolutely did,”
No. The people at Twitter absolutely explicitly acknowledged doing “visibility filtering” – which is what Bari described.
What’s arguable is whether or not they did “censoring” or “shadowbanning” – which they denied doing. Both are arguable.
Like I don’t think that Judith is doing “censoring” when she deletes one of my comments I don’t think “censoring” describes what Twitter did. If you think Judith “censors” me when she deletes them my comments, then I guess you could day that Twitter “censored.”. Tiweter censors and Judith censors.
As for shadowbanning….when Twitter people testified before Congress they explained their definition of shadowbanning – effectively banning people without them knowing it (the logical definition given the “ban” part), as distinguished from the ‘visibility filtering” tyoe stuff they explicitly acknowledged doing.
So not only was Bari curating a narrative, it’s ridiculous that she called finding out that they did’ “visibility filtering” surprising since they acknowledged doing so.
The “surprising” part looks like disingenuity on top of curated messaging, under a veil of “journalism.”
J and W
I can’t think of anything more traumatic or unsettling for leftwing extremists than being suspended from Twitter. It must be some of their darkest days. But for those who have lapsed into a catatonic state from anxiety and have curled up into a permanent fetal position, they should know they have not been been forgotten. Special accommodations like this might soothe their pain.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FkJZpgfXEAE4J2e?format=jpg&name=small
I really enjoy how some of you like to substitute “banned” for “suspended.” I don’t have time to fact check everything you libs say, but when I do, I frequently find this sort of misrepresentation. A suspension is temporary. I am, however, liking how Musk is making your heads explode.
Joshua is lapsing into his pattern of very repetitions, long winded, and essentially content free proof by insinuation comments. It’s mostly smears of Weiss and Taibbi, by painting them as ideologically motivated. That’s all irrelevant and fallacious anyway. The issue is whether what they are saying is actually true and Joshie has absolutely nothing of substance on this issue.
I really like how Jim changed his tune since a year ago:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/01/12/the-big-cancel/#comment-941215
Soon he will do his Snoopy dance for his favorite Apartheid tycoons’ heir.
And there I thought it was shadowbanned that people were talking about when all along people were talking about shadowsuspended.
Just to be clear, I think that Bari and Matt have perfect right to do issue advocacy and curate the information from Twitter to push Musk’s agenda.
Just as “skeptics” have perfect right to be as credulous as they want. I know that defending a daddy figure is kind of a thing around here.
But maybe people should take time to think about the difference between journalism and issue advocacy even when they like the issue advocacy.
Matt Taibbi has responded to the narrative motivated attacks on him which Joshie is echoing here. It’s a diversion from discussing a very real scandal about government law enforcement data collection and interference in elections.
“Elon Musk has been candid and straight with me, and there are a lot of things about him I definitely like, but he doesn’t need my endorsement and neither should anyone else. If we had a real press corps, its minions certainly wouldn’t be calling me about him or Bari Weiss at this moment. They would be calling about the FBI, DHS, ODNI and other such over-empowered entities, whose secrets are only just starting to bleed out. They’re the story, everything else is a head fake, and people like Mehdi know it.”
Journalism, and twitter, lol. Might want to throw in “fact check” there, J-gas.
The quaint notion of shadow suspension aside, at least your inadequacy for twit speak atmospheric gravitas is amusing, J-gas
Trunks and scatology? Who woulda thunk it?
The pedigree of your aromatic waft proceeds all your political inculcations, J-gas, it’s nothing personal; it frames itself in the same way a gerbil, or bunny is cute.
Another aspect of this that Greenwald and Taibbi have reported extensively is that it’s not just Twitter. Many corporate media outlets have become arms of the deep state to censor and propagate narratives. This really got into high gear in 2016 with the Russian collusion lie and reached a very high level during the pandemic when the CDC got into the act. Part of this elite collution strategy is digging up dirt to discredit the messengers exposing it to deflect from the alarming nature of this collusion. And then they have tools like Joshie who spread the smears. Given Joshie’s history of distraction and misrepresentations, this latest is no surprise.
Here’s Turley on the media and the FBI/Twitter scandal. Joshie is in this thread acting as their mouthpiece attempting to smear those who are telling the truth.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/12/16/turley_self-loathing_media_embrace_being_censorship_apologists_while_pretending_to_believe_in_free_speech.html
Greenwald exposing the media smear of Matt Taibbi and mouthed with real feeling here by Joshie.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1599058977198731264
In the unlikely event that there migh be some skeptical “skeptics” running zbiut – gis is a pretty even-handed article:
https://www.thebulwark.com/do-the-twitterfiles-matter-or-are-they-a-nothingburger/
For those who think they know what was the net effect of Twitter’s algorithm:
https://t.co/whSgxNTZ7e
For those who think that Bari wasn’t curating messages just like Matt:
https://t.co/nsJEzpItWG
The Bulwark essay Joshie is a deep dive into the weeds while ignoring the giant alligator. This writer is ignoring the bannings of anyone who questioned the Covid dogma propagated by the CDC. There are at least a half dozen prominent ones. Oh and the banning of the New York Post for reporting a true scandal right before the election. Twitter propagated instead the lie that the Hunter Laptop story “had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation,” a lie designed to further the political purposes of the authors. We now know that this censorship affected to outcome of the election. Your Bulwark author, in a clear case of strong bias, failed to mention it.
The vaccine issue was indeed an example of journalist malpractice and Twitter’s suppression of debate on this is shameful and cost lives.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
These things are all assaults on truth and free speech. That’s a huge scandal.
The idiotic study of the algorithmic boosting of tweets is not the issue either. Just for starters, its not valid to lump US right wingers with those in Europe or Canada. You are focusing on a largely irrelevant issue. The issue is interfering in an election and denying the public an informed debate on covid. It is illegal for the Feds to collude with private actors to do what the Feds cannot do.
Listen to Greenwald’s Rumble video on the media’s deep corruption. Of course you won’t because you like diving into the weeds to find any quibble or insignificant cavil and to excuse how corrupt the media and the science establishment have become.
And of course, you double down on your personal smears of Taibbi and Weiss. It proves nothing and shows you to be quite small-minded and petty.
Why did I know Joshie would dredge up some material that is largely irrelevant to the most important facts here but allows him to muddy the waters and act as a shill for mainstream media narratives.
The Bulwark essay is a master class in deflection and diving into the weeds to obscure the giant alligator. She doesn’t mention the Hunter laptop, the worst kind of election interference perhaps done in collusion with the FBI. Twitter then went with the lie that it had “all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation” from a bunch of professional liars from the security state as Greenwald calls it.
Then there were the bannings of anyone who questioned the CDC covid dogma. Jay Battacharia was just one of many. They denied the public an honest debate of covid response when the “state media” sponsored policies were harming people. Childhood vaccination is a very obvious example.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
This was all deeply political.
Your study on the algorithms to boost things is largely meaningless. It is wrong to lump in American conservatives with European or Canadian conservatives. In any case, its a deflection from the main issue, which is actions people at Twitter took to censor content at the direction of government actors or former intelligence officials who were lying.
I know you won’t do it because you are very biased, but you should listen to the Greenwald Rumble video I cited near the end of this comment section. It reveals a media that is very corrupt and is lying to us using fraudulent titles such as “fact checker” and “disinformation expert.”
And you should stop doubling down on attacking the reporters who are bringing this out. It is childish and means little but does show your biases.
> For those who laughably pretend Musk is a champion of fee speech:
> Elon Musk’s Twitter Suspends Reporter Who Has Investigated Him for Years
https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-suspends-insiders-linette-lopez-another-reporter-who-pissed-him-off
For those who laughably think Musk is a champion of free speech:
https://twitter.com/robertwrighter/status/1604610590219149312?t=wjuayGGKaRukBGajh2dAQw&s=19
Hilarious that self-described “skeptics” are credulous enough to fall hook, line, and sinker for this obvious com man’s gift.
> Musk blamed a Twitter account for an alleged stalker. Police see no link.
Twitter owner Elon Musk threatened legal action, changed the platform’s rules and suspended journalists’ accounts after a confrontation involving his security team at a gas station. But the incident’s timing and location cast doubt on a link to the @ElonJet account.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/18/details-of-musk-stalking-incident/
Joshie, you are distracting from the main point with irrelevancies such as the algorithms for boosting.
The Bulwark essay is a master class in deflection and diving into the weeds to obscure the giant alligator. She doesn’t mention the Hunter laptop, the worst kind of election interference perhaps done in collusion with the FBI. Twitter then went with the lie that it had “all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation” from a bunch of professional dissemblers from the security state as Greenwald calls it. This was all very partisan.
Then there were the banings of anyone who questioned the CDC covid dogma. Jay Battacharia was just one of many. They denied the public an honest debate of covid response when the “state media” sponsored policies were harming people. Childhood vaccination is a very obvious example.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
This was all deeply political.
Your study on the algorithms to boost things is largely meaningless. It is wrong to lump in American conservatives with European or Canadian conservatives. In any case, its a deflection from the main issue, which is actions people at Twitter took to censor content at the direction of government actors or former intelligence officials who were lying.
I don’t understand why you think that minor issues will help your attempt to cast doubt on how important this is. Merchants of doubt stuff again?
Lorenz is a partisan hack who misrepresents everything and then cries about it when caught. She tries to contact minors to find dirt on their parents. She’s scum.
Musk is more an advocate for free speech than you are Joshie, and a vast improvement over past management. Why do you think pointing to minor things Musk’s detractors say is important? It is not important and makes you look like you are just muddying the waters.
You knew this was coming…
https://youtu.be/YHtSUcw4q4M
Sorry wrong link:
https://www.captiongenerator.com/v/2284647/elon-reacts-to-twitter-implosion
Interesting article from Glenn on Bari’s integrity, and viewpoint diversity.
https://theintercept.com/2017/08/31/nyts-newest-op-ed-hire-bari-weiss-embodies-its-worst-failings-and-its-lack-of-viewpoint-diversity/
Perhaps the most interesting part is how Glemm decribes Bari’s target as marginalized lefties.
Joshie, Why do you keep doing the smearing people thing and deflecting from the main point? There was collusion with the FBI to interfere in an election. There was total suppression of any dissent from CDC dogma on Covid that harmed the country. That’s a big deal.
Josh – where is your analysis of counter-factuals, context, and general fact checking of the Bari Weiss hit piece?
Yes, I was thinking just the other day that covering up the real time location of a billionaire’s jet was every bit as important as covering up government corruption at the highest levels. Good find!
Most welcome. You might also like:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-suspends-mastodon-twitter-account-over-elonjet-tracking/
Thanks for playing dumb, Steven!
Is that link in some way supposed to change my opinion on the equivalency between the issues and if so, how would it do that?
Not sure why I should care about your mind states, Steven.
Even your misdirection is of little concern to me.
Have more Elon News:
https://globalnews.ca/news/9289080/twitter-hq-projected-insults-elon-musk/
I rather like *Space Karen* as it seems to seek to neutralize the term’s gender.
Not sure why I should care for your mind states, Steven. Even your misdirection is of little concern to me. Have more Elon News:
https://globalnews.ca/news/9289080/twitter-hq-projected-insults-elon-musk/
I rather like *Space Karen*. Captures his persona quite well, and it seeks to neutralize the gender.
Misdirection? Is that similar to misinformation? There is no equivalency. That’s what you stating misdirection means, correct? Now that we know you want to argue snowflakes while the rest of us are concerned about avalanches it puts things in perspective.
Steven, see my last comment above. Taibbi has responded to the misdirection and personal attacks online. It is quite compelling.
“Elon Musk has been candid and straight with me, and there are a lot of things about him I definitely like, but he doesn’t need my endorsement and neither should anyone else. If we had a real press corps, its minions certainly wouldn’t be calling me about him or Bari Weiss at this moment. They would be calling about the FBI, DHS, ODNI and other such over-empowered entities, whose secrets are only just starting to bleed out. They’re the story, everything else is a head fake, and people like Mehdi know it.”
Steven,
Yes, misdirection. I could also add misinformation for two reasons. First, you misrepresent the point I was making. Second, you feign being interested in something you failed to comment so far in this thread. Which is not that surprising, considering that your usual conspiracies are mostly irrelevant here.
Looks like there is a Subreddit you will appreciate:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ElonJetTracker/
If you would like me to look back for all the times you cried about celebrities and other jet sets, please respond to this comment.
“ The White House issued a dire warning this week, reminding the nation that Elon’s continued ownership of Twitter means they now only control 97% of the media.
“We can’t overstate how dangerous this is,” said Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “Yes, we still control Facebook, Google, Apple, Instagram, YouTube, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Hollywood, TIME, USAToday, The Wall Street Journal, and pretty much all the rest, but we don’t control Twitter. This is dangerous to democracy.”
The entire intelligence community at the CIA, FBI, and NSA concurred with the warning, stating that “Elon’s ownership of Twitter leaves America vulnerable to dangerous opinions we do not approve of.” Leaders with the agencies are recommending immediate investigations to bring down the Twitter CEO provided their planned drone strike doesn’t work first.
“Democracy is at stake,” said all the agency leaders in a shared statement in which they all recited the words simultaneously in a robotic monotone. “We must do something. Democracy is at stake.”
https://babylonbee.com/news/government-warns-that-with-elon-owning-twitter-they-will-only-control-97-of-the-media
Wrong link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ElonJetTracker/comments/znsjeo/great_question_for_elon_musk_here/
Perhaps Denizens (go team!) could chime in and ask Elon to permaban Fox News?
Willard, that’s a good idea. Why don’t you do that and report back to me.
Willard, have you completed the search on my crying over celebrities yet? I’m interested in what you found.
Looks like Elon has some legal work ahead:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ElonJetTracker/
Let’s hope he will realize what *public information* means before wasting more of his money.
While President PuddinHead listens to the Climate Doomers, blocking oil and gas development in the US, Norway is expanding production.
Norway will add a new natural gas field in the Norwegian Sea from 2026 in a push to bolster supplies to continental Europe as the EU rushes to replace Russian flows.
Equinor ASA will lead the development of the Irpa gas discovery in the northern reaches of the Norwegian Sea to unlock an estimated 20 billion standard cubic meters of recoverable reserves, Norway’s Petroleum and Energy Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday. Investments will total 14.8 billion kroner ($1.4 billion), with production planned for the fourth quarter of 2026.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-22/norway-to-develop-new-gas-find-in-bid-to-keep-up-european-flows
FYI there is a problem with WordPress today. can’t access to release posts caught in moderation, can change any settings, etc. Seems like new comments are coming through, which is good
problem fixed. I’ve had to hire a company to keep my blog “clean” and uncorrupted. What is astonishing is that I’ve managed to run this blog without any problems for the last 12 years, without having a clue as to what I am doing
Deleting posts without deleting the subposts can never be a good thing, but one which you have done on numerous occasions (I realize you have your reasons). WordPress does seem to mostly do the correct thing and allocate the orphans to the next higher message in the chain, but each version could deal with the issue slightly differently, and it is likely to cause problems (not to mention confusion to the readers). Hiring someone to read through the HTML and look for issues is a very good idea.
There have been issues in the past, you might not have noticed them, but I have several times. For instance, the last entry should always be at the bottom. In the past, many times this has not been the case. Several people have complained about notifications not working, etc. These are signs of a problematic site, which may still work ok due to the forgiving nature of HTML code, but are all indications of corruption.
WordPress is used by a large number of people, and so the code has been pretty well tested, and is therefore inherently stable, so it doesn’t surprise me that you have had a successful site for 12 years. It does have its moments, though.
Has it only been that long? I have been a fan since the heretic days, thought it was longer than that, but time flies when your having fun. Now you are a wicked heretic, so congratulations!
Climate Doomers are sending Germany to the junk heap.
Major German steel plant threatened with closure due to green energies transition…
German site pleiteticker.de here reports on one of the latest victim’s of the green energy’s debacle in Germany as the fourth-largest steel producer is now seriously threatened with closure.
Much of Germany’s industrial bas been hard hit by the skyrocketing energy prices that have resulted from the country’s move to green energies, like sun and wind, and away from nuclear power and fossil fuels.
“3100 jobs are now in acute danger, reports opleiteticker.de. “The planned conversion to climate-neutral steel production at Hüttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann (HKM) in Duisburg is in danger of failing due to financing, according to IG Metall. IG Metall is Germany’s powerful industrial and engineering trade union, representing more than 2 million workers nationwide.
“That would be the end of Germany’s second-largest steel mill,” the IG Metall reported Thursday in Frankfurt am Main.
Pleiteticker calls the recent development “a brewing tragedy”.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/12/11/germanys-krupp-mannesmann-steel-mill-in-danger-of-failing-due-to-financing-green-energy-costs/
Noah Rettberg is the very popular Decouple podcast’s second most popular guest. He’s very versed in technical minutia. It’s hard to believe he’s only in his early twenties. He has a very dire assessment of Germany’s situation:
It’s the Morgenthau plan risen from the post WWII hate Germany faction. The relentless German haters.
The cryptoscience of Global Warming Catastrophism has driven reason out of Western academia.
More on the damage caused by the Climate Doomers.
The problem is, energy markets are so tight that only a few degrees Celsius, or a few windless days, are what separate Europe facing blackouts from having enough power to make it through the winter. And although gas has been emblematic of the energy crisis since Russia cut supplies, I remain more worried about electricity.
There’s still a significant risk that consumers will be asked to reduce demand. Localized blackouts remain a strong possibility, particularly for France, Finland, Ireland and Sweden. In its winter outlook, released last week, the association of the European companies that manage the grid (ENTSO-E) said: “[The] situation this winter is critical but manageable.” That doesn’t sound like the worst is over.
Last week also offered a preview of how a crisis could develop in the coming months. Across Europe, the wind nearly stopped, forcing the grids to lean harder on gas-fired power stations and, in Germany, on coal. In the past, the French nuclear industry would have stepped up, exporting electricity to everyone. But France was importing lots of power as many of its reactors have been down for repairs, further tightening the market. As a result, electricity prices surged. In the Nordic region, the weekly average price surged to €318 per MWh, the third-highest weekly price ever.
Weekly average wholesale electricity prices have surged in the Nordic region above €300 per megawatt hour, the third highest level on record
With so little wind, Germany fired up its coal plants. At times last week it was producing 40% of its electricity from them, polluting as much as coal-hooked nations like India and South Africa. If nothing broke, it was because it wasn’t particularly cold.
From now on, the dreaded scenario is what energy professionals in Germany call a Dunkelflaute — literally meaning the dark doldrums, a period with little solar and wind electricity and high demand because of low temperatures. If a Dunkelflaute episode hits Europe — and some traders and meteorologists believe there’s a high chance of one this week or next — the region will be in trouble. The grid operators would likely ask consumers to cut their demand to avoid blackouts.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-12-05/the-worst-of-europe-s-energy-crisis-isn-t-over-electricity-blackouts-loom?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=221205&utm_campaign=author_19016770&leadSource=uverify%20wall
Your biztv interview was excellent!
BizNewsTV just did a great interview with John Christy.
Dr Curry,
Actually in all seriousness, you could probably ask Chat GPT to summarise a longer article you might want to post here. It will probably do the job well enough and you can tweak it afterwards. You could even include a link to your blog for a more in-depth discussion in your article.
Worth a thought?
I looked into ChatGPT for writing code. It’s code sux. Just sayin’. It writes code on the level of a beginner, with all the beginner mistakes, some of which are non-obvious. Having to talk to it to correct it is very slow compared to an experienced programmer writing high quality code using a keyboard.
It’s been massively upgraded. I have a friend that is getting it to write code for him in the music business. It’s amazing what’s able to do atm. But I think he is only asking it to write fairly simple code. I was thinking for summaries it ought to be able to manage it fairly well.
Jim2. Yes I know what is going on in China. A negligible percentage of the population has died. Their economy officially grew 6.8% in 2020, 3.9% in 2021, and 2.8% in the first three quarters of 2022. There have been some really severe restrictions before cases have been locally reduced to zero. I don’t know how “normal” things have gotten back to between the worst of the lockdowns, but we suffered from nearly a year of restrictions that never significantly shrank the pandemic.
The US has suffered a million deaths and the highest death rate among peers, but, for reasons I can’t understand, many think we tried too hard. Success is containing or ending a pandemic, not losing a 0.32% of your people. SAR1, MERS, and Ebola examples of success. China came close to that level of success and most of its outbreaks may have come from outside the country. Smallpox, polio, and numerous childhood diseases (thanks to mandatory vaccination) are other examples of success.
I’ve read about protests and some of the horror stories (in Shanghi, for example), but those suffering Chinese people probably wouldn’t want to have been living in an American nursing home either.
Everyone here seems to think the Chinese are going to love getting rid of their Zero-COVID policy. Let’s ask them in another two months when they have experienced the cost of not having Zero-COVID.
I certainly don’t think China has done a great job of handling COVID. South Korea and Taiwan did extremely well at constraining the pandemic until a vaccine was available and the less deadly omicron variant replaced earlier more deadly (per infection) variants. 85% had been vaccinated (vs 69% here), nearly everyone except children. Then they intentionally removed their restrictions, suffered an explosion of cases and peak death rates similar to our worst, but cumulatively 1/5th as many deaths overall.
Right, Franktoo. Net-zero was working so well they abandoned it. Yes, there will be deaths, but that is the cost of living. Freedom means a lot to everyone, even, maybe especially, those under the jack boot of Communism.
The number of Covid-positive dead arriving at Beijing’s funeral parlors and crematoriums is rising, according to media reports, despite China not reporting a fatality from the virus for two weeks.
…
Reuters reported funeral homes in Beijing being overwhelmed.
…
Still, China hasn’t recorded a death from Covid since Dec. 4, when two were lodged, that of an 84-year-old man in Sichuan province with underlying health conditions and another in Shandong province. The last official Covid fatality reported for Beijing — which was seeing thousands of cases a day even before China’s swift u-turn on Covid Zero — was recorded on Nov. 23: A woman, 87, authorities said had chronic heart disease.
…
It’s becoming increasingly hard to get a handle on the scale of China’s Covid onslaught, with the country last week halting reporting of asymptomatic cases, which typically made up the bulk of the infection tally. Even before that move, the dismantling of the country’s once ubiquitous PCR testing apparatus and increased used of rapid antigen kits meant official data was virtually meaningless.
…
When contacted Sunday, the NHC had no comment on the reports of Covid fatalities and stretched funeral parlors in Beijing.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-18/reports-of-beijing-covid-deaths-fuel-speculation-china-covering-up-data
There has been a tendency for “authorities” to focus on single factor analysis with regard to Covid, as Frank is doing here. They seem to be unable to recognize that every policy response has both costs and benefits. One heavy cost has been to the mental health and education of young people particularly in the US blue areas. Keeping schools closed was always an anti-science position and like many covid responses from the “zero covid” zealots, it was scarcely rational. Masks is another area where the science shows pretty clearly at best a very small benefit. Yet everyone ignored the real costs and side effects of mask use.
Generally, it does appear that covid “deaths” are higher in countries and areas of the US where people already had health problems, such as obesity and diabetes. It shocked me when I found that 40% of the US adult population is obese. Another lie spread by our state run media was that healthy young people were at significant risk of death from covid. It was clear from the beginning that covid was killing mostly people who were already seriously ill or quite elderly.
For Frank, Another example of zero covid fanatics harming people.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
DPY: Twitter was run as a state media: An average of 35 Trump Tweets were sent without context or rebutting to almost 90 million Americans every day in the second half of 2020. About 100 per day during his first impeachment. And they were echoed by retweets, social media, Fox News and a dozen sites on the internet.
Here’s an introduction to our current corrupt media by Glenn Greenwald.
https://rumble.com/v1xbl8g-the-medias-deranged-hysteria-over-elon-musks-restoration-of-free-speech.html
Ron –
> The reason that you find so many highly intelligent people here with astonishingly skeptical views about the state of educational and scientific authority…
Consider, just for a minute, that the people here are not materially different than any group of highly identified advocates, and that they display the same patterns of cognitive biases as other groups do, generally. Consider that just because you agree with people, that doesn’t mean that they’d be relatively immune from motivated resoning, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, etc.
And consider that along with normal cognitive biases, it’s predictable that members of pretty much any ideologically aligned group would think that their own group a special case, and relatively free of biases when compared to members of out-groups.
Just a thought.
This is so lame Frank. You are cherry picking. Twitter interfered in the 2020 election by banning the New York Post and scrubbing anything about the Hunter laptop. It was all true. Twitter instead went with the “Russian disinformation” lie.
Twitter was also banning anyone who questioned the CDC covid dogma, most of which was a tissue of lies and half-truths. Jay Battacharia is the best example. Jay says that the public was denied an honest debate on covid responses that allowed bad policies to harm people.
Dr. Scott Atlas’s book, A Plague Upon Your House, outlines in fine detail the failure in US Covid policy from start to finish. The one bright spot is that the states ultimately had a choice to ignore Dr. Birx’s in person recommendations to governors as Fauci put pressure on them through his media blitz. Ron DeSantis was the only governor to invite Dr. Atlas to present his policy of extreme protection of nursing homes and highly vulnerable while opening up the rest of society. I think there was a pole last November 3rd in which the people of Florida showed their appreciation of DeSantis’s policy, which was subject to two years of relentless attack by the legacy media.
And Florida has the 14th highest death rate out of all the US states, even higher than New York. How exactly did DeSantis benefit his State? Allow the rich and healthy to say “Up yours” to the poor and weak? He’ll make a great republican nomination for president (I hope).
At JMurphy
Florida is where old people retire to live out their last years.
Many are New Yorker’s who decided they did not want to spend their last years in New York.
Florida’s age-adjusted death rate for seniors is pretty good.
Remarkably, despite its elderly population and laissez-faire approach, Florida has only the 33rd highest age-adjusted COVID-19 death rate per 100,000 population (251) among the states. That puts it in the same ballpark as mandate heavy Illinois (ranked 32 with 255 deaths/100,000) and California (ranked 38; 234) and well below New York (ranked 7th highest; 334).
https://nypost.com/2022/02/23/without-mandates-or-lockdowns-florida-better-managed-covid-than-ny/
JMurphy failed to account for the high number of elderly retirees in Florida. (That’s right, they didn’t go to New York to retire – wonder why?)
All of this partisan politics by proxy, comparing COVID rates across states in facile ways as if it’s meaningingdul to do so, and as if the differences are easily attributable to the politicians in office, are symptomatic of how people will subvert science and legitimate analysis to score cheap points.
For example –
JMurphy failed to account for the high number of elderly retirees in Florida.
Age adjustment is a meaningful factor but jim “forgot” to adjust to account for the better baseline health status and SES among Florida retirees, or lower prevalence of living in multi generational households among Florida retirees, as compared to seniors in other states. Jim also “forgot” to mention that COVID death rates among young people in Florida were considerably higher then in some other states – which likely reflects those same factors related to SES and baseline health, given that the rates are higher among the young while lower among the elderly.
States can be quite diverse within their borders and aggregating stats within states, and then using them as units of comparison, are prolly pretty meaningless.
But if you’re going to try to compare one state to another to assess COVID policies, and you’re doing do for any reason other than scoring cheap pojnts, then ii should avoid simplistic analysis results even when they confirm your biases.
I do think Joshie is taking this too far. He sees bias and political beliefs under every rock. Comparisons are possible if carefully done. On the whole, the thing we do know is that covid mostly killed the really old or the really ill. Thus age adjustment is essential. One could adjust for obesity rates too since that’s a pretty good proxy for fitness and the most widespread risk factors like diabetes. So jmurphy is clearly wrong and jim2 is a lot closer to being right. Mississippi’s high covid mortality is probably due to their very high obesity rate.
Florida and New York have almost identical obesity rates, so comparing them is probably justified. The conclusion is that strong mitigation measures didn’t make a big difference.
It is also true that there was never any real scientific evidence to support most of the mitigations, especially shutdowns which are unprecedented in American history, even during wartime.
We know that the vast majority of people have antibodies to covid and I doubt if that varies much state to state. In short, trying to “stop” the virus as many many anti-science scientists and politicians tried to do was always an impossible task. But hey it was a good excuse to extend government power and to reinforce the censorship regime we live in today, and to spend trillions that set off the worst inflation in 40 years and has enabled many people to continue living off their covid savings and not look for a job. Thus the labor shortage.
Even the golden calf, the mNRA vaccines seem in retrospect to have only helped the elderly. Young healthy people on the whole were harmed. This was done at the behest of government officials who are corrupt and either stupid or lying to themselves. The vaccine mandates were always inexcusable and almost certainly unconstitutional.
I’m just quoting the stats, Josh. As far as you know, it WAS in fact Florida’s approach that resulted in fewer deaths per elderly head count. Of course DeSantis didn’t send the elderly sick with COVID back to the nursing home resulting in skyrocketing nursing home deaths in New York.
It’s funny how you always want facts until the facts oppose your political narrative.
Hey jim2,
(Off topic)
I just heard that 3M is discontinuing all production of PFAS related chemicals due to the risk of cancer.
“3M to phase out manufacturing of all fluoropolymers, fluorinated fluids, and PFAS-based additive products”
They are also taking a multi-billion dollar charge because they know they are going to be sued for damages.
One small step forward.
jim –
> I’m just quoting the stats, Josh
You’re just quoting stats you got from political source. Which is why you had none of the details that (necessarilyy)contextualize the different rates of COVID morbidity and mortality by state among seniors.
Josh, the question you should be asking is if the article is correct, that is, is it presenting the age-adjusted, per capita stats? So is there an error in the information presented? And I’m not talking about information NOT presented.
@jacksmith4tx | December 20, 2022 at 8:53 am |
Yes, I saw the PFAS news. I’m surprised action is taken with such a dearth of solid data. All the articles I’ve read about problems with them use the may/might weasel words.
The NYPost was reporting, not doing a medical journal article. It’s fine if you want to add context, but that doesn’t alter the result. I noted you omitted the context that NY and some of the other states noted in the article had lock downs more severe than FL. I’m sure if you tried you could find more “context” that suggest FL should have been worse.
jim –
> I noted you omitted the context that NY and some of the other states noted in the article had lock downs
My point is that there’s a lot of context necessary to understand the implications of the stats. And so you do it yet again:
Which is necessarily (in part) related to other factors – such as that NY was hit hard early, when less was known, when there were less treatments available, when behaviors were different absent NPIs, where there was less international travel. That Florida started out with so much of head start but still surpassed NY in per capita morbidity and mortality could be seen as an indictment of the policy choices there, if you were so inclined as to make facile comparisons to reach conclusions. We could consider the differences in the amount of people spend outdoors, population density, etc.. It goes on and on. To meaningfully assess the impact of policies you need to look at all of that. But instead you focus on one relevant variable to the exclusions of all the others. And of course, I’m sure it’s coincidence that you focus on metrics that would put what happened in Florida in a good light, to the exclusion of those that wouldn’t.
Yeah, that’s the ticket
Just a coincidence.
Joshua, the main reason DeSantis was appreciated by Floridians was his keeping schools and small businesses open. So Florida exceeded NY in protecting the physically vulnerable while also protecting the financially vulnerable. Threading this needle and others like it are what pragmatic policy brings. I don’t know what it was about leftism that wanted so much to lock down the population. You tell me.
Joshua, the relative outdoor activity in FL to NY in the summer during 2020 was likely lower, which likely led to the FL surge. The most important factors like indoor ventilation were still unknown while the death rate in nursing homes was known from the start with the WA state disaster and the cruise ship infection analysis.
Ron –
> Joshua, the relative outdoor activity in FL to NY in the summer during 2020 was likely lower,
Given the amount of time people in Florida might spend at the beach in the summer, or in boating activities, I’m not sure that’s true.
But further, to say anything meaningful you can’t focus in on only one relatively short period of time that would create a favorable comparison for those politicians you’d favor. You’d need to look at a longer time frame, the full COVID period, cross-referenced with the timing of the different waves of the different variants, with consideration of how easily transmissible the different variants were, and the prevalence community immunity at the times. You’d need to look at the general state of ventilation infrastructure in the different regions, etc.
It’s just think it’s really obnoxious to leverage the illness and death of people to score cheap political points in service of supporting self-serving politicians. These are complicated assessments. I get why people would want to make facile speculation that fits their political preferences. It’s just sad that at a website where people with the skills to be more scientific in their approach fail to do so. Especially when they focus a lot of their energy on reinforcing their beliefs that they’re skeptical.
Josh – even if you conducted the COVID deaths study using some of the context you contend matters, it probably still wouldn’t be definitive. NYPost does lean conservative, but I believe they faithfully reported the numbers they had. Most newspaper articles, left or right, don’t go into the detail you are demanding. Even if they do, they probably don’t capture the reality of whatever subject is on the table.
jim g
I’m not questioning the veracity of the stars per se, or arguing that the NYPoat (or conservative-leaning publications) are more prone than others to politicize COVID.
Josh, You could make a better contribution is you would stop the “skeptic” bashing and the self-righteous pointing to political bias in everyone but yourself. It’s transparent projection and biased on your part.
New York vs. Florida is a pretty good comparison with regard to covid. It is not political in the slightest to point this out. You can adjust for age structure and obesity rates are almost exactly the same.
There are any number of liberal newspapers and mags I’m sure you can find that also don’t write research papers. The Atlantic writes some long articles, but I find that those are politically biased.
Joshua: “It’s just think it’s really obnoxious to leverage the illness and death of people to score cheap political points in service of supporting self-serving politicians…”
I think this is as close as you or any leftist bureaucrat or politician will ever come to apologizing. Thanks for thinking of us people though.
The reason that you find so many highly intelligent people here with astonishingly skeptical views about the state of educational and scientific authority is that we are fearful for the sake of humanity, not as much from CO2 as we are from other anthropogenic dangers, ones that would be recognizable to the drafters of the US Constitution: bias, corruption, enforcement of religion and mass delusion. I think you would agree these are real dangers. But I am guessing you feel that stricter compliance to educational and scientific authority are the answers. I am guessing the left leaning media feel the same way so thus due to the crisis in confidence in these authorities they must be bolstered at all costs, including the squelching of dissenting views. At some point I think the non-leftists are hoping they left will come to their senses. But delusion doesn’t work like that. It needs the dissenting views. That is the only medicine that can be counted on.
Thank goodness for this site’s host and the new one at Twitter. i know you will be happy to see him gone.
Oops. This belongs here:
Ron –
> The reason that you find so many highly intelligent people here with astonishingly skeptical views about the state of educational and scientific authority…
Consider, just for a minute, that the people here are not materially different than any group of highly identified advocates, and that they display the same patterns of cognitive biases as other groups do, generally. Consider that just because you agree with people, that doesn’t mean that they’d be relatively immune from motivated resoning, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, etc.
And consider that along with normal cognitive biases, it’s predictable that members of pretty much any ideologically aligned group would think that their own group a special case, and relatively free of biases when compared to members of out-groups.
Just a thought.
Ron has a really really important point here. The pandemic accelerated the loss of faith in most Western elites including science. There was a rash of fraudulent, badly flawed, and politically motivated papers. People like Ioannidis was caned by an online mob including our own juvenile Joshua for doing good science. There was never an honest debate about the science of covid just as there has not been an honest debate about climate science and its “results.” We do know that both covid modeling and climate modeling suffer from the same problem of trying to address an ill-posed problem.
Science has hit the wall of complex systems and chaos. Viral epidemiology is a primitive science based mostly on crude mechanistic narratives that lack quantification. That’s why our authorities were so wrong, but for some reason they seemed to like forcing people to do the wrong thing. This speaks to a really dark strain in human nature and modern cultural Marxist thought. Even if you have no real idea if its good, tell people to do it because you are a really really fine person who has noble motives. The trend toward authoritarianism especially in the deep state is quite troubling. I have come to the conclusion that this trend goes back to 9/11 and Bush and his deep state’s authoritarian response to it. Obama accelerated it by packing the deep state with ideologically motivated partisans like James Baker, who were quite willing to lie to advance their goals and started the conversion of the FBI into a domestic intelligence agency with disastrous results. There was a temporary pause under Trump who actually was remarkably restrained in his response to what was really a 4 year insurrection with massive rioting in the streets and a massive increase in the murder and crime rates.
Joshua’s mind I fear is too unfocused and ideologically biased to come to grips with this as his previous comment shows.
Joshua, Judith’s blog is one of the most open and free on the internet. She doesn’t need to explain anything to you and expecting an explanation is quite arrogant and shows an amazing lack of self-awareness.
Joshua’s comparison between Judith removing an irrelevant comment from her blog and Twitter banning people at the behest of the FBI and colluding to influence an election is as absurd as it gets. There is no comparison. Judith’s deletion will affect no one and actually improve the comment blog. FBI/Twitter collusion is the biggest political scandal in the last century.
Ron –
How many times at this site have we read complaints about the unfair and authoritarian “censorship” at Real Climate? For years, I’ve been laughing at the self-victimization that lies beneath the idea that a proprietor moderating their online platform (by deleting comments they feel don’t enhance their product) amounts to “censorship.”
So with that understanding, this is also quite perfect.
You say ‘including the squelching of dissenting views.” and “Thank goodness for this site’s host”
While Judith (free speech) Curry explains why she deletes a comment of mine, which noted Glenn’s hypocrisy about “identity politics.”
And leaves up David’s constant stream of personal attacks.
And then says I’m responsible for the “worst” behavior of other commenters.
Pretty much in line with Elon’s attitude about “free speech” and the kind of adoration he gets for his “free speech” advocacy.
“The problem with totalitarianism is that everything has to be perceived thought the lens of ideology.” – Paraphase of Michael Malice.
He was talking about Russia in the past. But many of us can see this here now.
—————————————
Judith you should contact Malice about his podcast. If you were to see what he’s about, Lex Fridman recently had him on his podcast.
Here’s a much more honest discussion of collusion between federal law enforcement and the DNI to censor content and affect elections. Joshie’s take is not serious because it ignores the main and most important facts.
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/12/18/censor-or-else-democratic-members-warn-facebook-not-to-backslide-on-censorship/
With the restoration of free speech protections on Twitter, panic has grown on the left that its control over social media could come to an end. Now, some of the greatest advocates of censorship in Congress are specifically warning Facebook not to follow Twitter in restoring free speech to its platform.
In a chilling letter from Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Andre Carson (D-Ind.), Dathy Castor (D-fla.), and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Facebook was given a not-so-subtle threat that reducing its infamous censorship system will invite congressional action. The letter to Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, is written on congressional stationery “as part of our ongoing oversight efforts.”
Censorship comes at a cost not only to free speech but, clearly, the these companies. Nevertheless, some members of Congress are demanding that Facebook and other companies offer the “last full measure of devotion” to the cause of censorship. Despite the clear preference of the public for more free speech, Facebook is being asked to turn its back on them (and its shareholders) and continue to exclude dissenting views on issues ranging from COVID to climate change.
I’ll just note that climate scientists were the pioneers in this attempt to censor people they disagreed with. It’s a dangerous precedent because what happens is that once the climate change crisis idea gets going, there is a competition of sorts by people who know nothing about the subject to spread and amplify the alarm. The loudest and most shrill voices get more attention.
Readers might also like:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/11/what-happened-to-jonathan-turley-really.html
We can all be glad that Freedom Fighters find respite in freeze peaches.
Come on, What you cite is content free rhetorical posturing. It’s what the media tries to do to anyone who deviates from the approved narrative.
Willard –
Did you see this?:
https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-983747
From back in the day when libz were marginalized.
Yes, I did.
In return:
http://www.critical-theory.com/chomskyburns/
> do care
Do *not* care, it should go without saying.
Joshua, What you “pointed out” is totally irrelevant to the main points here. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was deleted as a fallacious adhominum attack. The hypocracy thing is the last refuge of propagandists when you have nothing on the substance.
You need to try harder to make a substantive contribution. You have so discredited yourself over the last decade that you are not taken seriously by Judith or really anyone else.
David –
Did you ask Judith to delete my comment that pointed out Glenn’s hypocricy?
No one asked Judith to delete your comments. Judith is sick of your trolling and bickering, which multiplies by bringing out the worst n other commenters. I have been deleting many comments these last few days that do not contribute to constructive (or at least interesting) dialog here
Joshua, You are paranoid in addition to being a doofus. Get lost.
Joshua, This last comment is a perfect encapsulation of your track record.
You just lied about what I have said about Weiss and Taibbi. I have not lionized them. They are doing real journalism which has virtually vanished in the mainstream media. You smear them as “Musk scribes” which is a lie and is also your standard method, you try to discredit not on the facts but based on childish smears and name calling.
Then you do the same thing to Judith by using childish name calling.
Your problem is that your intellect is weak and reactive. This is not an attack, its a fact. This is perhaps why you can’t see the difference between a “personal attack” and a factual statement or opinion.
There are plenty of other blogs you could comment at. Why do you choose one whose proprietor you like to call names and don’t like very much? This goes beyond weak-minded and calls into question your integrity and judgment. Perhaps you know that here there is a much higher level of tolerance of your usually fact free views.
You are just so transparently emotionally driven that you never see this inconsistency and yes hypocricy. Yet you attack other people and worse misrepresent what they say. Shame on you.
You are lucky you have not been banned.
And lest anyone forget, Judith is in good company among your harassment targets. You have pointlessly attacked Nic Lewis for being less wrong than other “experts” about covid and doing some very interesting work. You have attacked John Ioannidis work mostly elsewhere with your usually complete ignorant of the science style.
I appears that your harassment targets are an august group and I am proud to be in this group.
Finally, your focus on irrelevant “inconsistencies” among skeptics is meaningless really. You can’t focus on the substance because that would require intellectual discipline.
I just want to point out that Judith’s blog is indeed as close to an open forum as you will find. You leverage that to distract and to generate some weird corrupt form of personal satisfaction (at least that’s my best guess).
Rhetorical and meaningless posturing.
David the Hall Monitor has issued his bat signal.
Denizens are now safe.
And the true reporting continues.
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/fbi-behind-twitters-censorship-of?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=279400&post_id=91744587&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email
Conclusion:
In response to the Twitter Files revelation of high-level FBI agents at Twitter, Rep. Jim Jordan said, “I have concerns about whether the government was running a misinformation operation on We the People.”
Anyone who reads the Twitter Files, regardless of their political orientation, should share those concerns.
From the Schellenberger piece:
In other words, Twitter was a covert contractor to the FBI to carry out a campaign of censorship and spying.
More than half of 17.5 million users who responded to a Twitter poll that asked whether billionaire Elon Musk should step down as head of the social media platform voted Yes when the poll closed on Monday.
There was no immediate announcement from Twitter, or Musk, about whether that would happen, though he said that he would abide by the results. The results of the unscientific online survey, which lasted 12 hours, showed that 57.5 per cent of those who voted wanted him to leave.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/twitter-poll-musk-ceo-1.6690699
This is actually a somethingburger.
Twitter (among other social media companies) cooperating to some degree with pentagon psyops in Arab countries. Seems the scale was small and the participation somewhat proscribed (I.e., giving “vefired” privileges to some fake accounts) but it’s problematic because Twitter has said it wouldn’t allow the platform to be used by governments to conduct propaganda campaigns.
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-accounts/
Elon made no promise about his own person, however:
https://www.newsweek.com/who-nailya-asker-zade-putin-elon-musk-world-cup-1768404
If only Glenn had a private jet, they would have made a perfect group photo.
How about the vastly more important collusion with the Feds to influence the outcome of an election? Perhaps your strong biases prevent you from even acknowledging these facts? Perhaps your political biases are driving your evaluation of the evidence!!
What about whataboutism, David?
Enjoy:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03035-4
This is a giant nothingburger Willy besides being “whataboutism” and off topic. Scott Atlas’ book amplifies many of my points below. You haven’t read it I’m quite sure.
In fact given the terrible track record of the “science” on covid, I wouldn’t trust any government public health “scientist.” Just a few of the lies.
1. Vaccination will “stop the virus.” Vaccinated people get infected and spread the virus and after 9 months are actually more likely to catch covid as the unvaccinated according to a large Swedish study.
2. Children should get vaccinated with the mRNA covid vaccine. There is now a large body of evidence that children are on balance harmed by vaccination. This recommendation from the CDC is malpractice. In fact, healthy people under 50 have had little to fear from covid from the beginning, a fact de-emphasized by out public health agents of disinformation.
3. Mask mandates are good. There is only very weak scientific evidence surgical masks work against covid.
4. Shutdowns work. Once again, there is no good evidence they worked.
5. School closures are good. In fact, there is a lot of evidence children were harmed by these closures. Studies in Germany failed to document many cases of a teacher being infected by a student.
And the public knows this too. That’s why the new vaccine “booster” has seen terrible uptake.
I almost forgot to mention that several top scientists on the CDC vaccine approval committee resigned I think in 2021 over the shoddy approval process for the covid vaccines.
All of this was accompanied by shameless lying and censoring by the media and big tech. Jay Battacharia is a prime example but there were many others.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9947445/Two-FDA-vaccine-regulators-RESIGN-clashing-WH-COVID-boosters.html
TL;DR, David dear.
You might profit from a refresher:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_political_interference_with_science_agencies
Would you say that this was a good prediction from Atlas and teh Donald? I would say it was .500. A coin toss would have done the same.
Another giant nothingberger from the king of obfuscation. The President has ultimate power to set policy and appoint his advisors. Atlas’ recommendations agreed with WHO guidance pre-pandemic and the scientific literature. Masks are worthless except for N95’s but compliance has been low on wearing those even among health care workers. That’s because of potentially serious side effects such as hypoxia. Social distancing is also worthless. It was always going to be true that essentially everyone was going to be exposed to covid. Anything else was always a lie.
The pandemic was not over in 2020, but everyone who predicted anything about covid was mostly wrong, often dramatically so. “The science” was almost always wrong and they imposed huge costs on mostly working class people, like the truckers in Canada. White collar obfuscators such as yourself were able to phone in and keep their jobs.
W
I know you have had your heart set on succeeding Elon as CEO of Twitter, so I hope this doesn’t upset you too much.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FkgP0uAWAAQaa6n?format=jpg&name=medium
Condoleezza disagrees with your softballing, David:
https://news.stanford.edu/2020/11/20/faculty-senate-condemns-actions-hoover-fellow-scott-atlas/
Seems to me that you are taking the wrong side of the hawkish bet.
Also, your claim about masking goes against the WHO and the CDC, btw. Is it because of your expertise in fluid dynamics?
Meanwhile, please enjoy some Musk Money:
Rice is not a scientist and you aren’t either.
The literature shows an at best very weak effect from masking. Look it up if you are capable of even reading scientific literature.
Condoleezza is or was Atlas’ boss at their neocon think tank, David, and applied maths does not make you a virus guru.
If there is one thing you need to take out of this silly episode, it is that we write ad hominem, not adhominum.
This condemnation by Stanford of Atlas is more proof that Covid19 ushered in a new censorship regime in which there are career consequences for deviating from the public health establishment line. I referenced and quoted below from a paper on this subject. This regime has devoted storm troopers in the science establishment and academia.
Indeed, David. Everything confirms what you knew all along:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice
*That* Condoleezza.
Victor Venema may have had a point when he said that there is little one can do with troglodytes.
May he Rest In Peace:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2022/12/24/victor-venema/
What you are doing here Willard is deflecting from the scientific issues such as mask effectiveness. Atlas was clearly right on this and the authoritarian covid secret police had to punish him for dissenting. It is and indeed was clear that everyone would eventually get exposed to covid and that social distancing generally wouldn’t affect this outcome.
Reading Atlas’s book, the bottom line was that Fauci, Redfield and Birx acted as a unit, not based on any scientific reporting or study of models but simply as a political consensus that was reached in the dark outside of the task force sessions. They used their majority to give task force leader Pence no choice but to go along or over-rule “the experts.” Pence being a VP was not in a strong enough position to challenge Fauci and subject the White House to media controversy. This was notwithstanding that Pence could have gone to Trump and asked him overrule Fauci. We may never know if this happened. My guess is that Pence was not that bold.
Atlas wrote that Birx’s basic premise was to slow the spread by monitoring infections and react with shut downs. Her concern included asymptomatic infections as much as deadly ones. Atlas believed that the single focus should be on protecting the vulnerable and concentrate testing on only in the aim of protecting the vulnerable, and not focusing on shut down criteria. Ron DeSantis met personally with Atlas before he was asked to join the presidential task force by Kushner and implemented Atlas’s policy.
That is not a bottom line, Ron.
Here is a bottom line:
https://www.businessinsider.com/scott-atlas-appeared-on-russian-propaganda-outlet-and-slammed-lockdowns-2020-11
Keep dancing, tricky troglodytes!
On masks.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306987720317126
That paper linked to by dpy6629 is not what it seems.
First, it’s related to performing exercise while wearing a mask. Second, the only mention of a criticism of wearing masks generally is a quote cited as being from a paper by “Perencevich et al, 2020”. However, the link for the quote is an opinion piece (I’m presuming because the link is broken and a search of the linked website came back with no results) in the Sacramento Bee online newspaper. Yes, a scientific paper cited a newspaper opinion piece!
A search for the actual quote came back with no results for me (apart from the above sources) and the only 2 relevant papers with the name Perencevich in 2020 did not contain the quote and, in fact, the papers were pro-mask wearing.
How could someone like dpy6629 use such a source? He wants to believe but doesn’t want to check? Or facts are not important, only politically-aligned assertions. I find it all very strange.
To actually find out the facts and figures, I would recommend this link which provides a stack of information and linked papers. However, it does contain the same Perencevich quote, so the ideologically inclined will be happy!
https://werstupid.com/blog/do-we-all-need-to-wear-masks
(Great website name too! Perhaps we can all say that to ourselves now and again, especially to encourage us to check our beliefs and what we think we know)
Mr Murphy
Try to research observational studies on effectiveness of face masks against covid. You will find that your search will be redirected to results of studies on the theoretical efficiencies of masks to trap particles in actual use
The largest observational study on the effectiveness of masks in India found that they were only very slightly effective in preventing covid infections. This study did not take into account any of the negative aspects of wearing a mask much less being forced to wear a mask.
JM, If you look at all the research prior to covid, it showed a negligible effect of surgical masks on the spread of influenza. In fact the WHO recommended against mask mandates.
As pointed out by Rob, recent research shows the same thing with regard to COVID.
You are here employing a classic deflection tactic. You attack one paper to discredit an entire body of research which you haven’t read.
On top of everything else it appears that the CDC was lying about their own “research” on masks.
https://reason.com/2022/02/07/that-study-of-face-masks-does-not-show-what-the-cdc-claims/
dpy6629 | December 23, 2022 at 1:02 pm | Reply
“On top of everything else it appears that the CDC was lying about their own “research” on masks.”
FWIW – the CDC wbsite lists approx 40 studies showing /claiming masks work and/or effective.
Out of the approx 40 studies, I reviewed/read 6 or 7 of the studies. All six of those studies I looked at had serious flaws.
Kansas counties with /with mask mandates
Arizona School mask v non mask
Bangladish study
Boston mask/non mask schools
Here’s another one which references the Bangladesh study.
http://www.theinternationalchronicles.com/2022/06/22/medical-study-are-masks-actually-effective-against-covid/
Rob –
Observational studies of mask wearing have significant limitations in their informativeness regarding mask usage (as they do with any kind of causal inferences). That said, there is quite a bit of diversity in the findings of observational studies.
You might find the discussion here interesting.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/12/14/lack-of-correlation-between-school-mask-mandates-and-paediatric-covid-19-cases-in-a-large-cohort/
I agee with Andrew’s view that observational epidemiological at the population level has limited utility regarding assessing masks usage/mandates.
And mask-wearing is incredibly difficult to study from real world RCTs due to a variety of factors, not the leaaf controlling for compliance/usage and the well-known difficult of self-report data.
As you will see in any number of follow-on analysis of that RCT you referenced (and indeed what the authors themselves had to say about the limitations.
But if coursezhiire entitled to be certain in your views if you’d like.
For me, the bottom line is that there’s quite a bit of uncertainty regarding the impact of mask-wearing at the community level. Seeing that uncertainty, my conclusion is that there’s the potential for a population-level compounding of marginal risk reduction at the individual level. Thus, as a matter of risk reduction.in a context of high-level (perhaps low probability) pote fjsl damage (at the community level), I think it makes sense to for people to wear masks, notably in crowded inside spaces, particularly when there’s sub-optimal ventilation. That said, I think anyone who claims to know with much certainty on either side is likely just engaged in confirming biases. Given the way mask-wearing has become politicized in this country, I think we’d be better off spending resources on improving ventilation.
And it appears that mandating boosters for college students is unethical. Another giant fail by the CDC.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Rob –
Observational studies of mask wearing probably have significant limitations in their informativeness regarding mask usage (as they do with any kind of causal inferences). That said, there is quite a bit of diversity in the findings of observational studies.
You might find the discussion here interesting.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/12/14/lack-of-correlation-between-school-mask-mandates-and-paediatric-covid-19-cases-in-a-large-cohort/
I agree with Andrew’s view that observational epidemiological at the population level has limited utility regarding assessing masks usage/mandates.
For me, the bottom line is that there’s quite a bit of uncertainty regarding the impact of mask-wearing at the community level. Seeing that uncertainty, my conclusion is that there’s the potential for a population-level compounding of marginal risk reduction at the individual level. Thus, as a matter of risk reduction.in a context of high-level (perhaps low probability) potential damage (at the community level), I think it makes sense to for people to wear masks, notably in crowded inside spaces, particularly when there’s sub-optimal ventilation. That said, I think anyone who claims to know with much certainty on either side is likely just engaged in confirming biases. Given the way mask-wearing has become politicized in this country, I think we’d be better off spending resources on improving ventilation.
Joshua
I disagree that observational studies have significant limitations in general. Effective studies are difficult to conduct but are the most representative when done properly.
The “study” you linked was not done properly to form conclusions on effectivity. It was looking at macro data at a county level and then trying to form conclusions. A more useful approach is to compare individuals who use vs do not. The problem is these studies are difficult to conduct and need to be large and coordinated. They provide the most representative results of how well masks work in the real world.
Rob –
It’s generally accepted by epidemiologists that observational studies are limited in that they can show correlation, but are insufficient for establishing causality. You’re certainly entitled to view it differently, of course. I would suggest Bradford Hill criteria as a search item for approaching the topic.
What I think would be interesting would be for you to go over to Andrew’s blog and put up a comment with your opinion on the sufficiency of (properly done) observational levels in the context of mask-wearing and mask-mandates. You might get some interesting responses.
At any rate, the results from observational studies are all over the map. So even if you think observational studies are sufficient for drawing conclusions about masks, it seems to me you’d have some trouble figuring out which way to go.
Rob –
Don’t know if you’re interested, but independently of whether you’d like to comment, there is some discussion at that link regarding the sufficiency of observational studies for drawing epidemiological conclusions.
Again, I disagree with your conclusions about observational studies in general. I also disagree with your conclusion about effectivity.
Masks seem to have a very slight positive benefit in preventing infection. (as I wrote 2 years ago here), They also have negative consequences so their use should imo be measured.
Rob –
> Again, I disagree with your conclusions about observational studies in general
Just to be clear, this isn’t “my” conclusions. The insufficiency of observational studies for drawing conclusions about causality is fundamental to epidemiology. Virtually any observational study conducted by epidemiologists will include a caveat that their work is insufficient for drawing conclusions about causality.
You’re entitled to disagree, of course, but if you don’t already know the reasons why they say that you might want to research it a bit.
The point here is the accepted standard for medications and things like mask mandates that have potential harms is double blind studies that show a statistically significant benefit that outweighs the harm. There were quite a few of those before covid and the WHO based their recommendation against mask mandates on that science.
This was all thrown out by our authoritarian “experts” and “leaders” in blue states anyway. The lying is inexcusable don’t you think? A lot of harm was done to children in terms of their development and there were a lot of serious side effects from the idiotic vaccine mandates.
One last comment –
Imo, whether it’s an RCT or an observational study, longitudinal rather than just cross-sectional data are key for drawing conclusions about causality, and theorizing about and testing theories about associated mechanisms of causality are critical. Again, the Hill criteria, I think, are important to address.
But I’m certainly no expert and as I’m sure you know my friends here regularly demonstrate I’m also not very bright.
“Conclusions: The association between school mask mandates and cases did not persist in the extended sample. Observational studies of interventions are prone to multiple biases and provide insufficient evidence for recommending mask mandates.”
So then we have multiple sources saying there is no evidence for mask mandates. So then why did the CDC do it and even misrepresent their badly flawed study to justify it? This is just malpractice. And masks are part of a pattern of malpractice that was supported by ignorant politicians of Joshua’s persuasion who showed a disturbing authoritarianism, especially with regard to vaccine mandates that actually did a lot of harm.
I think this is a reasonable take on Musk.
https://nonzero.substack.com/p/the-misunderstanding-of-elon-musk?utm_medium=email
This is a masterpiece of deflection. It focuses on Musk himself while ignoring the biggest scandal of the last 100 years. But this is Josh’s thought process, unfocused, focusing on minutia, while ignoring the elephant in the room. It must be wonderful to be in possession of such a trivial intellect.
I’ve come to the conclusion it is far better to let Josh have his say and don’t respond. The back and forth with him just clutters the blog with trash.
Probably. The problem is when he misrepresents what others say or wrongly attacks “skeptics” or the blog, Judith, or her moderation policy. Sometimes, it is necessary to counter misinformation. What truly surprises me is that he has this amount of spare time. He must not have much of a life assuming he works full time.
Judith, I think there is a need for some science teaching resources that get to grips with complex systems and the critical thinking needed for good science – especially in politically controversial areas. I get the impression that many teachers even in Year 11/12 are happy to play An Inconvenient Truth and allow students to work within that paradigm without asking basic questions such as how do we know that what we are told is true, how we would go about checking or refuting, and not being able to spot the typical flawed logic that are used in rhetorical argument but should not be part of the scientific process. It could be something that you could collaborate with the likes of Heather Heying if you are looking for a challenge that could really benefit the next generation of science students.
“…teaching resources…being able to spot the typical flawed logic…”
I absolutely agree. In the age of carefully crafted propaganda coming from every direction, even from within the classroom upcoming generations need first and foremost tools to be able to navigate fact from narrative. Courses in propaganda, common logical fallacies, debate and scientific method should start as early as middle school and repeat every other year thereafter.
It appears that the CDC continues to double down on its vaccine misinformation. I was just on the phone with Social Security and they had a message playing saying the best way to protect yourself from covid is to get another booster despite evidence the latest booster is only marginally effective and quite short lived. Of course, no mention of serious side effects.
For the CDC, Safety First primarily means their own.
I have to say I have never engaged in Twitter whatsoever, and I do not feel any less informed than anyone as a result. It is a place for soundbites, for smearing and slurring, for trolling. You can succinctly mouth conclusions and absolutely cannot provide evidence-based argument.
It’s a place for feelings, not for scientific debate.
What’s really sad is that a younger generation seriously see Twitter as akin to a 21st century library. I see it rather like an informational porn shop, aiming to titillate but not necessarily to inform. And certainly to blackmail and threaten those porno users who don’t toe the line…..
If I were you, Prof Curry, I would inveigle yourself an invite up to Maine to have a chat with Tucker Carlson. Whether you agree with all he says or not, he is an incredibly successful communicator using modern media and for him, Twitter is mostly an advertising space for his more meaty content.
You’ll never be a competitor of his, so you and he might be able to help each other: you give him expert input on climate issues; he help you to hone your skills in how to use Podcasts and other channels to reach out to audiences.
I would expect Tucker to be eager to interview Judith.
I think she should compose a four-minute monologue for Tucker on some basic political points (that he would stylistically edit) and then have her on to confirm and elaborate for another 4 minutes on the state of the actual science on those points. This is the formula Tucker seems to very effective with. Judith was on Tucker Carlsen in 2015 but he did not have any knowledge prepared and asked a very open ended question. It did not seem coordinated.
Correction: I must have missed this one on Tucker right when Judith was leaving GA Tech. It is rather better than the one I recalled and Tucker at the end suggests they do a series together on what we know and don’t know about climate.
From 2 years ago with a podcaster Judith does a rare reveal of the evolution of her fallout with the consensus at minute 16:10 here. She says that it started in 2003 when she sat on IPCC committees and noticed that scientific uncertainties were being glossed over. Then with her co-authoring of Webster (2005) she was taken aback at the throngs of climate activists ready to elevate her for supporting the claim that cyclones are becoming more powerful, an alarm she now refutes. She mentions participating in the skeptic climate blogs. I remember seeing her debates with Roger Pielke Jr. in the Climateaudit.org archives 2005-2008 and being fascinated at witnessing her position evolving. Then in 2009 the Climategate emails appalled her, she told the interviewer.
Dr. Curry, I find this part of your story fascinating and I think others would too. I would suggest reciting the particular Climategate quotes. This is old news for you but is a rarely told story for the masses, which is mostly whitewashed into oblivion on Wikipedia.
If one searches “Climategate” on Youtube the top two results debunk the claim of scandal. There are only a few results now that tell the the truth and result #11 is Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining to the CNN audience that the wide body of scientists all support in one direction that humans are causing an alarming effect on the climate. He belittles any politicians (conservatives) that would listen to one outlier skeptic. He points to the recent Florida hurricane as “a wakeup call” to snap out of our inaction. He then underscores his point of the power of listening to science in pointing to how we can now model the projected hurricane path and save lives. He closes on warning that we have to act now because we can’t move our cities twenty miles further inland in time to prevent massive coastal global catastrophe from sea flooding.
The question is: Should Judith be eager to be interviewed by Tucker. In recent legal depositions, Tucker said he never believed Sidney Powell’s claims about Dominion Voting systems FOR A SECOND, but he was eager have her on his show to help Trump contest the election. Of course, Sidney Powell has told us that her claims about Dominion Voting machines were not to be taken seriously. Fox News is a great place for global warming den1ers and election den1ers, but I’m not sure about a scientist with a more nuanced scientific explanation for what’s wrong with the IPCC consensus.
Franktoo – Carlson let Powell have her say. It’s free speech and honest reporting. By allowing her to speak, he was “reporting” in a sense what she said. Carlson apparently is OK with allowing free speech, then letting the viewers make up their own minds. IMO, this is how discourse should work.
Jim –
I see you’re doing your but to spread good cheer on Christmas morning.
> Carlson apparently is OK with allowing free speech, then letting the viewers make up their own minds. IMO, this is how discourse should work.
Throughout the case, Fox has asked the court to keep almost everything in the case pertaining to its inner workings under seal.
Matt Taibbi has some reflections on the last month. Well worth reading. Apparently there is more to come.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/notes-on-a-friday-night
A group of us spent the last weeks reading thousands of documents. For me a lot of that time was spent learning how Twitter functioned, specifically its relationships with government. How weird is modern-day America? Not long ago, CIA veterans tell me, the information above the “tearline” of a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of origin and any other CIA offices copied on the report.
I spent much of today looking at exactly similar documents, seemingly written by the same people, except the “offices” copied at the top of their reports weren’t other agency stations, but Twitter’s Silicon Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia. It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire. A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Details on those “Other Government Agencies” soon, probably tomorrow.
One happy-ish thought at month’s end:
Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?
I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.
From Taibbi’s summary thread this morning.
4. The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.
I’m sure all decent and honest people would be appalled and see the need for change. But based on what is happening here in terms of the flood of misinformation and obfuscation that is clearly not the case. You are either an authoritarian at heart or you are not. You can’t split this down the middle as an “all sides” problem.
Another excerpt:
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
·
3h
16.The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm.
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
·
2h
17. These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others. Industry players also held regular meetings without government.
Yes, David. However, if the government was providing accurate information to internet platforms that were eager for such information to prevent a repeat of Russian abuses in 2016, it isn’t obvious yet to me that either party did anything illegal or even immoral. This is a common problem in the real world: Newspapers with political biases receive information from government officials with similar biases. For example, take the WSJ’s Kimberley Strassel’s access to the Trump DoJ and Republicans on the House intelligence committee.
In the real world, the IRA troll farm and other Russian sources are still putting out vast amounts of disinformation According to the intelligence community, there was a major conduit through Ukrainians to Giuliani that contributed to Trump’s attempted extortion of Zelenskyy and impeachment.
Finally, given that the Trump-appointed AUSA for Delaware has been investigation Hunter Biden for 4 years without filing getting close to charges (except taxes), I suspect the importance of the laptop has been greatly exaggerated. That doesn’t mean I be unhappy to see Hunter properly convicted for any crimes he did commit. The stench is overwhelming. Unfortunately, many things that stink are not illegal.
What did the Russians do in 2016 besides give a lot of money to Democrats? Search Sberbank and Podesta if you are clueless as to what I’m talking about.
I am glad you ask, Steven:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections
If you want to sea lion furthermore, don’t hesitate!
Willard
Do you see a correlation between intelligence officials that thought Russians were behind 2016 election interference and in 2020 officials who thought Russians were high behind Hunter Biden propaganda
Rob,
I do see a correlation between leading questions and sealioning. It usually occurs when an apprentice baiter fails to distinguish the two. You might like:
https://www.thebulwark.com/fox-news-putin-propaganda-primetime/
Please, very please, do ask me about Ukraine.
Christmas would not be complete without paranoid chaps ranting about Joe.
So Willard still believes the Trump-Russian collusion hoax despite the obvious problems when you follow the money, and he calls me a conspiracy theorist! LMAO!
So, Steven believes that mind probing will cover for his blunder:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/18/gop-operative-convicted-of-funneling-russian-donation-to-trumps-2016-campaign-.html
Has Steven found back the documents teh Donald fled the Whitehouse with in Forida?
25K? Podesta was just one of several Democrat lobbyists receiving large sums of money from the Russians and giving it primarily to Democrats and he got at least $170,000 just from Sberbank. The entire Russian collusion crap was just that, nothing but crap.
Wikipaedia was one of the entities the FBI was calling on to censor content so Willard’s citation is not worth the time it took him to type it. Wiki is well known to be quite unreliable being crowd sourced and not reviewed except by unqualified strangers on the internet.
Russian “interference in 2016” was mostly made up by the Hillary campaign and the corrupt FBI. For example the alpha bank hoax. Likewise with the dossier. In any case, there are always attempts to interfere in elections. The FBI clearly suppressed information to interfere in the 2020 election. And it was very effective as 6% of Biden voters when polled said they would have voted differently if they had known about the laptop scandal.
Frank has been deeply confused on this for a long time. He says for example that Crossfire Hurricane was adequately predicated when it started. This is irrelevant. There is still no proof it was the Russians that hacked the DNC. Quickly, the investigation morphed into a Russian collusion one based almost entirely on the fraudulent Steele dossier. It was a sham and those running it knew it. It is dishonest to mention the former without discussing the latter.
Frank also has vastly too much faith in the US Attorney in Delaware. We know for sure that many crimes were committed, from lying on a firearms application, to major drug use, large scale tax evasion, and almost certainly money laundering, and influence peddling. I trust Bobolinski a lot more because he has no motive other than patriotism.
And Frank I don’t think you have read much on the Twitter Files.
1. Virtually all the things the FBI flagged to Twitter were Americans and their tweets, not foreigners or bots.
2. Twitter was looking hard for “interference” and was constantly prompted by the FBI to find it and in my reading so far was unable to find any. It was almost as if the FBI knew that what it was doing was illegal and was searching for an excuse to fool naive people like Frank.
You talk about the Ukrainian connection to Guiliani. That has nothing to do with 2022. You trying to link the two is dishonest.
In this comment thread, there is absolutely no evidence of foreign interference that authoritarian supporting people are trying to invent to justify something that is illegal. The supreme court has ruled on this. Government cannot deputize private entities to do what it cannot do itself. Censoring speech is illegal for government to do, therefore it is illegal to work with Twitter to do it.
There is the further problem of CIA involvement. The CIA is forbidden by law from operating on US soil.
Further, we have still not gotten the files on the CDC interference to squash scientific dissent (which was mostly true) and to support the CDC line which was mostly either wrong or pseudo-science. Mask mandates, vaccination will stop the virus, children should wear masks and get vaccinated, shutdowns work, etc. etc. The list of lies is long.
BTW, Biden’s covid tzar just admitted that there is no scientific evidence that masks work for viruses. He is instead advocating on improving indoor air quality presumably by better filtration and more air circulation.
I really wish that Frank and WeeLard would actually read some of the voluminous source material in the Twitter files so they could contribute something besides deflection and falsehoods laundered through Wiki.
Wikipaedia is a wholy unreliable source being crowd sourced from people with no verifiable credentials of any kind.
I have yet to see any proof of impactful Russian interference in 2016. Vastly more troubling is the Hillary campaign/FBI collusion to do so through wholely fraudulent sources such as the Steele Dossier. Don’t cite deep state “sources” either. They have proven themselves to be liars. Brennan is a prime example of a serial liar. I guess no one should be surprised as the job of a spy is to lie.
I also haven’t seen anything that shows that the Russians hacked the DNC. The server was never turned over to the FBI. Hillary’s campaign paid some 2nd rate firm to evaluate it. Perhaps this firm did what Steele did, viz., give Hillary the fraudulent talking point she wanted.
it would be most helpful Frank and WeeLard if you would read the Twitter files. A couple of facts stand out.
1. Virtually all the content the FBI flagged was from Americans.
2. The FBI was almost begging Twitter to identify Russian interference leading up to 2022 election and Twitter did not find any thing significant. It’s almost as if the FBI knew they were doing something illegal and were trying to find a fig leaf to use with gullible authoritarian supporting outsiders.
3. The main consequential interference in 2020 was the suppression of the laptop story and the Bobolinski story. That was done in collusion with the FBI and the “intelligence community.” Plenty of lies were spread by the professional liars in the CIA and former professional liars like Brennan and Clapper. Polling shows that 6% of those who voted Biden would not have done so if they had known.
The Supreme Court has been clear. It is illegal for the government to deputize private entities to do things the government can’t do. Some of us value the first amendment.
We really need to get out of the cycle of lies and propaganda. There is always “interference” in elections some of it foreign in origin. Our governmene interferes in elections overseas by spreading disinformation. Obama did it in an Israeli election.This reminds me a little of the red scare in the 1950’s. There were quite a few Communists in the government, but not enough to really change anything.
Wikipaedia is a corrupt source of information. It is crowd sourced under the direction of “moderators” of unknown qualifications. Perhaps what WeeLard cites really came from a foreign attempt to influence our elections. No one knows. That Wee cites it shows his very low standards.
Yes, Steven, minimization would have been better than pure gaslighting:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-bannon-associates-factbox-idUSKBN25G1YU
Be seeing you.
It’s pretty clear Frank and Wee have not read the TWitter files.
1. Virtually all the information flagged buy government actors was from Americans.
2. The FBI pushed relentlessly for Twitter for find foreign interference and Twitter couldn’t do so. Was the FBI seeking a fig leaf to fool their authoritarian partisan supporters into supporting this violation of the Constitution?
3. The most important election interference was suppressing the laptop and the Bobolibski stories. Those thing pushed Biden over the top by polling data.
Willard, your explanation for how Russia was trying to get Trump elected while giving all their money to Democrats is what, exactly?
I am sorry you got to stay thirsty, Steven, but sea lions always do,
It’s obvious our Hall Monitor has lived under a Freedom Fighter echo chamber for too long:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63882140
No explanation for the Russians funding Democrats while still believing in your little conspiracy theory about Trump? Stay on topic.
Gerald Baker of the WSJ writes:
“The Twitter Files have exposed how a powerful class of like-minded people control and limit the flow of information to advantage their monolithically progressive agenda.
The Twitter Files tell us nothing new. There’s no shocking revelation in there about government censorship or covert manipulation by political campaigns. They merely bring to the surface the internal deliberations of a company dealing with complex issues in ways consistent with its values.
If you think the first paragraph is true, you must be a tinfoil-hat wearing member of the vast right-wing conspiracy destroying our democracy. If you think the second is true, you’re a credulous apologist for the elite left-wing ideologues destroying our democracy.
If you think both are true, congratulations. You’re a reader of uncommon genius and perspicacity.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-files-revelations-are-instructive-but-not-surprising-media-cultural-elites-misinformation-disagreement-musk-11670856198
So Frank, are you fine with the FBI and the Intelligence Community getting media companies to censor true information to influence an election?
Baker of the WSJ may already know about the Twitter collusion with the FBI. Most Americans don’t. I’d be curious if Baker agrees with the Supreme Court that what happened is illegal?
In any case, you didn’t respond to any of my detailed points. I guess you are then acknowledging them to be true.
I think the Covid Twitter files may be even more interesting. People like Jay Battacharia were banned for speaking their evidence based opinion on covid policy. Did the CDC or the FBI play a role in this censorship?
Another source says Frank is wrong about the CDC recommendation to vaccinate children.
DR. MARTY MAKARY: If a child has a special medical condition, those are the ones who show it. Those are the children who come to the hospital with COVID complications. If the child has not had COVID in the past, then there may be a case there and a healthy child. It’s not compelling, but certainly the kid with a special medical condition who does not have natural immunity. Now, if the FDA is trying to take its already shattered reputation with the public and make it even worse, they’re doing that today.
They’re about to authorize this COVID vaccine for 16 million children, 90-plus percent of whom have already had COVID, based on a small study of kids who did not have COVID. That was the condition to be in that study. So ignoring natural immunity is actually having significant implications now. And even that small study that showed that it works in kids, shows it didn’t work very well, as low as 30% effective in the first few months. And that goes down the drain after a few months.
Dr. Marty Makary is a top surgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins U Hosp. His bio page there does not even mentioned that he has been the editor-in-chief of Medpage Today, a medical newsletter I have been reading for 15 years. He is a fearless maverick that calls the shots exactly as he see them, even at the cost of backlash from the national health establishment and vulnerability to his prominent career standing. He is a genuine hero in my book, as is Judith Curry. Here is a page of his recent editorials on covid policy and healthcare. They are all excellent.
Ron -.
I must say, that was an top notch appeal to Markary’s authority.
> He is a fearless maverick that calls the shots exactly as he see them.
Unfortunately not a few of those shots he’s called have been notably wrong. Prolly the most infamous was that medical error-the third leading cause of death in the US., but some of his stinkers on COVID were arguably just as bad.
.
But your faith in and loyalty to his lack of bias is admirable – even if it’s another example of a “skeptic” not being particularly skeptical about scientists with whom they share ideological orientation.
.
Ron –
BTW – this was one of my favorites.
We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
Covid cases have dropped 77% in six weeks. Experts should level with the public about the good news
That would be April of 2021
Prolly just a coincidence that you’d have so much faith in someone who was almost as wrong as Nic on the very same topic.
Joshy the childish ankle biter is back. Everyone made big mistakes in predicting this epidemic. Makary is no exception and that in no way should prejudice evaluation of his opinion on childhood vaccination. Your role is peurile at best and makes no contribution to showing us any facts and data concerning the topic.
Do you support the CDC recommendaton?
Why would I need to explain your conspiracy theory, Sealion?
I wonder when our Hall Monitor will reach that stage:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-clements/
Do you?
Joshua, unlike you, Makary is not wrong on every topic I have heard him speak or write on and he does very little personal attacks. Instead he focuses on policy. His projection on herd immunity, if it was early 2021, was surely based on the advertisement of 90% vaccine effectiveness. The rollout was projected to be 80% complete by April 2021. He apparently was in the dark along with the rest of us on the false vaccine promise.
I would not say that authority is irrelevant to expertise. It’s just no guarantee. I do not know Makary’s personal politics or ideology. For all I know he is like Musk, Taibbi, Gabbard, Greenwald, Weiss, Turley and Dershowitz, a liberal that is willing to speak out against the tribe as it heads off the rails.
Ron –
> Makary is not wrong on every topic I have heard him speak or write on and he does very little personal attacks.
The main problem with his statement on herd immunity, that reflected no acknowledgement of the obvious uncertainties, was that he went on to opine with great certainty on something he couldn’t have known about, in a way that was obviously paranoid and which was sure to undermine public confidence in public health officials.
Experts should level with the public about the good news.
So there he goes from all the certainties involved to conclude that “experts” were being deceptive about herd immunity, to reinforced the idea that “experts” weren’t to be trusted, that “experts” were trying to scare the public. And there he knowingly fomented all the associated paranoia and tribalism among people who are looking to COVID to reinforce ideological orientation.
> His projection on herd immunity, if it was early 2021, was surely based on the advertisement of 90% vaccine effectiveness.
His projection was obviously wrong AT THE TIME, irrespective of what one knew about the durability of vaccination-induced immunity. His numbers simply didn’t add up, and would have required there to have been a population infection rate of over 100% in the US at the time. His numbers were based to a large degree on an obviously low (and wrong) IFR.
But it is fun to watch you invent a reason for why he was wrong, one that places the blame for his failed analysis on other people. That’s EXACTLY what we would expect if you have some kind of allegiance to the scientist as an individual rather than the science in itself. That was exactly my point.
So thanks for making it.
Ron –
I’ll also note that with Makary’s widely publicized and sensationalist but erroneous assertion that medical errors are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US, it wasn’tedely that it was wrong that’s the problem. The problem is that he’s promoting sensationalist claims that are based on shoddy science.
Of course that doesn’t imply that he’s wrong about everything or that he has nothing of use to contribute.
And yes, I agee that “expertise” is an important factorz the problem is when people use expertise as if it’s dispositive about the veracity of someone’s work.
Joshua, you are accusing Makary making uninformed and irresponsible statements without linking to those statements. You have been here long enough to know better.
But you bring up an interesting overall dynamic. You wrote: “So there he goes from all the certainties involved to conclude that “experts” were being deceptive about herd immunity, to reinforced the idea that “experts” weren’t to be trusted, that “experts” were trying to scare the public.”
You are mindreading here.
However, there is no question that “experts” have misbehaved. We are only in dispute as to which experts were worse. But your most interesting point is that experts should be unified as not to spread the idea that experts weren’t to be trusted. This is a fundamental dilemma that needs a whole post just devoted to it IMO. When does an expert weigh the importance of what they believe is the truth getting expressed versus the value of maintaining the integrity of the institution? Is the institution better protected by allowing robust debate versus speaking with one voice? Real questions. Historical FBI patriarch J. Edgar Hoover’s often cautioned his special agents, “Don’t embarrass the bureau.”
Joshy, you are just repeating yourself. You didn’t respond on the substance of vaccinating children. It is fallacious to attack someone’s credibility on a separate issue, an issue where everyone was wrong by the way. By your puerile standard, no public health expert is trustworthy.
And your childish point about undermining faith in “experts” is laughable. Given their terrible track record, by comparison Makary was very accurate, the “experts” deserve public disapproval and indeed ridicule.
Can you name one important issue where the “experts” were right?
Ron –
> Joshua, you are accusing Makary making uninformed and irresponsible statements without linking to those statements.
I quoted his statement. That it was ill-informed was self-evident as it relied on mind-probing. Unless you think he really has mind-probing skills. Google the quote if interested. It was a WSJ article.
Willard, if you can’t explain the money but you bother to use the Mueller report as a reference would you like to explain why the unregistered Russian agent that there was out there, Podesta, was allowed to just quietly leave instead of having to sell his house to pay legal bills like if he had been working for Trump? I think a sea lion asks for evidence. I’m asking for your explanation of evidence contrary to your views. Certainly you know the difference. Not a big cat if you don’t take things on directly. Just a noisy little kitten getting underfoot.
No need for anything else than answer your first question, dear Sealion. If you want a sammich, you know what to do.
Enjoy Elon eating popcorn while reading Medvedev’s Sci-Fi book proposal:
https://www.newsweek.com/medvedevs-wild-2023-predictions-include-elon-musk-us-president-1769667
Is your musket ready?
Meow.
https://twitter.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1606804252063850496?s=20&t=wuyXJqjsm8HYOj9uuIuj2g
No, Trump is right and Biden is senile and demonizing half the country. You have no memory and no grasp on the facts revealed in the Twitter Files.
dpy: Florida’s “Petition for Order to Impanel a Statewide Grand Jury” justifying an attempt to indict vaccine makers on CRIMINAL CHARGES can be found at the link below. 90% appears false to me.
https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Vaccine-Grand-Jury-Petition.pdf
For example, Items 11 and 12 complain that “on November 30, 2020, the Chief Executive Officer of Moderna told the public that a study “confirms the ability of our vaccine to prevent COVID-19 disease with 94.1% efficacy” and that “Pfizer similarly stated that its vaccine was “highly effective with 91.3% vaccine efficacy observed against COVID-19 … through up to six months after the second dose” These are the published findings of human clinical trials that were independently analyzed by the FDA. Now it is true that vaccine efficacy is defined in terms of the reduction in infections serious enough to warrant a PC test – not in terms of reduction of transmission. Some vaccinees (and placebo controls) may have suffered asymptomatic or mild cases that were not detected by PCR. And while these subjects might have transmitted COVID to others, it is well known that seriously symptomatic and pre-symptomatic patients are responsible for most transmission. The distinction between reduced infection and reduced transmission is important because in Items 5-10, Florida asserts wrongdoing:
5) “The federal government, medical associations, and other experts have created an expectation that receiving a COVID-19 vaccine is an ethical or civic duty and that choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is selfish and harmful to others”
6) …”some Floridians made the choice to receive the COVID-19 vaccine because they believed that receiving the vaccine would prevent them from spreading COVID-19 to others.”
Studies have proven that vaccination has reduced transmission in the COMMUNITY. The best evidence comes from Israel, which vaccinated 50% of their population by March 1. When combined with natural immunity, this was enough to create an effective state of her immunity that reduced the number of cases nearly 1000-fold over the next three months. That ended with the arrival of the Delta variant. The US didn’t reach 50% vaccination until mid-May, so the decline in cases was only 10-fold before Delta arrived. (Infection had been detected in about 10% of the population of both countries as vaccination got underway, assumed to have given about 40% of the population natural immunity at the time, but that has been adjusted down to about 20% today.) Beyond any doubt, vaccination reduced transmission in the community, thereby protecting those who were not vaccinated.
Similar studies showing a reduction in community transmission by giving everyone PCR tests were down in the UK after only a single dose of Pfizer or the less efficacious AZ vaccine. The UK gambled and gave doses three months apart, allowing them to give more people limited protection sooner.
Items 18&19 absurdly complain that he vaccine was marketed before before there was proof that vaccines reduced transmission in the community and that vaccines did “not fully prevent transmission” in the community. Of course, clinical trials showed only 95% reduction in detected infections, not 100%. Clearly the authors of these complains don’t understand the mathematics of exponential growth and decrease in case loads. Even a 20% reduction of the reproduction rate from 1.0 to 0.8 will bring a pandemic to a halt: 90% reduction in cases in less than two months and 99% in four months.
Item 17 complains that the protection from infection after vaccination would “potentially” last a “couple” of years, but not even one year later, manufacturers were calling for boosters. They don’t mention that the more transmissible Delta variant with resistance to both natural and vaccine-induced immunity appeared during this period and more variants of concern were on the horizon. The data in hand at the time showed the alpha variant would be controlled for several years at the rate the level of antibodies had been dropping.
After Delta and Omicron arrived, vaccination reduced infection about 75% soon after getting a booster, but much of that protection faded over about six month because the antibodies produced by vaccination didn’t neutralize these variants as well as they did earlier variants. IIRC, the protection afforded by natural infection in 2020 was negligible by the time Omicron arrived. One could argue that the Biden administration was too aggressive trying to impose vaccine mandates once it was clear that vaccination wasn’t as effective at reducing transmission against the new variants. However, deciding when a vaccine should and should not be mandatory is a question to be resolve by the politics, not a lawsuit agains vaccine manufacturers.
The problem of myocarditis in young men is a serious one and the risks and benefits of vaccination this population were carefully analyzed by the FDA before approval. To the best of my knowledge, no one has died directly from myocarditis, but some with serious existing conditions have died with myocarditis. The problem is that COVID also causes myocarditis in young men for exactly the same reason vaccination does: antibodies that attack heart tissue are made in both cases. From my perspective, it is almost undoubtably safer to produce those antibodies from a well controlled localized site in your arm than during an uncontrolled infection that invades lung, heart and nerves.
Finally we have Florida’s unpublished and un-peer-review report showing that people are at increased risk of cardiac-related death in the month after vaccination using the self-controlled case series method. However, Lapado may have forgotten to correct for the fact that most people received two doses of vaccine and were exposed to the normal risk of cardiac death for two months after vaccination! A long discussion of the Florida study is included at the fact-check link below. An expert on the self-controlled case series method Lapado cites in four of six references (Whitaker) has adapted the method for two-dose COVID vaccines and thinks the study is wrong. Apparently it is contradicted by other studies of COVID vaccine safety performed using the same method. A full understanding of the Florida study may not be in hand, but the best ways to resolve scientific disagreement is not in front of a grand jury of non-experts .
https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/20221007-guidance-mrna-covid19-vaccines-analysis.pdf
https://www.factcheck.org/2022/10/scicheck-floridas-covid-19-vaccination-analysis-is-flawed-experts-say/
Thus I fear DeSantis may be as much of a sucker for conspiracy theories asTrump is. (He obviously doesn’t have some of Trump’s other weaknesses.)
“Some vaccinees (and placebo controls) may have suffered asymptomatic or mild cases that were not detected by PCR. ”
If it were not for the PCR test being able to detect asymptomatic cases we would not know of them.
Ron: The detection of asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic infections and transmission by such people is challenging because you need to screen an entire community to detect it. The British have done excellent work in this area. IIRC, they were surveying the vast majority of the nurses in the country about their symptoms and then screening them regularly by PCR, both before and after vaccination. (People report substantially more symptoms after being told they tested positive than before.) And they have regularly screened all of the participants in some clinical trials to detect asymptomatic infections. IIRC, the Oxford/AZ vaccine was only 30% effective at reducing all detectable infections and near 0% in another trial when the alpha variant was circulating. Basically, the AZ vaccine made almost all infections milder and less detectable, but failed to eliminate even half of infections when everyone was tested by PCR.
It is interesting to note that while the sponsors of this vaccine were doing these interesting studies, they never accumulated a package of clinical trial data that allowed the FDA to grant emergency approval for the use of that [DNA] vaccine in the US. (Oxford had grandiose visions of producing a practical cheap vaccine that would vaccinate the whole world.) One problem is that the first dose of the viral vector used to deliver a gene for expressing spike protein sometimes creates an immune response that makes the second dose less effective. A single dose of both the AZ and mRNA vaccines afforded about 70% protection (often crudely measured between doses), but the second dose of AZ didn’t cause much improvement. The J&J DNA vaccine that was approved by the FDA originally was a single dose vaccine. The vaccine approval process and rollout in the UK was a real gamble, while the US IMO maintained its normal rigorous standards. We produced the best vaccines and the worst vaccine hesitancy.
Despite all of the above caveats, even one dose of the UK vaccines were clearly proven to reduce infection and transmission in the community. The reason is fairly simple. If you have a stable pandemic with a reproduction rate of 1.0 and you reduce transmission by only 20%, after 10 transmission chains (about two months with the alpha variant), mathematically there should be 90% fewer infections (1-0.8^10). In another two months 99%. The problem is that once you achieved that much reduction, people stop social distancing and wearing masks and the reproduction rate rises. On paper you can get dramatic improvement over time from modest reductions in transmission using masks, social distancing or lousy vaccines, but the benefits don’t last. They all “work” but the public doesn’t see success. All of the US’s NPI’s quickly brought the reproduction rate down from a disastrous 3.5 in March of 2020 to near 1, but there was no appetite in the US for doing a little more. Germany dropped their infections by 90% by mid-summer. Then the alpha variant arrived in fall and quickly overwhelmed everyone.
The FDA’s initial standard for emergency approval of a vaccine was only at least a 50% reduction in infections – which when you add immunity from natural infections might get to herd immunity if everyone were vaccinated. In Africa, a malaria vaccine that is only 35% effective is beginning to be used.
All of this Frank is largely irrelevant. Everyone was going to get exposed to covid and that has pretty much taken place. The vaccines may have helped some vulnerable people but there was never any evidence they would help the under 18 cohort. This is 75 million people in the US and as of last fall there were fewer than 400 deaths “with” covid in this group. Most of those were already in the hospital with things like cancer. Marty Makary has talked about this data often. It was obvious from the very beginning that covid was killing almost exclusively the very elderly or the very ill. The US suffered more than Sweden probably because our obesity rate is 40% whereas in Sweden if memory serves, it is 11%.
The fact is that every successive booster has been less effective than the previous one. We reached a point of diminishing returns a long time ago. So then why does the CDC continue to advocate a drug that has only a small benefit? They have lied to us on almost every important issue from the beginning.
BTW, The same Swedish study I mentioned earlier showed that the effectiveness against serious covid was not 95% as Pfeizer claimed, but closer to 85% and it started to decline pretty quickly. So your assertion about controlling spread of the virus might be true in the very short term, but had no effect on the ultimate outcome. All of the focus on minutae just serves to focus on the trees and not the forest.
I personally am glad to see DeSantis empaneling the Grand Jury. It’s the only we are going to get the truth. There has been really an unprecedented campaign of censorship and cancellation around covid that hasn’t even happened in wartime really. And the public health establishment has forfeited any credibility they might have had. Perhaps Frank, you approve of this. But it is a crime in my view. It prevented a robust public debate about the science and led to a climate of fear and panic driven by a corrupt media.
Frank, the PCR test was extremely sensitive, so much so that by the end of 2021 the CDC were recommending not to used to verify recovery but to instead rely upon the less sensitive antigen (quick) test.
The RNA vaccine’s rollout advertisement of being in the 90% effectiveness range against infection (and transmission) was very questionable in hindsight. It certainly did not hold true for the variants that were dominant by the time of the 2021 rollout. More troubling is the high rate of severe side effects, especially in young people that had no danger from the virus nor were primary spreaders if infected.
Asymptomatic infections as a vector of transmission was negligible, which also made the school closure policy unnecessary. Whereas nursing homes were tinder boxes, schools were marshlands. The policy of putting most all resources into protecting nursing homes and the vulnerable would have been the best policy as shown by Florida and Georgia’s anti-Fauci approaches.
Considering the low level of danger of the virus to young and healthy people, and the low level of danger this group posed to the elderly, and considering the level of permanent heart damage to some young people, government mandates or vaccination passports were completely out of line. Again the anti-Fauci policies of FL and GA proved to be wise revolts against “the experts.”
Lest anyone be fooled by Frank’s undue deference to our vaccine “authorities”, apparently the two top and senior FDA vaccine regulators disagreed with the vaccine recommendations strongly enough to resign over it.
https://nypost.com/2021/09/01/two-senior-fda-officials-resign-over-biden-administration-booster-shot-plan/
Frank –
> Thus I fear DeSantis may be as much of a sucker for conspiracy theories asTrump is. (He obviously doesn’t have some of Trump’s other weaknesses.)
I suggest you be more skeptical. I don’t think that either of them are “suckers,” but instead that both of them find conspiracy theories convenient to exploit for political expediency and personal benefit.
Just consider what you noted above – that Tucker (and Sean) didn’t believe Sydney’s nutty claims – but found her claims convenient for enhancing their audiences and pursuing their political goals.
What’s always so amusing to me about so-called “skeptics” is that they’re so credulous about politicians and TV stars when doing so confirms their.biases. It’s part of what I love about them so much.
Joshua
Consider this to be my Christmas gift to you. As my quote below says, it’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled. I’m wondering if you bit on a tasty delight that most leftwingers probably have been fooled about. As noted previously Biden has snowed the public into believing that in his IRA, the rich will pay their fair share in taxes. I guess increasing the taxes of earners of + $1 M from $985B to $987B by 2027 would qualify, since that is the only increase in taxes for the rich.
The MSM has been running stories non stop that the Omnibus bill of $1.7 Trillion has passed Congress. Many believe that is the total amount to be spent this coming year. And a subset of that many are upset to think Congress would actually spend $1.7 Trillion of their hard earned money in a single year.
I don’t have the heart to tell them that $1.7 Trillion is not even 1/3 of the actual total amount to be spent in FY23.
It’s actually going to be $6 Trillion +.
I didn’t want you to be one of those who have been fooled in a colossal con job, and that is why I am letting you in on this secret. Merry Christmas.
Kid –
I think that “fare share of taxes” is inherently subjective. So I don’t really have much in the way of thoughts operating from that baseline.
I happen to think that rather heavily progressive taxation makes good economic sense, but I recognize that it’s a question that’s every difficult to evaluate empirically.
Josh: Perhaps you are correct about political expediency. However, in Trump’s case, “truth” was always whatever he needed it to be. When Trump sued a reporter for under-reporting his wealth, he was deposed and asked under oath was his wealth was. He replied that the answer varied from day-to-day depending on how he felt about the value of his properties and especially the value of the “Trump brand”. The Jan6 committee established that Trump was clearly told by nearly everyone in his campaign that he had lost and that occasionally he took actions that reflected that reality. For example, IIRC he ordered a pullout of all troops from Afghanistan to be completed by January 20, 2021. However, whatever he may have believed in the first weeks after the election while he was losing every court case, he soon convinced himself that the election was stolen.
Now maybe I’m too much of a scientist who believes in following the data and fighting confirmation bias and all politicians are doing exactly what Trump did only less publicly. However, I think the success of Trump’s lies has emboldened all politicians follow their gut not their brains.
Frank –
> Josh: Perhaps you are correct about political expediency. However, in Trump’s case, “truth” was always whatever he needed it to be.
For understanding Trump, I always go back to his long association with Roy Cohn, and what Cohn and Roger Stone and Trump explicitly described as their formula for winning friends in influencing people: lie, lie hard, lie often, and keep doubling down on the lies no matter what. They explicitly described that strategy and with that in mind it’s easy to see how they employ it. Critical is that you lie about the very things that you’re accused of lying about – for example if you’re accused of lying you call the person accusing you, of lying. They didn’t try to hide that policy; they were explicit about it.
> and all politicians are doing exactly what Trump did only less publicly.
I pretty much agree with that. I’m sure that not all politicians lie as frequently as Trump, but certainly many do.
Still, the question for me has always been whether Trump ir really different in how much he lies, or whether he’s just more open about his lying. The case might be made that he’s less deceptive or less open about his lying. In a sense the argument could be made that he’s more honest about his dishonesty.
I”m not completely sold on the answer to that question. Certainly there’s a long history of politicians lying and some of them have lied about things that are just as substantive as what Trump has regularly lied about (say, Johnson lying about the Vietnam War). But I do think that Trump has been ore deliberate in his strategy to achieve his goals by lying, and I do think that has a negative impact more generally on our society.
> However, I think the success of Trump’s lies has emboldened all politicians follow their gut not their brains.
Yes, I think that’s essentially what I was saying.
Frank –
> Josh: Perhaps you are correct about political expediency. However, in Trump’s case, “truth” was always whatever he needed it to be.
For understanding Trump, I always go back to his long association with Roy Cohn, and what Cohn and Roger Stone and Trump explicitly described as their formula for winning friends in influencing people: l*e, l*e hard, l*e often, and keep doubling down on the l*es no matter what. They explicitly described that strategy and with that in mind it’s easy to see how they employ it. Critical is that you l*e about the very things that you’re accused of ly*ng about – for example if you’re accused of ly*ng you accuse the person accusing you, of ly*ng. They didn’t try to hide that policy; they were explicit about it.
> and all politicians are doing exactly what Trump did only less publicly.
I pretty much agree with that. I’m sure that not all politicians l*e as frequently as Trump, but certainly many do.
Still, the question for me has always been whether Trump is really different in how much he l*es, or whether he’s just more open about his ly*ng. The case might be made that he’s less deceptive or more open about his ly*ng. In a sense the argument could be made that he’s more honest about his dishonesty.
I”m not completely sold on the answer to that question. Certainly there’s a long history of politicians ly*ng and some of them have l*ed about things that are at least as substantive as what Trump has regularly l*ed about (say, Johnson ly*ng about the Vietnam War). But I do think that Trump has been more deliberate and explictly in his strategy to achieve his goals by ly*ng, and I do think that has a negative impact more generally on our society.
> However, I think the success of Trump’s l*es has emboldened all politicians follow their gut not their brains.
Yes, I think that’s essentially what I was saying.