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“Not even wrong”. Seriously Node, you don’t yet know enough to hold a proper discussion with. You won’t like this, and I’m sorry, but so far you’re just a sheeple. If we can sort out some of the earlier points, and after that if you’ll let me help you learn some of the real issues around the politicisation of science, then maybe we could make some progress. But the path you’re currently permitting yourself to be led down is not even wrong. Oh, and it leads to the slaughterhouse.
SA, I have at last got round to reading the link you posted May 3, 11:20 #52860 about falling vaccination uptake and a fall in the anti-vax movement. Interesting and informative article. Overworked parents, a large drop in the number of health visitors, and yet another counterproductive reorganisation of the health service – my dad was an NHS administrator and government mandated reorganisations were the bane of his working life.
One criticism; the article lays the blame for the MMR-autism conspiracy theory entirely with Andrew Wakefield and his case series paper of a dozen subjects. It completely omits the the legal firm sponsoring Wakefield’s work, and more importantly the corporate media journalistic amplification and their obsession with the Blairs and Leo. The corporate media in the form of Prospect Magazine have painted their own influence completely out of the picture. Sad and predictable really.
Clark
Thanks for pointing this out. I have to say I did not realise this but the general Blairite bias by Prospect was also pointed out to me by my brother in law.
Yes I can now see how Wakefield has become the focus .
Similarly the MSM is now criticising the incompetence of the Tory government in dealing with Covid19 but firstly not enough, and secondly not reflecting on their role as to why they got it so wrong in the general elections in not holding the government to account. We now have an arrogant and incompetent government with a huge majority that can bluster its way through anything.Blair was virtually installed by the corporate media.
The corporate media is capital’s conduit for conditioning and controlling the public, including the politicians. The typical alternative outlook is that government controls the media, but that reverses the power relationship; capital dominates government, which is why government so consistently serves capital.
(“typical alternative” – is that oxymoronic?)
Sure, the corporate media serve government occasionally – on those matters in which government is doing what capital demands, such as moving towards war in places with oil.
The corporate media forever dumbs-down the public. It typically depicts science as a battle of incomprehensibly complex opinions between white-coated authority figures. Look at the stupid graphic heading this Guardian article; they look like gladiators! Then there’s this:
– “Report on face masks’ effectiveness for Covid-19 divides scientists”
– “Experts clash…” – “A row has erupted…”Was there any “clash” or “eruption”, or did the Guardian ‘phone around and garner some conflicting “opinions”? We don’t know, because like TV camera operators, the journalists and their actions don’t appear in the article; the media has again painted itself out of the picture. By contrast, the systematic review this concocted drama is based on is very clear; it sets out all the research and finds that masks help:
– “Face masks could offer an important tool for contributing to the management of community transmission of Covid19 within the general population. […] If correctly used… face masks, including homemade cloth masks, can contribute to reducing viral transmission.”
The corporate media is most people’s window onto science; it’s obvious why most people think of science as merely a battle of opinions. The corporate media subjugates any sort of objectivity beneath its own authority, and routinely deprives the public of the objective understanding needed for critical assessment of the advertising that funds it. It is currently very aggressively shifting anger away from the government’s abject failure to prepare, and onto the ‘lockdown’ (that very word is a negative propaganda term) and actively demonising the scientific community.
It is tragic to see so many commenters at Craig’s supposedly enlightened blog meekly falling into line without even realising it. UK Column and the UK papers, unanimous that Ferguson should be skewered, never mind that the UK is just one country in this global pandemic.
Michael, this might interest you:
– [Exercise Cygnus] contained 26 key recommendations, including boosting the capacity of care homes and the numbers of staff available to work in them. It also warned of the challenge facing homes asked to take in patients from hospitals.
– Asked recently about the report on Exercise Cygnus, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said he had been assured by officials at the Department of Health that “everything that was recommended was done”.
– However, Martin Green, the chief executive of Care England, which represents the largest independent care home providers, said concerns raised by the exercise about the social care system’s ability to handle patients discharged from hospitals and the need for the largest private care providers to increase capacity were not raised by government agencies with his members.
The Wikipedia article has quite a few links in its references / citations.
Neil Ferguson’s history of wildly inaccurate predictions is on the public record.
His report on which lockdown is based was never published or peer reviewed. If you dispute this, show me where it was published or peer reviewed. I cannot prove a negative.
Up until the end of 2018, Ferguson’s employers, Imperial College, had received $185 million from the Gates FoundationYet on the strength of this untested report from an unreliable source with a clear conflict of interest, the WHO changed the course of history.
Node, I’m going to cease interacting with you unless you stop advocating for an agenda, start reading what I’ve already written and start discussing, because it is simply a waste of my time. There are many points above, and from weeks back, that you simply ignore. Discussion requires that we achieve consensus as we proceed, or we fail to build a basis for further discussion. I am on the verge of discounting you as insufficiently rational to hold any meaningful discussion with.
You need more than conspiracy theory to engage in rational argument. You’re a disgrace; you’re proving Mark Lewis right:
– “I’m quite happy to take their homes off them. If these people would have rational debate, I would do that [instead], but they are nutters who have conspiratorial theories and I will never change their outlook.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/uks-foremost-libel-lawyer-sets-his-sights-on-israels-enemies/
Node, you’re undermining freedom of speech and the freedom of the Internet by abusing them. You disgust me.
You’re discrediting Craig’s site and thereby discrediting support for the Palestinians, the peace movement and the campaign for human rights. All through your inflated ego, your sense of superiority and your searing sense of self-righteousness. Get a grip, or get lost.
For every action there’s a reaction, and one reaction to pigheaded conspiracy theory is that Israel needs nuclear weapons. If rational debate is refused, what option is left but strength of arms?
You disgust me Node.
Clark.
Your behaviour towards me is obsessive. It is causing problems for both of us. If you stop interacting with me I will respect that. Quite simply, you stop responding to my posts or referring to me, and I’ll reciprocate.Node
“What about you SA? Do you dispute any of my 3 premises or my conclusion that the WHO has changed history on the strength of an untested report from an unreliable source with a clear conflict of interest?”
First I would like you having levelled the charge that a world leading organisation in infectious disease modelling and control is an unreliable source. Could you please provide me with such evidence? I do not think that such a unit with so many world class researchers and publications and funding, in one of the foremost universities in the UK can be dismissed so lightly by you without producing adequate references from reliable sources with knowledge in the area.
Then you say that Ferguson’s group research on Covid-19 is not published. What is this? or is The Lancet not a peer reviewed Journal?I do not think that the WHO has declared a pandemic purely on the say so of Ferguson’s group. He may be one of the advisers but there are many sources that have led to this declaration.
I notice from your questions that you start off by questioning all recognised ‘authorities’ by either rubbishing them, with no evidence but just because some layman on a website has said they were incompetent and without providing any evidence. As Clark says there is no point in discussing anything if we do not have an agreement on basic facts such as the expertise of known and universally recognised experts. I am not saying that that is sufficient, because that has to be continuously bolstered by their continuing track record. To give an example, although Ioannidis has had an excellent track record, he has recently done things that are against his own advice, rather a poor piece of research, but with a little bit of scientific training anyone can see the weaknesses of his output in this case. Whatever else he says has only been a matter of opinion. The Imperial group, and others are in the heart of this research and have produced many reports, some publications, and guidelines including to our government. To try to undermine them the way you do is a bit too dismissive for me to try and indulge in refutations.
I refuse. You have the mind of a Nazi, and I’m calling you out. All decent people must be forever vigilant against the totalitarianism you espouse. Engage rationally, or accept that your views must be suppressed for the greater good. You do have a choice, just as criminality is a choice that risks incarceration. With freedom of expression comes responsibility. Exercise responsibility or lose your freedom, your own and others’.
SA, it is agreed that a good test of theory is its ability to make predictions.
I predict that Node will continue as before, ignoring your link to a peer-reviewed article published in the scientific literature, and simply never raising that question again as if he had never raised it in the first place. Node will continue to harp on about other things, effectively changing the subject and forever setting the agenda.
Node has no interest in impartial, objective investigation. Node has very limited curiosity about the natural world. Node’s overriding objective is to win, by any means necessary, just as a government instructs its military.
Blood of the Past
All the many corpses begin to speak
What ignorance is cannot be argued over anymore
It is too late for pleading white picket dreams
Print you off, the shemps, the world is shrinking
Rooted in a trivial concern, in interconnectedness
In the need to make face and keep up
And drown out the many voices within
Imagine a culture that has, at its root
A more soulful connection to land and to loved ones
But I can hear the lie before you speak
There is nothing but progress to eat
And we are so fat and so hungry
And the black wrists are cuffed in the pig van
While the white shirt and tie in the tube car, distractional picture
Pictures of beer and guilt about urges
Sexual distrust and abandoned to nothingness
Give me something I can nail myself to
Give me a sharply-dressed talking head
Who has something about them I trust and despise
And what of it, anyway? These windows don’t open
They were designed to stay closed
Shower, smoothie, coffee, commute
Check the internet, never stop, never stop
There is a scar on the soul of the world and it needs you to look
The blood of the past is here, it remains
The blood of the murders, the bodies like sacks leaking brain
All stacked, chest aback on the planes, it remains
To acknowledge without guilt, to accept without condition
And to listen when other people tell you how you have behaved
Truth is, it’s for us to feel and be moved
But I hear the clatter of bone against steel, it is coming
It will not be stilled, it is there
In the air, scorched white
The reflection of sunlight on glass bouncing back into sunlight
And glass bouncing back, industrialized
Denial, business as usual
So roll your eyes, shake your head, turn away and call me names
I’m okay with that, too proud
Unable to listen, we keep speaking
Moted by blood, unable to notice ourselves
Unable to stop and unwilling to learnI have heard you,
Long since,
Node.When will you say to us, Node?
Yes Clark, yes SA,
I have heard you.SA
To forestall further argument, I see I should have added “up to” to some of Ferguson’s predicted death totals. However all that is necessary for my point is that you agree that Ferguson’s predictions have proven unreliable in the past. Can we agree on that?Testing is no better and no more accurate than flipping a coin. We’ve been had, some far more than others.
And you’d know Tony M, ‘cos you’re an expert.
Great sources Node. The Guardian twice; the right-wing, friend-of-the-landowners Spectator (I thought you were above being brainwashed by the “MSM” Node?); some obscure private Washington “non-profit” think-tank-cum-consultancy that seems to have written its own Wikipedia page as an advert; one apparently genuine research institute; and a YooToob by… Wait for it…
UK Column again!!!
…and it was only uploaded since the covid-19 pandemic; axe to grind perhaps?
The chairman of PRB is Amanda Glassman of the Center For Global Development and writes for the Guardian. The PRB’s home page is all about how serious covid-19 is. Their CEO appears to be venture capitalist Jeff Jordan, investing in Belly, Circle, Tilt.com, Fab.com, Instacart, Lookout, Twice, Walker & Co., 500px, Accolade, Pinterest, Fanatics, Julep, and zulily.
– “The Population Reference Bureau receives support from a number of foundations, non-governmental organizations, and government agencies. Examples of such funding include the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the United States Census Bureau, and the World Health Organization“
Node, these are the very people and organisations you claim to be creating a fake pandemic!!! This is why conspiracy theory is so useless; you can “prove” anything with it.
Wanna talk to me about evidence yet, what sort I find convincing and why?
So, our expert Node writes:
– “Actually only 178 BSE deaths worldwide”
He means humans killed by variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) not BSE which affects cattle; the 178 were in the UK not worldwide, he omits another 49 in the rest of the world despite them appearing in his own link. Such sloppy work is hard to take seriously.
But something immediately occurs to me; those 227 were indeed killed by vCJD, which is caused by meat contaminated by BSE. So is it really the case that those animals were destroyed unnecessarily?
To find out, I looked at Node’s first link, and guess what, Node has misrepresented the facts. Node’s version; “[Ferguson] Predicted 50K BSE deaths” (actually vCJD). Reality:
– “The Imperial College team predicted that the future number of deaths from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) due to exposure to BSE in beef was likely to lie between 50 and 50,000″
50 < 227 < 50,000 – so the team that included Ferguson got it right.
I don’t think I’ll bother looking any deeper. Would you trust Node to make medical decisions for your family? Would you even buy a used car from him? What a sloppy twit, leaping to his preferred conclusion and not even bothering to read his own sources. Jeez.
Node, you’re just a conspiracy theorist. I can help you fix that if you like.
OK Node, forget that débâcle and never recall it again, right? Onwards and upwards to your next glory! As Tony says, some have been had far more than others…
Regarding flu vaccines, what I think happened there was this. The flu vaccination is a precaution, so it has to be administered before the outbreak, so obviously it has to be manufactured before it can be distributed and administered, and this was done and cost a lot of money (a political issue).
When the flu actually came around, a lot of people turned out to have immunity to it, especially older people, who are the ones expected to be more vulnerable, so the vaccine proved less necessary than it might have been.
Now I’m no expert, so what I wrote above might be wrong. But at least I know I’m not an expert. I don’t just see a big price tag and scream “conspiracy!”, assuming I know better than all the world’s experts. It takes a special type of intelligence to do that.
Now. Tony M. If you looked at the total excess death figures, ie. the huge rise (and subsequent fall) in the UK death rate since March, you’d realise that it wouldn’t matter even if we had no test at all, there’s still overwhelming evidence for a deadly pandemic.
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