Academia and the new dark age: Part 11 - Nature's Trump meltdown
Academia and the new dark age: Part 11 - Nature's Trump meltdown
According to one of the world's leading science journals, science as we know it is coming to an end.
I have a general policy of steering clear of political discussion in my posts (although my paying subscriber-only open threads are a different matter!). But when one of the two most prestigious interdisciplinary science journals in the world, Nature, publishes an article about how scientists all over the world are on the verge of a nervous breakdown over the election of Donald Trump, I figure I have some justification for breaking my own unwritten rule, and having a good laugh at midwit pearl-clutching and fainting couch-falling.
It's unfortunate that I have to preface this post with a clarification of my personal position on Donald Trump, but in our hyperpolarised world, it's a sad necessity. So here goes: I'm an Australian. I didn't have a horse in the US election race. I don't worship Donald Trump as Orange Jesus, nor do I believe that he is literally Hitler. I'm well aware of his turbulent marital history and sleazy behaviour toward women, and I know full well that he packed his first administration with more swamp-creatures than a biologist has Latin names for, and failed to fulfill at least as many election promises as any other politician - and maybe more. Nonetheless, I think he is frequently hilarious; perhaps he would have been better suited to stand-up comedy than becoming President of the United States. I'm fascinated by how hated he is by the so-called elite, as I agree with every word of Matt Taibbi's blistering critique of the self-appointed American ruling class:
"America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies who were marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed speech police.
In prerevolutionary France even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword fight to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at a mean tweet. These people have no honor, no belief, no poetry, no art, no humor, no patriotism (which is unique to them), no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off."
... and I'm also piqued by how completely and utterly fake this elitist hatred of Trump actually is, as was revealed when Joe Rogan played an old clip of Trump being fawned over by the liberal ladies who inhabit the innermost sanctum of TDS1, The View:
Furthermore, the last four years of observing the empty husk of Joe Biden shaking hands with invisible people, wandering off in the middle of photo ops with international heads of state, and stumbling through teleprompter reads, while the US ship of state sailed on at full steam, should have convinced anyone who was paying attention that the idea that the President runs the country is a sick joke.
And that's why the sight of practitioners of The Science™ melting down over Trump's re-election as the 47th President of the United States, is so totally next-level bonkers:
"Ready for a new world". Seriously. The article's title was lifted from a quote by a Polish scientist, who is evidently frightened that Donald J. Trump is going to single-handedly destroy science as we know it, all over the world, perhaps even reaching out his tiny orange hand to throttle her career:
"'We need to be ready for a new world,' says Grazyna Jasienska, a longevity researcher at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. 'I am trying to be optimistic, but it is hard to find any positive aspects for global science and public health if Republicans take over.'"
‘We need to be ready for a new world’: scientists globally react to Trump election win
Yeah, watch out Grazyna - he's coming for you, and your longevity research. Because, you know, he's a Republican.
Also having a very big sad about Trump's election was Fraser Stoddart:
"'In my long life of 82 years … there has hardly been a day when I felt more sad,' says Fraser Stoddart, a Nobel laureate who left the United States last year and is now chair of chemistry at the University of Hong Kong. 'I've witnessed something that I feel is extremely bad, not just for the United States, but for all of us in the world.'"
‘We need to be ready for a new world’: scientists globally react to Trump election win
Right, because it's not like any appalling tragedies involving incalculable human suffering, that should rightfully elicit that level of sadness, have happened in the last 82 years, is it? Civilians killed in pointless wars; lives destroyed by natural disasters; children starving to death in a world of plenty - meh. Trump elected president by a majority of voters - Worst. Day. Ever! Exactly why a Trump presidency is "extremely bad" for everyone in the entire world, Stoddart did not explain - or if he did, the article did not quote him; perhaps it's so self-evident to regular readers of Nature that he didn't feel the need to elaborate. But hey, he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, so he's obviously an expert in politics too.
However, as the article goes on to elucidate, the reason why scientists are reaching for their smelling-salts is because of Trump's "anti-science rhetoric and actions":
That hyperlink leads to this article, penned by the same author, Jeff Tollefson, in October 2020, which rips Trump for holding rallies that flouted all public health guidelines. You know, the completely evidence-free public health guidelines, including the social distancing that "sort of just appeared" and the farcical mask regulations, and all the other humiliating biosecurity theatrics that abjectly failed to prevent transmission or reduce hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 in any jurisdiction in which they were implemented? Bad Orange Man! Bad!
The article claims that Trump's administration "undermined, suppressed and censored government scientists working to study the virus and reduce its harm". He sure as hell didn't manage to censor chief virus-oracle Anthony Fauci, whose presence on regime media outlets was so ubiquitous throughout the entire scamdemic, you would have sworn he'd cloned himself. In fact, Trump (in my opinion, shamefully) handed over the management of COVID-19 to Fauci, along with Deborah Birx and Rochelle Walensky, who proceeded to enact policies that screwed up millions of Americans' lives, destroyed their small businesses, ruined their children's education and forced their elderly relatives to die alone, while failing to "stop the spread" or save a single life. And it was not the narrative-conforming government scientists, but the dissident scientists - the ones who questioned the official story about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and developed early treatment protocols - who were "undermined, suppressed and censored".
And the article insinuates that Trump's (non-existent) obstruction of public health officials - rather than the dismissal of early treatment, the restrictions on the use of time-tested medications such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and deadly hospital protocols - was largely responsible for the huge number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the US... while admitting in the next breath that "other wealthy countries have struggled to contain the virus; the United Kingdom [which imposed draconian lockdowns and mask regulations] has experienced a similar number of deaths as the United States, after adjusting for population size." Yeah, but everything bad is still because Orange Man hates science. Give me a break.
Other examples of Trump's "anti-science rhetoric and actions" that are apparently getting scientists' Y-fronts in a knot are his previous withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate agreement, his pledge to "give Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a political figure who has denied the effectiveness of vaccines, a 'big role' in his administration" and his planned reforms to reclassify thousands of bureaucrats, making it easier to fire them. Let's take these Crimes Against The Science™ one at a time.
1. The Paris climate agreement
No matter what your views on the anthropogenic climate change thesis may be, there's no denying that the Paris climate agreement was nothing more than - to borrow James Corbett's memorable phrase - a 100 trillion dollar bankster climate swindle. All that tearing of hair and rending of beards over the existential threats posed by the "climate crisis", is the modesty garment concealing the ugly naked reality: the real purpose of the Paris conference - and all previous and subsequent climate confabs - was for Big Energy, Big Business and Big Banking to hammer out the terms of the deal by which they would carve up "$90 trillion of energy infrastructure investments and the $1 trillion green bond market and the multi-trillion dollar carbon trading market and the $391 billion (and growing) climate finance industry" between them.
Besides which, even that bastion of truthiness, Wikipedia, admits that "A pair of studies in Nature found that as of 2017 [i.e. the year Trump took office for the first time] none of the major industrialized nations were implementing the policies they had pledged, and none met their pledged emission reduction targets,[107] and even if they had, the sum of all member pledges (as of 2016) would not keep global temperature rise 'well below 2°C.[108][109]". In other words, Trump's withdrawal from the Paris agreement is not evidence of his "anti-science" attitude, but a simple recognition that the agreement was a ridiculous sham that would make not a jot of difference to so-called global temperatures.
2. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Claiming that RFK Jr. has "denied the effectiveness of vaccines" is a very special kind of journalistic malpractice. Since he entered the vaccine debate, Kennedy's sole focus has been on the safety, not the efficacy, of vaccines. Eliding the two terms misdirects the reader's attention. A vaccine could be efficacious - as in, it reduces the incidence of a particular infectious disease - whilst being unsafe - as in, it carries the risk of short-, medium- and/or long-term harms. (This is certainly true of the diphtheria-whole cell pertussis-tetanus, or DPT vaccine, which decreases the risk of each of the three infectious diseases while more than doubling the risk of death, according to research conducted in the desperately poor African country of Guinea-Bissau.) As the Informed Consent Action Network has pointed out, using FDA data, not a single childhood vaccine has ever been studied in a randomised, placebo-controlled trial with adequate follow-up to detect adverse effects on health and development:
Without such long-term studies, it is impossible to make the claim that any of the vaccines administered to our children are safe, either individually or in combination. (I discussed this issue at length in Vaccines: Science, Undone Science and Anti-Science.) I sincerely hope that Donald Trump follows through on his pledge to empower Robert F. Kennedy Jnr to direct research on vaccine safety.
3. Schedule F
Nature's Jeff Tolleson describes Trump's proposed changes to the employment classification of bureaucrats as a "promise... to make it easier to fire specialists such as scientists from the US government who oppose his political agenda." Again, the hyperlink leads to yet another of Tolleson's articles, which frames this reform as "an existential threat to the future of science in the US government." Once again, this article accuses the Trump administration of "repeatedly ignoring scientific evidence and sidelining government scientists, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic". Because government scientists were such brave truth-tellers during the scamdemic, weren't they? That's why Anthony Fauci and his inner circle deliberately used private email addresses rather than their government ones to conduct their discussions about the possible laboratory origins of COVID-19, in order to subvert federal transparency laws, while Fauci publicly insisted that SARS-CoV-2 arose from a natural spillover event. And what exactly were those "sidelined" government scientists recommending, that wasn't implemented? Meaningless testing, pointless masking, counterproductive stay-at-home orders and school and business closures were the order of the day throughout the Trump administration, except in states whose governors defied the nonsense. The government scientists were listened to, more's the pity, and the policies they devised were a total disaster.
In reality, as Jeffrey Tucker explained in The Astonishing Implications of Schedule F, Trump's plan to make it easier to fire bureaucrats is intended to dismantle the unelected fourth branch of government - dubbed the administrative state - that has quietly taken the reins of power while completely insulating itself against accountability for the outcome of its actions:
"The administrative state for the better part of a century, and really dating back to the Pendleton Act of 1883, has designed policy, made policy, structured policy, implemented policy, and interpreted policy while operating outside the control of Congress, the president, and the judiciary.
The gradual rise of this 4th branch of government – which is very much the most powerful branch – has reduced the American political process to mere theater as compared with the real activity of government, which rests with the permanent bureaucracy. "
If you've ever watched the classic 1980s British comedy series Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, you know how this works. Zealous but naive politician Jim Hacker ceaselessly struggles to enact policies that he believes will benefit his constituents (and hence, enhance his chances of reelection), and to reform his department by slashing bureaucracy. Meanwhile, his Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, outwardly feigns support for Hacker, while thwarting him at every turn in order to defend the status quo - and most importantly, to head off any cut to his department's size and budget. Here's Sir Humphrey explaining to his civil service underling, the aptly-named Bernard Woolley, why it is so vital for the bureaucracy - not the politicians, whom the people elect to represent them - to actually run the government:
Substitute the British references for their US analogues (or those of your home country), and you have a pitch-perfect representation of the way that senior bureaucrats view themselves. Actually, the more accurate word for them is technocrats. Technocracy is defined as "a government or social system that is controlled or influenced by experts in science or technology." It is fundamentally incompatible with both the constitutional republican and democratic systems of government, as it is essentially a vehicle for elite domination. In the technocrat's view, ordinary people are too narrowly focused on their own self-interest, too ignorant to comprehend the specialised knowledge that the technocrats possess, and therefore wholly unqualified to vote on policies - let alone to participate in formulating them.
The technocrats - and Nature, if we may assume that Jeff Tolleson represents its views - believe that you are too stupid to know what's good for you, and therefore, you need practitioners of The Science™ - in fact, whole departments of them - to formulate and guide the implementation of every policy that issues from the government you supposedly elected in order to enact your will.
The problem with putting people whose catchcry is 'follow the science' - those who venerate The Science™ above all other sources of knowledge, insight and wisdom - in charge of making decisions that affect us all, is that, as Matthew Crawford perceptively observed,
"The phrase 'follow the science' has a false ring to it. That is because science doesn’t lead anywhere. It can illuminate various courses of action, by quantifying the risks and specifying the tradeoffs. But it can’t make the necessary choices for us. By pretending otherwise, decision-makers can avoid taking responsibility for the choices they make on our behalf.
Increasingly, science is pressed into duty as authority. It is invoked to legitimise the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such moves from the realm of political contest."
How science has been corrupted: The pandemic has revealed a darkly authoritarian side to expertise
Of course there is a role for science, and scientists, in the formulation of public policy. But most scientists have excessively narrow subject-matter expertise which renders them incapable of perceiving the big picture, and moreover, both their education and the tenure track process render them pathetically conformist and hence, highly susceptible to groupthink.
The issue of water fluoridation is the perfect illustration. For decades, scientists working in the field of public health have lauded water fluoridation as "One of the 10 Greatest Public Health Achievements of the 20th Century" whilst ignoring steadily-mounting evidence that fluoride is a neurotoxin that is particularly harmful to the developing human brain. Recently, the US District Court, Northern District of California, ruled that "fluoridation of water at 0.7 milligrams per liter ('mg/L') – the level presently considered 'optimal' in the United States – poses an unreasonable risk of reduced IQ in children" and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to "engage with a regulatory response".
Multiple cities and counties across the US have already stopped adding fluoride to their drinking water, without waiting for the EPA to issue an updated guideline, while the CDC continues to endorse the practice. That is, a judge (not a scientist) and various city and county officials (not scientists) considered the totality of effects of water fluoridation and made an eminently sensible value judgment: protecting children from IQ loss is more important than preventing tooth decay2, while scientists at the CDC refuse to update their position in response to new data. That's following The Science™.
The unbearable hubris of scientists
Of all the stunningly oblivious quotes from scientists who were interviewed for Nature's tendentious seethe-and-cope, this one took the biscuit:
"'Perhaps one of my biggest worries … is that Trump will be another nail in the coffin for trust in science', given his anti-science rhetoric, says Lisa Schipper, a geographer specializing in climate change vulnerability at the University of Bonn in Germany."
‘We need to be ready for a new world’: scientists globally react to Trump election win
No, Lisa dearie, you and your Church of Scientism brethren have scuppered public trust in science all by yourselves. When scientists abandon the scientific method itself in favour of partisan advocacy, preachy moralising and supercilious disregard for the concerns of ordinary people, they shouldn't be surprised if the public begins to view them as just another tentacle of the Leviathan of state control, seeking to throttle their independence and autonomy.
Lisa Schipper, and the other whiny little cry-bully scientists who think the world is ending because Americans just voted in a new president, should be grateful that there's any public trust left at all in their disgraced profession.
It is frankly bizarre that citizens of other countries, let alone Americans, are having mental breakdowns over the USA election.
I thought Jeff Brown's column made a lot of sense (https://substack.com/home/post/p-151398986), but of course, there was someone commenting that he was insensitive and cruel to the grief the Democrats were suffering, and that - of course! - he could never understand because he's white, male and has the incredible privilege of being Canadian.... WTF?
First rate Robyn! So many great points, especially highlighting that the unelected administration pulls the strings. Regarding fluoride, the allowable limit for Australian water (1.5 ppm) is double the USA limit of 0.7 ppm, and yet there seems total silence within our shores since the US district court's ruling at levels of 0.7 ppm. Surely there will be a knock-on effect here, or perhaps it's just my wishful thinking. Have you heard any rumblings about fluoride in Australian water since the US court's ruling?