Professor Brown’s Confession
I read an article this week which really got my attention. It was describing the “confession” of Patrick Brown, an academic who is a Co-Director of Breakthrough Institute Climate and Energy which is an institute of a world-famous university. He revealed that he recently submitted a joint paper as principal researcher along with seven other post-doctoral researchers which he knew was not “the full truth”. Now he was not expressing a commendable epistemological humility here, admitting his lack of godhood in not knowing everything there is to be known about the subject of his paper, what he meant was very specific because he spelt it out very explicitly.
He deliberately altered what he presented in his paper to fit with the editorial policy of the journals he had submitted to, in this case the prestigious Nature. He also admitted the same in respect to work in the competitor journal Science. Now this might not seem so scandalous, we all know what it is to need to comply with certain restrictions and policies, or to avoid controversial language, or to present a paper at a level with the audience in mind. However what Asst Professor Brown described was something qualitatively very different.
The journal editors had made it clear that they would only accept papers which matched the narrative that they wanted to establish and consolidate as “good science”. It seemed that they were not even interested in papers that predominantly presented the “accepted” view and raised peripheral questions but only papers which presented research in such a way as to consolidate the desired narrative. In this case the required narrative was clear, only “[catastrophic] climate change caused by human activity” was to be presented in research as causing the “wildfires” around the world, such as in Greece, Maui and Canada and that future catastrophes were likely to follow. It is not difficult to demonstrate that this is substantially a false claim as recognised by Professor Brown himself in that he did not include those factors in his research because they would weaken the causal claim of the paper. Thus, he had also made it clear that he had deliberately presented the data in the most “sensational” manner with non-standard metrics and emphasised only that data which matched the desired outcome.
The professor made it perfectly clear that he considered this practice “normal”, and that “savvy” researchers knew exactly what they needed to do to get published. He realised that this was not beneficial as to the education of the public or to the progress of knowledge generally or even for the integrity of the science. However, these were irrelevant considerations; for the greater social good and for the benefit of future sponsors of the research, it appears it was perfectly acceptable to doctor the research at the behest of the journals, or third-party interests which sponsored those journals.
Of course, this was not the first time that I had heard of dishonest research, but you normally heard of it after the fact rather than upfront from the researchers themselves, unless they were deliberately wanting to demonstrate the bankruptcy of academia by running a hoax. For example, the university of East Anglia in the UK had another climate researcher in a “scandal” describing in email correspondence how to fiddle the data with “tricks” to match the required “humans are causing climate change” narrative. That and the fact 2 million in research funding was riding on the “proper” presentation of the “facts”.
Similarly, COVID “research” was also some of the most dishonest research known to humankind. The three most prestigious medical journals had all conspired with the drug companies in publishing fake papers with the primary aim of discrediting a generic anti-viral which had a proven track record of over 60 years in order to advance the case for mRNA “vaccines” which in itself had an interesting back story. Since 2016, the definition of “vaccine” had been changed twice to allow what was really better described as therapeutic gene therapy to be reclassified as “vaccine”. Vaccine had historically been those compounds which prevented you from getting the disease and prevented you from transmitting the disease; no one even tries with a straight face anyway, to pretend now that the mRNA vaccines match that definition, but Pfizer are over 100bn richer courtesy of the fake science.
Three faulty papers were published in the journals, one was withdrawn within 6 weeks and the other two were comprehensively debunked [1] as faulty. The fakery of the studies was extreme. One had faked a RCT study where 10000 patients were allegedly enrolled. The senior researcher was a senior figure at a university hospital I believe and remains in good standing; he should have been fired and banned from medical practice and evicted from his university chair. Another paper had such a defective methodology that the government of the country in which the study was conducted considered criminal charges; as one independent doctor had commented, all the study had shown was that if you gave known toxic doses of the anti-viral under investigation to COVID patients, you would poison them, but the researcher had classified them as “COVID deaths” and described the anti-viral as ineffective.
When the ex-French medical government minister, once tipped to be head of the WHO as principal competitor in the race with the “Dr” Tedros the current head, questioned one of the journal editors as to how they all had published such defective and dishonest research, his response was candid and simple, the “drug companies” that were now major sponsors of the journals had “instructed” them to do so. There were willing “peer reviewers” waiting to rubber-stamp the papers and it was published as cutting edge “science”. Perfectly reasonable when over 100 billion in vaccine receipts was at stake. It was the mother of all scams,[2] and they pulled it off and continue to do so as far as pretending that new vaccines are possible against the splintered and mutated Sars-Cov-2.[3]
One of the editors was even more forthcoming describing how they were to present the requested outcomes by publishing papers written by those with outrageous conflicts of interest. One paper was published which had 10 authors and estimated that worldwide around 100000 deaths had been prevented because of vaccination I believe in the 18 months or so since the vaccine was made available, which to be perfectly blunt was hardly a justification for the pushes for mandatory vaccination which were growing louder and stronger even as the pandemic was retreating. However, out of the 10 authors, 5 worked for the drug company who developed the vaccine and the other 5 were contractors employed by the drug company and we are still happy to call it “science”.
Perhaps it is not logically impossible for researchers with high ethical standards to do a genuine study but in the era where doctors working for MARS confectionary can be interviewed and tell us that “chocolate is good for you”, we need to take the results with not just a grain of salt, but a full salt cellar. Are you really going to publish a critical paper of that magnitude unless you already had an exit strategy into another position? At best, a critical paper that undermines your company’s products would probably be published internally, and corrective actions taken before the product ever came to market. The paper was vaccine propaganda, plain and simple.
The Wider Picture
There seems no doubt that we are in an epistemological crisis at the moment, and this gets reflected in the dishonesty freely admitted to by our researcher. There is a crisis with regards to the public’s access to good science and the academy’s commitment to it. Nietzsche once wrote that “the falsity of a proposition is no objection to it” and he had in mind that what mattered was the practical utility of the proposition, does it help you to get what you want? If bald-facing lying served your ends, so be it; anything else was a hangover from the snivelling Christian era and we needed to put our grown-up panties on, live in the real world and cast off those moral shackles of honesty, compassion, and fairness and above-all, abandon truth as a legitimate aim of research.
Life without God was the coming of Age of Humanity, perhaps nicely captured in the humanist and positivist manifestos of the 1930s; unfortunately, we all know what happened before the ink was even dry on those documents. We also had the political pragmatism of Dewey and the scientism of the positivists who similarly believed that “science” could somehow solve the problems of society. It is worth remembering that this great coming of age of humanity was marked by more violence and deaths in the name of the self-same liberation from capitalist bondage, with the blood on the hands of the Marxists surpassing even the medieval catholic church with deaths per capita of humanity, notching up at least 120 million deaths. In a more sophisticated form, we had the scientific behaviourism of the 20th century that took as its starting point that human behaviour was completely deterministic, the implication being that there was no freewill and that freedom was “an illusion”, given the correct environment with the correct stimuli, human beings would behave in an egalitarian manner.
Common to all these “scientific” positions was the quasi-religious belief that if we just spend enough time watching the human subject on the hamster wheel of life, we will be able to understand that behaviour and engineer a perfect society. Probably the most famous and articulate of the behaviourists, Harvard Professor B F Skinner (who completed his final paper on the day he died and lectured to a packed auditorium two weeks prior), argued unapologetically [4] that concepts such as freedom and individuality, political liberty etc. were unscientific, metaphysical artefacts and we needed real, true scientific planning of society.
The problem of these “scientific” solutions was that they begged the question as to why we would consider some things “problems” and others not. That would seem to require an ethical presupposition established on a non-pragmatic, non-behavioural basis and undermine the entire thesis. The problem then becomes that ethics requires some kind of metaphysical presupposition if it is not merely to be judged arbitrary. Yet common to all their positions was their rejection of any metaphysical or spiritual logos such as a personal God. There was no longer a “universe” (and hence a university) where we seek some underlying story that relates the disciplines together as a symbiotic whole, building a human house of truth and knowledge but rather a “multiverse” where all our conceptualisations are arbitrary and fluid, there are many voices and a truth for me and a truth for you but no Truth. One person’s “problem” is another person’s emancipation.
“Science” merely becomes what me wants it to be, value-free and arbitrary. Professor Brown is perfectly justified in making his own way by any means necessary, there is no rhyme and there is no reason. We seemed to have resorted to the cynical position of the ancient Greek Parmenides, that “justice” was merely that conception that suited the most powerful in society, or those that have bubbled to the top of the social-Darwinist gene pool and can make everything better for everyone else by merit of their birthright, even if that means mass sterilisation, depopulation, and “re-wilding”. COVID-era policies were the most blatant attempt to date for a bit of scientific planning, with emergency legislation sweeping aside centuries worth of our collective struggles for political freedom and protection from our governments.
At the present time we have the constant and deafening whine of “climate change” as the next big thing that requires the sacrifice of our individual liberty in the name of environmental responsibility, everything will be provided for you within 15-minutes of home and national or international travel will require special authorisation.[5] With cars “smart” and electric, they can be turned off remotely to ensure your compliance for the good of the environment, both socially and ecologically. With currency digital, your access to food and resources can be tightly controlled, as modelled in COVID-China.[6] All this is “scientific” planning, free from any obsolescent moral scruples resulting from a primitive view of the world.
Perhaps this is all indicative of the last gasps of Western civilisation. We still require some facsimile of rationality, warrant and justification for what we do. We argue our public policies should be “evidence based” but then proceed to fabricate that evidence with seeming impunity for the academics and their sponsors with the big chequebooks. There seems little doubt to me that there needs to be a new generation of universities and colleges committed to academic honesty and excellence with a funding model that keeps them independent of governmental or industrial interests. Universities once more need to be centres of innovation that are financially independent of would-be third-party sponsors or interests. This would seem to imply students would need to work through university to fund their studies (as fees would be far higher) or be sponsored through their studies by employers who would expect results; this too, would be in marked contrast to the excess, dissipation and causal debt now associated with modern university life in the Western world. In my personal experience of mentoring students on work experience or placements, students emerge ill-prepared in knowledge, socially and vocationally. Perhaps in finding the Aristotelian (and Christian) virtues of discipline, knowledge, honesty, and truth in student life, can we return to them in research.
Further Reading
Coleman, Vernon. Vaccines Are Dangerous – And Don’t Work. European medical journal. 2014. Kindle Edition.
Mounk, Y., “What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia”, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/
Sherman, Y., “Researchers knowingly submit misleading papers to journals, says scientist”, https://frontline.news/post/researchers-knowingly-submit-misleading-papers-to-journals-says-scientist
Macneil, M., “When Science Goes Out To Lunch (And Never Comes Back)”, https://planetmacneil.org/blog/covid-19-thesis
[1] See for example, https://planetmacneil.org/blog/covid-19-thesis/ , pp.36ff.
[2] However, another scam has just come to light with regards to the SUDAFED medication which has made billions though in the form it is sold in most pharmacies has now been shown, after years of selling, and billions in revenue to be predominantly ineffective. Pharmaceutical companies are immune from redress in the US and have made similar liability exceptions in the EU and other nations in exchange for their products.
[3] Even now, in the US, the CDC have reissued guidance and recommended a new “booster” for everyone from six months old and up because of “increasing COVID cases”. Well, we are coming into winter and there is always an increase in respiratory diseases, COVID is so splintered and is now just part of that same “flu mix”. Any vaccine will be as ridiculously ineffective as the flu vaccine already is if it has not already been incorporated into the “flu” vaccine as an “enhancement” (this was apparently being done surreptitiously in certain vaccine resistant demographics and jurisdictions). It is as ridiculous as attempting to vaccinate against flu which is itself an annual exercise in futility in the UK at least. You pick a strain and pretend it will provide protection against all the other strains, it will not.
Natural immunity acquired by normal community exposure is a far more effective way (see Coleman (2014)) to build up a wide spectrum resistance in those groups with low mortality; those who are particularly vulnerable or particularly ill shield and isolate themselves as would be expected, no vaccine necessary. Only now are we finding how doctors were financially “incentivised” to push COVID vaccines as the “only”. Things are a little different in different jurisdictions as to at what level the “incentivisation” has to be applied as we in the UK fund public health services differently to many other nations, but financial incentives were nevertheless made available at various touch points; and the censuring of dissent and punishment for it was as equally costly.
The present push by the CDC also has a conspicuous political element with the particularly toxic political environment in the US as they approach the next major election. For the neutral external observer, there was major election fraud last time round that was primarily facilitated through electronic and postal voting (in fact, in every jurisdiction where postal voting has been used, there have been major problems with fraudulent activity) and procedural malefice (caught repeatedly on hidden cameras in what were supposed to be secure counting environments). Additionally, there was dishonesty from electoral certifiers through to the corralling of observers in the counting halls to interfere with their work.
Thus, in order to repeat “the steal” (ironically orchestrated by the very same senior politicians that warned about the possibility of the abuses of electronic voting prior to 2020, including the present VP), you need people locked down again and voting electronically or by post. It is of note, that many US-States who denied there was a problem with voting have since passed legislation to strengthen their processes. The constitutional issue regarding Mike Pence’s role in which it was alleged that he did not have the authority to return the votes to the college for revalidation, was later shown to be incorrect. In fact, he did have the authority because the rules have since been changed to prevent a VP from doing that in the future. It is disturbing that so many of Trump’s “delusions” (especially those pertinent to the Biden family cartel) have actually proved to be not so delusional after all with even some mainstream outlets now admitting “Trump was right [about Hunter]” or “Trump was right [about China]”.
[4] Skinner, B. (1976 (1971)). Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
[5] The exception being of course, that the politicians and the scientific planners themselves are permitted “offsets” to continue to travel internationally using their private jets to get to those WEF conferences in those Swiss resorts. “Offsets” are like the modern form of medieval indulgences, as long as you sponsor an environmental project somewhere, you receive some “carbon credits” that you can use to “offset” your carbon footprint. To her credit, Greta Thornberg was at least principled enough to sail across the Atlantic, rather than fly.
[6] A personal friend of mine was amongst those who had the doors of their tower block welded shut in the name of COVID-restrictions. The block survived by pooling food. If a resident went out on the balcony appealing for help, their image was captured by a remote drone and a fine automatically applied to their bank account. Other technologies were applied to travel, if you were no longer “approved” (because your social score had been compromised because of some perceived aberration), barriers on roads or walkways would refuse to open for you and you turned around and went home, then to be fined for non-attendance at work.