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Better Choices than Woke Cult vs. Trump Cult?

August 31, 2023 by tornado Leave a Comment

I have many friends, associates and colleagues whose relationships I value, and who also voted for Trump. I do not think less of any of them for it; in fact I respect and even agree with a lot of their reasoning. It’s also well-known that I did not and will not vote for him, ever, in any primary nor general election.

Mainly it’s his wanton selfishness, disturbing level of impulsiveness, intellectual vacuity, utter absence of statesmanlike dignity, demonstrated dishonesty, and shameless personal immorality—all of which together made and make him utterly unvotable to me. Even if (being very generous here) 90% of the crimes of which he is accused are completely bogus, the balance, combined with his historic moral and ethical problems, still leaves him wholly unsuitable in personal character to return to this nation’s highest office. I have a moral litmus test and he fails it, period. “Bigly!” [BTW, the same goes for the overwhelming majority of Democrats, including all D candidates on any of my ballots since 1990. I have voted for other Rs, as well as Ls and Is. Modern Ds have swung so radically far left that the very idea of their influence in powerful positions is thoroughly repugnant…and dangerous.]

I mean this in a concerned and caring way, not a derisive one, regarding my Trump-supporting friends, whom I value as God’s children and whose overall worldviews I otherwise relate to, strongly. What if you’re being played…by Trump and by the system, as a means to the end on a larger-scale game of divide and conquer? Please read this Twitter link carefully, stop for a few moments, and give it thought. If you do, you may see how he has betrayed all of us who care about liberty, fiscal responsibility, and personal moral bearing, in several ways (whether or not we voted for him).

What if Trump himself is controlled opposition? Dare I even ask? Is that too radical a concept to even consider? I am not positing any particular “conspiracy theory”, whatsoever, period. Instead I am asking questions, and posting questions and suggestions from others that are worth giving some thought.

Just as with the “woke justice” social-conformity cult on the opposite part of the spectrum, whose derangements I see infecting a lot of otherwise brilliant minds, what easily could be considered the personality cult of Trumpism has used legitimate (and legitimate-sounding) grievances to ensnare many, and appears to have blinded them to the internal inconsistencies, double standards, un-Christ-like behaviors, and direct deviances from the values we liberty-cherishing Christian conservatives share.

And if you still vote for him in the primary anyway, I will not insult you nor think less of you as a person. I might scratch or shake my head, however.
Here is the link again. Read thoughtfully.

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: Christian ethics, conservatism, conservatives, Donald Trump, ethics, immorality, liberty, morality, morals, politicians, politics, social justice, woke cult

Heavy Blow to Scientific Credibility

July 29, 2022 by tornado Leave a Comment

The entire theory (and research thereon) that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by “amyloid beta” protein plaques, which has been around since a widely publicized and seminal 2006 paper, now teeters on the brink of implosion, or at least deep and major reworking. A six-month Science magazine-supported investigation reveals “doctored” (pun not intended, but fits) medical imaging of the sufferers’ brains. Those images appeared inside that first paper, other papers by the same authors, and on down through more papers by others that used the original work and data as a foundation.

Many tens of millions of dollars of research, across 16 years of elapsed time, is at risk, thanks to irreproducibility and perhaps outright tampering. That risk includes waste of a lot of taxpayer funding. If these images contain bogus alterations (in effect, unethically altering data to fit hypotheses), as independent analysis hired by Science magazine have affirmed, this could become the greatest scientific scandal of our time, and that’s saying something.

Science (the profession), and medical science in particular, are having a tough time reputationally right now — most of it not deserved, but some of it well-earned, unfortunately. Science (the profession) doesn’t need any more body blows to credibility. The great majority of scientists are honest and ethical. I know many in meteorology and other geosciences, and even a few in medicine. Scientists absolutely should be held to utmost high ethical standards. Still, as with any profession, human nature can infest science with bad actors too — some of whom are smart enough to get away with it, at least for awhile.

Yes, science is self-correcting, but the time for that with this topic was *before* publication, during peer review — or at the very latest, independent reproduction shortly after with retractions…but not 16 years and countless research time and money later. Better late than never in exposing potential misconduct, of course — but this has a uniquely foul stench due to the broad impact. It’s not some obscure work with an audience of ten, investigating the electrical conductivity of a piece of tree bark in Tasmania. Instead this is a horrid disease that impacts millions of people, now and future, with enormous social and economic cost, and most of us know someone(s) affected.

As a (non-medical) scientist and photographer, who is also a journal editor, I care about experimental and data reproducibility, photographic & science ethics, as well as waste of taxpayers’ research funding. I’ve also lost friends and colleagues to Alzheimer’s disease. That all makes this revelation rather infuriating.

Please read the full, long-form article (linked here again) for the full story. Here is an excerpt:

If Schrag’s doubts are correct, Lesné’s findings were an elaborate mirage.

Schrag, who had not publicly revealed his role as a whistleblower until this article, avoids the word “fraud” in his critiques of Lesné’s work and the Cassava-related studies and does not claim to have proved misconduct. That would require access to original, complete, unpublished images and in some cases raw numerical data. “I focus on what we can see in the published images, and describe them as red flags, not final conclusions,” he says. “The data should speak for itself.”

A 6-month investigation by Science provided strong support for Schrag’s suspicions and raised questions about Lesné’s research. A leading independent image analyst and several top Alzheimer’s researchers—including George Perry of the University of Texas, San Antonio, and John Forsayeth of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—reviewed most of Schrag’s findings at Science’s request. They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné’s papers. Some look like “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.

The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” says Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant. “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: Alzheimer's, bad science, ethics, medicine, peer review, photography ethics, reproducibility, research, science, science media, scientific ethics, scientific fraud, scientific misconduct

Active Repression of Journalism by U.S. Federal Officials

November 19, 2021 by tornado Leave a Comment

U.S. authorities under the last three presidents have wanted to extradite freelance reporter Julian Assange, currently held without cause in a British prison, to face U.S. prison for practicing journalism. The domestic-spying deep state hacked into the computer of longtime reporter Sharyl Attkisson during the Obama administration. More recently, using warrants signed by puppet judges, Federal thugs raided the homes of several Project Veritas investigative reporters, including its founder, James O’Keefe, over a supposedly “stolen” diary belonging to Joe Biden’s daughter that Veritas gave back without disclosure.

The common pretext between O’Keefe and Assange? The suits and ties in DC unilaterally have decided those being targeted with these tyrannical tactics are not journalists.

What? That’s not the government’s call to make. Journalism is not supposed to be subject to Federal gatekeeping in a supposedly free society. The Constitution not only provides no Federal authority over news reporting of any sort, by any means, but expressly forbids its interference therein!

When a government nominally bound by Constitutional law of press freedom simply can declare the people it is persecuting “aren’t journalists”, and get away with that, they can come after anyone for reporting anything. Then there is no freedom of the press; the Constitution is no longer an ideal, but just another meaningless piece of paper that some long-dead dudes scribbled stuff on, hundreds of years ago. Moreover, “journalism” becomes a governmentally prescribed caste system of dictated exclusivity, rendering all approved “journalists” as de facto stenographers for the regime.

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: Constitution, domestic spying, ethics, federal government, government, journalism, liberty, spying

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