pandemic

Scattershooting 230128

January 28, 2023 by tornado Leave a Comment

Happy new year! Several topics have cropped up of late, not demanding a full-form entry, so I’ll resurrect an old category for a 2023 kickoff encore. As usual, topics are highlighted, so you can skip what doesn’t interest you.

Scattershooting while wondering why so many otherwise intelligent ignoranti fall for obvious, textbook conformist cult tactics employed by purveyors of the secular “social justice” ideology…

AMAZING DALLAS FIREWORKS SHOW on NEW YEAR’S NIGHT: Several times, when not setting them off myself, I’d go up Reunion Tower to watch Trinity River fireworks shows and assorted pyros doing their thing around town on July 4 & New Year’s. Now they’re launched from the tower, with lighted drones in formation as accompaniment. Spectacular! I ought to go see and shoot this sometime.

‘TWITTER FILES” REPERCUSSIONS and SO-CALLED PANDEMIC “MISINFORMATION”: Over the past couple months, several independent journalists, with the full cooperation of current Twitter owner Elon Musk, have exposed a hardline left-wing censorship agenda of Twitter users and linked content, by the corporation, in collusion with high-level government bureaucracy (mainly but not entirely FBI). This includes labeling pandemic content, by licensed medical doctors and scientists, as “misinformation”. This also includes information from peer-reviewed studies that was flagged or relegated to sight unseen. Yesterday’s ”conspiracy theories” sometimes do become today’s news. They affirm comments I made to some folks many months ago about non-expert bots and poorly educated basement dwellers—censoring posts from real-life scientists and physicians in fields such as immunology, epidemiology, virology, and general medical practice. Some low-wage tech contractor in the Philippines, nor high-level company executives without medical degrees, have no business censoring degreed, licensed physicians on medical topics! Yet these were the tactics social media employed to limit what you were being told about a crisis situation to Big Brother’s official Party line—even when the line clearly was flawed then or turned very wrong later. Thank God for watchdogs, gadflies and leakers — even if it’s the new owner dishing it out on prior management at great cost to himself.

MATURITY, SELF-RESTRAINT AND DISCIPLINE ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Speaking of Twitter, a libertarian I follow there, Curtis Scoon, posted these wise words: “I don’t want to be the person on social media who has something controversial to say about every headline just for attention. It’s definitely close to being an ambulance chasing personal injury attorney.” (My words now) …or virtue signaling to either spectral extreme. I have huge respect for such self-discipline & maturity. I aim the same. Not every topic needs instant opinion from every person. I’ve expressed my extended thoughts on this before, in this space, with, “Silence is Not Complicity nor Agreement.” I’ll comment on the issues of my choosing, at the time and place of my choice (and nobody else’s). The context was “hot takes” on the Tyre Nichols incident in Memphis. There’s more to it, but next is what I’ll say for now, in this medium of my choice:

DISTILLING the TYRE NICHOLS KILLING to the SIMPLE PLAIN TRUTH: Often, videos like the Tyre Nichols police-brutality footage from Memphis (which I won’t post here) miss crucial “before” context. In this specific case, I don’t think such context matters. I’m having a hard time imagining what “context” would justify treating any handcuffed man with such relentless, 5-on-1 savagery — basically 5 strong dudes tossing the guy back and forth between each other like a medicine ball and taking turns slugging him full force. No excuse for that, whatsoever. Even if he had violently resisted before being restrained (and that info wasn’t available from the video I saw)…once handcuffed, that’s that. His wrists are locked together with steel, behind his back, and he can’t use his arms. That was basically a gang-beating of a helpless man, in this case the gang being cops. These now ex-cops have been charged with murder and official abuse. The justice system is working as it should here. Unfortunately, this incident is being spun every which way and twisted like taffy by people with bigger social agendas. What it is, plain and simple, is homicide, and any and all who commit homicide (including cops on duty, regardless of how they look) must be held responsible.

COMMON GOTCHA AGAINST ECONOMIC LIBERTARIANISM ISN’T a GOTCHA AFTER ALL: I had to laugh recently at a stupid meme some airheaded male celebrity sent out, thinking it was a “gotcha”. The meme implied libertarians are hypocrites because Ayn Rand accepted her Social Security checks. Clearly this wasn’t the product of a critical thinker, or much of a thinker at all. You see, those checks were her money anyway, extorted from her for years before in taxes. So she had no reason (and neither do you) to feel at all guilty about getting some of it back. Too bad she, and you, couldn’t have just kept it in the first place, instead of being forced to process it through a massive, inefficient, distant, detached bureaucracy that skims so much off. And I’m still waiting in futility for anyone, anywhere, to show me where personal entitlement spending of any sort is an enumerated Federal power in the literal, black-and-white words of our Constitution.

DO YOU HAVE STUDENT LOANS? PAY THEM. This entry is brought to you by tough love from a fellow (former) debt holder. And not just any ex-student, but one from poverty: first-generation college graduate here, raised inner-city poor in Dallas with no air conditioning, who remembers with razor-sharp clarity the sounds of wailing sirens and the feel of roaches crawling up sweaty legs many summer nights. There’s not a college student anywhere in this land who has a thing new to say to me about being “economically disadvantaged”. I arrived at university with assets valued in two digits, not counting a beater car that was worth maybe $200, no parental aid whatsoever, and scholarships for which I had busted my tail, but were still woefully insufficient. I left grad school with even less: $16 to my name, and five figures in student loans. Inflation-adjusted, they match magnitudes from many sob stories I hear today. I paid off every last one in under 10 years by working rotating shifts, in a real career, for which my major of choice was chosen specifically to prepare me, using something called foresight and something else called sacrifice. Hint: my major wasn’t “gender studies” or similar useless bullshit. Unless one was targeted by illegally predatory lending, which I do oppose, I have a very hard time feeling sorry for anyone who demands that government (in other words, all of us but not him or her self) pay off debts he/she voluntarily chose to accrue. There’s a word for that, and it’s “freeloading”. My message, therefore, is clear: Yes, it is a loan. Pay it back. I’ve been there. I did, and I’m nothing special. So can you. Make better choices.

THE FED, BRETTON WOODS, GOLD STANDARD, and the RISE of CHINA: Finally, here’s a provocative, yet deeply historically informed, long-form essay by the aforementioned Curtis Scoon on how the Federal Reserve came to be, and its relationship with both American decline and the rise of Red Commie China as an economic and military power. I don’t necessarily buy into every detail he posits, but there’s a lot of basic truth here. This is well worth 15 minutes of time to read carefully and consider critically.

Ethics in Science: Fauci Must Go

October 24, 2021 by tornado Leave a Comment

As a scientist who publishes peer-reviewed research, I strongly support and favor scientific work, the scientific method with reproducibility and falsifiability, and science as problem-solver for human civilization. However, I’m not one of those who raises science to the level of a false god, to be served at all costs, morals and ethics be damned. I also cringe and anger when government gets unethical with science in any way, because that unfairly smears me by association.

Science should help to solve our problems, not cause them, nor make them worse! This is why I oppose such “scientific” endeavors as human experiments that are involuntary, unknowing, misrepresented, or deliberately physically or psychologically damaging (say, Tuskegee syphilis experiments by the United States Public Health Service, Wendell Johnson stuttering-orphan “experiments”, anything involving eugenics, “Little Albert” infant-fear test, 1955 CIA whooping-cough release near Tampa, human radioactivity experiments at the Universities of Rochester and Cincinnati, CIA’s MKULTRA subproject 68, 1950s/60s covered-up toxic, radioactive chemical releases in St. Louis, and many more).

[Have you ever noticed how many of these inhumane “experiments” have been performed or funded by government? Do you still wonder why so many people don’t trust government science? I have to deal with that blowback even in weather science, where harmful ethical problems have been extremely rare.]

Animal testing is a gray area for me, context-dependent, case-by-case. I’m not some PETA extremist who worships worms, roaches and rats. I gladly eat meat and lots of it. I don’t have a problem with most animal experimentation involving mice, insects, fish, etc. However, some are clearly and obviously cruel to anyone with even the most minuscule conscience. Pretty much anything that causes harm to animals that are common human pets definitely crosses my line.

Enter Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health. Some background…

On Fauci’s watch: Chinese gain-of-function experiments on viral bat coronaviruses were backdoor-funded via third party with taxpayer money, after it was banned in the U.S. (for good reason). This provided plausible deniability on direct funding of any sort of corona gain-of-function work in Wuhan, a semantics game Fauci cunningly and misleadingly played in testimony. Four days ago, in a latter to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, DHS admitted to very limited coronavirus GoF money laundering through a third party (EcoHealth Allaince Inc) to Wuhan Institute. Your tax money, folks! I’m highly skeptical this was limited to viruses unrelated to the one now causing so much human devastation, and am confident more will trickle out over many years, until all this smoke reveals the ultimate fire.

This full stream of Glenn Greenwald’s tweets summarizes this NIH/EcoHealth/gain-of-function insanity succinctly. Greenwald is hardly a Q-anon right winger. In fact he quotes a story from Vanity Fair, of all things, that damns Fauci badly. [Vanity Fair? Also hardly a right-wing rag — in fact, quite the opposite! Yes, it’s fair to ask why that outfit investigated this, instead of supposed journalistic titans turned woke-cult mouthpieces like NY Times or Washington Post.] I agree with Greenwald that Rand Paul is owed an apology he’ll never receive, from Fauci and NIH.

Greenwald ignores Red Commie China too much in his statements — they obviously know everything about everything happening in that country through their deep, pervasive, Orwellian surveillance state — most certainly at the Wuhan lab, and all of EcoHealth’s involvement. They knew all too well about how the pandemic began (and aren’t telling nor permitting full outside investigation) — then incompetently responded to the disease emergence, leading to its worldwide spread. Not to mention cooking their own books with low fatalities and case numbers. The CCP is very much culpable here *also*, even as Greenwald hyperfocuses on encouragement and financial support via the U.S. bureaucracy, NIH. So, back to NIH and Fauci…

Bottom line: Fauci either didn’t know about the EcoHealth GoF work, and should have (malfeasance, incompetent leadership), or did know (per the 2018 grant report Greenwald notes) and is lying. Either way, he needs to go. But wait, there’s more!

Do you like beagle puppies? Stop now if you wish not to know of recent “experiments” on them that you and I unknowingly funded, that if any of us did in our own homes, rightfully would land us in jail and labeled as psychopaths. I hate stories like this, and almost never share them. However, this is a rare exception, because you are paying for this every week out of your salary, and should at least have the option to know about it. NIH funded the needless medical torture of beagle puppies.

From another bipartisan House report: “NIAID spent $1.68 million in taxpayer funds on drug tests involving 44 beagle puppies. The dogs were all between six and eight months old. The commissioned tests involved injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them. Of particular concern is the fact that the invoice to NIAID included a line item for ‘cordectomy.’ As you are likely aware, a cordectomy, also known as ‘devocalization,’ involves slitting a dog’s vocal cords in order to prevent them from barking, howling, or crying. This cruel procedure — which is opposed with rare exceptions by the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Animal Hospital Association, and others – seems to have been performed so that experimenters would not have to listen to the pained cries of the beagle puppies. This is a reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.”

NIAID is a unit of the NIH, directed by Fauci. This cruelty in the name of science was done on his watch. He is responsible.

I find it ironic, and somewhat pathetic, that Fauci is likely to face far more heat for this than for other ways he has misled (covered up) and/or outright lied. If truly “the buck stops here”, his removal from NIH is long past due.

Scattershooting 210901

September 1, 2021 by tornado Leave a Comment

Scattershooting while wondering why “trust the science” from the left to often abruptly ends at nuclear physics or fundamental human genetics…

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THE ONE and ONLY BEST CO₂ and ENERGY-INDEPENDENCE SOLUTION: NUCLEAR: An environmentalist makes a powerful case for nuclear and against so-called “renewables” to supply energy at big scale. There’s a decades-long tradition of unscientific, mathematically ignorant, irrational fear-mongering around nuclear. Never mind that nuclear is (by orders of magnitude!) the most energy-dense fuel source, with the lowest carbon emission, the safest record of all U.S. energy sources (fewest human and wildlife casualties), the least land area used for the amount of energy generated, continual and reliable (unlike solar and wind), has the lowest lifetime total waste volume compared to all fossils/wind/solar, and so on. Truly, nuclear is the greenest of green energy. And the technology to generate more energy with still less waste on an even smaller footprint has improved hugely since currently operating plants were erected in the ’60s through ’80s. Even if the Utopia of fusion isn’t realized soon, nuclear still is the safest, most efficient steady energy source for us all. Only ignorant, petty NIMBY bullcrap, science illiteracy, anti-scientific and illogical fear-mongering, and massive bureaucratic red tape are stopping us from becoming truly energy independent, with the lowest carbon production per capita among all nations. The way there is nuclear. If it were announced tomorrow that a nuclear plant would be built right behind my property, I’d welcome it with bells on. Just tap me into the juice, nuke-man.

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PUBLIC-CRISIS MESSAGING MATTERS: Yes, as a formally published scientist, I know science matters, and changes. I also know messaging is important. As I’ve said before, consistent and clear communications matter in a crisis! Pretend for a minute you’re in a pre-pandemic time machine. SARS and MERS already have happened from remarkably similar viruses, and other RNA viruses have been studied for decades, so much already is known about such viruses in science. You’re told a coronavirus pandemic one is coming and that this will occur. Then, officially…

Let’s deny masks work, tell people not to get them, then mandate masks, then not differentiate between medical grade n95 masks & cloth rags, then say children are fine, then mask only children for a bit while telling the vaccinated to carry on as before the pandemic, officially declare vaccines as the way to end the pandemic, say the vaccines only reduce disease severity and aren’t stopping the pandemic, then reimpose mask mandates on vaccinated people, and then through all this confusing (for most folks, from their perspective) flip-flopping, express incredulous surprise that trust in institutions and expertise is being lost. Can you put yourself in another’s shoes? Do you get this point at all? Of course “the science changes”! Duh. Saying that is a straw man. The sciences of virology, epidemiology and immunology, however, existed before this pandemic, and have not changed anywhere nearly as wildly as the messaging has.

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FOLLY of CONFORMITY in LANGUAGE FADS: On a somewhat related note, I find it annoying that the “woke” politically correct feel like they have to stick their unwelcome and meddlesome noses into everybody’s business, much like the Puritanical small-town busybodies of days of yore, or over-officious homeowner’s-association pests who nitpick the most minute details of everybody else’s house and lawn in the neighborhood. Same mentality! In the pandemic, they forced spineless and overly compliant news organizations to stop saying “Wuhan” when that is factually where the virus originated, in support of an unproven, subjective perception that systemic racism was happening on massive scales against Asians because of that. Then the factually from India “Delta” variant came along, and media and citizens mindlessly comply without question. Factually, it is the Wuhan virus and the India variant, and that’s what I call them. Don’t like it? As I often say: your problem, not mine. I deal in facts, not what might offend some soft, coddled, overly sensitive, privileged, overwhelmingly white-leftist busybodies. Regurgitating the pre-scripted phrase isn’t an act of wisdom nor kindness nor tolerance, it’s instead the opposite: it’s an act of supine conformist submission to a preapproved set of opinions.

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BIG-CORPORATE SUCKING UP to CHINA:

This refusal to even acknowledge Uighur torture and genocide is craven corporate pandering to red Commie China by Coca Cola, much as we’ve seen from many other big companies and the NBA. Their “human rights” people only care about human rights when it doesn’t impact the bottom line much (if at all). Arguable and disputed sociopolitical events in the U.S.? “Woke” to the core, sucking up to the max to that bizarre conformity cult. Actual mass imprisonments, torture, and genocide of Uighurs, long-standing oppression of Tibet, a stiflingly Orwellian mass-surveillance state, and increasingly brutal oppression in Hong Kong? Cowardly silence. China has these faceless corporate suits and ties bought, paid for and leashed like obedient lap dogs. This guy from Coke even looks like a sniveling, spineless bureaucratic weasel, and is playing that part well. He should be in the movies. He wouldn’t have to act.

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RADICAL PUBLIC-SCHOOL BRAINWASHING OF MINOR CHILDREN: BUSTED! Whistleblowers, gadflies and undercover operatives are some of my very favorite and most respected people, as they are heroes of openness and justice, exposing nefarious, illegal and diabolical activity in many levels of governments and corporations. Public education is a level of government and absolutely should be subject to whistle-blowing activity and undercover reporting. Project Veritas did just that with video of a radical Marxist teacher in Natomas Unified School District near Sacramento, one Gabriel Gipes, who:

Placed Antifa flag and Mao poster on the wall of his classroom, and shamed a student who was uncomfortable about that
Like some of the Capitol insurrectionists on the opposite part of the spectrum, holds that violent overthrow of the U.S. government is a good thing
Assigned extra credit for students who attended extremist left-wing events
Promised he’s not the only teacher there inclined toward radicalizing students: “There are three other teachers in my department that I did my credential program with — and they’re rad. They’re great people. They’re definitely on the same page.”

The superintendent confirmed this “teacher” would be fired. Why was he hired? This tells me the real agenda there is: “We’ll radicalize children to the extent we can get away with it, until the PR gets too intense.” According to freelance journalist Andy Ngo, the school-board meeting included these speakers:
A black mom who said her daughter was brainwashed in 13 days
A Hispanic dad whose daughter noted that on the first school day, Gipe told the pupils that he e would turn them into “revolutionaries.” That’s consistent with Veritas’ recording where he admitted: “I have 180 days to turn them [students] into revolutionaries … Scare the f*** out of them.”
A Muslim parent calling for a criminal investigation into this “teacher”.

These left-wing “woke” cult radicals are badly overplaying their hand, causing a lot of quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) backlash among the very groups they purport to support: racial minorities (including Ngo, the black dad and Hispanic mom), Muslims, and homosexuals (including Ngo). These lunatics don’t realize this ultimately going to undermine their own cause, which will be so fun to watch. What’s not fun is the damage they do by poisoning young minds with their parasitic ideologies.

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PEOPLE I DON’T UNDERSTAND: Those who deny there’s a pandemic, or call it a “plandemic” seriously. Those who think males (that’s people with the XY chromosomes, for the biologically ignorant) should be using my wife’s or daughter’s bathrooms (and if I see a dude trying to go into a restroom with my wife or daughter, he’s not going to succeed). Those who stormed the Capitol thinking they were “making America great again,” when they were just being ignorant, herd-mentality fools. Those who think if a dude wears lipstick and a dress, he’s not a dude anymore (like putting lipstick and a pink bow on a boar makes it a sow…suuuuuure). Christians who grovel at an abject, unrepentant sinner and bombastic heathen like Donald Trump. Christians who support abortion, sexual activity of any kind outside monogamous man-woman marriage, or critical race theory (as if Jesus cared about race). Sometimes it seems so many on both sides have lost their collective and individual minds, or at least a moral compass of right, wrong and common sense.

Did I offend people on both sides with this segment? I did? Good! Outstanding! Shows I’m doing something right. Namely, thinking for myself, independently of anybody’s marching orders but God’s. And that’s OK with me. Why? Because ultimately, I will be answering to no mortal human — just God. Nobody on Twitter, nobody on Facebook, and not you either. I wasn’t put here to win popularity contests or conform to the worldly fads, but to adhere to truth. Your judgment won’t matter…only His. If you understand where I’m coming from and are cool with that, great — you get it. If not, learn and grow. Become more truly “tolerant” and “inclusive”.