Notes for a movie on research

20221008

These are note for a video in the series on coping with the new normal. As always, I will learn from your comments.

The institutions that sponsor research have been quite thoroughly corrupted by money. This includes universities, the government, teaching hospitals and academic publications. We witnessed this three and four decades ago with regard to AIDS. We have a dramatic demonstration of how the corruption works with Covid.

Anthony Fauci’s power to give and withhold grants gave him tremendous power over what got studied and what got printed. Bill Gates’ donations to the World Health Organization, universities, the Centers for Disease Control and the FDA, and numerous other organizations gave him outsized power over the decisions made by those organizations.

Fortunately, researchers are individuals, and a significant number retain the sense of pride, integrity and respect for the truth that led them to the field in the first place.

Peer review

The peer review process by which academic articles are selected for publication has been corrupted. The publishers know what the advertisers want to see, and the editors have stables of reliable academics who can be expected to give favorable reads to candidate articles. Conversely, articles that go against the grain do not get published. A notorious example last year was when Elsevier accepted and published, then retroactively retracted a peer-reviewed article on myocarditis caused by the Covid vaccines by Peter McCullough and Jessica Rose.

The big tech “fact checkers” are increasingly recognized as complicit and corrupt, and they have thoroughly compromised the once unbiased Wikipedia.  Formerly reputable journals – Lancet, MIT Tech Review, Science Magazine, Nature, Scientific American, Journal of the American Medical Association – have joined to suppress articles that go against the moneyed interests.

Solutions are in the making.  First of all, the literate public is becoming wise to the game.  “Fact checkers” are something of a joke. The informal solution is to simply publish on the Internet, as McCullough and Rose did with the article above, and let people read it.  The number and stature of people who comment approvingly is now the deciding issue.

 There are proposals to democratize the peer review process through some kind of block chain mechanism.  Though it initially appears to be too cumbersome to be practical, it may be needed if informal approaches don’t work.

Researchers

The good news is that although the administrators and institutions are thoroughly corruptible, a certain percentage of the researchers retain their integrity. Those brave people such as McCullough and Rose who will take a public stand receive a lot of support from researchers who remain anonymous but want to do the right thing.

Most research in controversial areas such as virology, evolutionary psychology and intelligence does not require vast amounts of money. Though controversial figures will not get appointments to the most prestigious universities such as Harvard, Stanford or the University of California at Berkeley, they can usually find posts somewhere and continue to do good work. They can expect periodic jihads, as woke students and administrators hassle them and outside agitators pester the University administrators. Sometimes they survive, sometimes they have to jump to another institution.

Researchers often do best work at second-tier institutions.  They may be scoffed at because they are not at Harvard. It doesn’t matter because they can collaborate with colleagues via the Internet using Zoom, Telegram and email.  The backwaters have attractions of their own. Jessica Rose and Kary Mullis like being physically in San Diego because of the surfing. They can schmooze online and at conferences.

Funding research

A virology lab requires a fair amount of expensive equipment such as electron microscopes, probably on the order of $1 million. That is more than a freelance academic could afford on their own, but not an unreasonable amount to find in a willing independent laboratory.

Statisticians such as Joel Smalley and Michael Crawford primarily need access to large databases and powerful computers to manipulate the data statistically. This is less expensive – my naïve guess would be between $20,000 and $100,000 for computers and software.  Intelligence researchers such as Richard Lynn and James Thompson also needs statistical computers, perhaps even less powerful and cheaper.

People who work primarily with ideas, such as evolutionary psychiatrist Edward Dutton and Gregory Cochran, need computers for writing and for accessing databases. They need a few thousand for subscriptions to academic publications.

All in all, my guess is that the most prominent boat rockers, the people who are challenging the false orthodoxies being enforced by big tech, Bill Gates, the government and the universities, do not need vast amounts of money to do their research. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they need courage, support and cover in their battle against the powers that want to suppress the research.

Most of the tools that are needed are available at rates that researchers, if not common folk, will find reasonable.  Libraries can be accessed online.  Elsevier, Wiley and others are affordable.  The vast databases that are needed are for the most part public domain.

Good science is been being produced by outcasts without vast financial resources. Here are some examples.

Covid and medicine

Peter McCullough
Matthew Crawford
Joel Smalley
Jessica Rose
Stephanie Seneff

Society

Richard Lynn
Ed Dutton
Michael Woodley
Kevin MacDonald
Ricardo Duchesne
Mattias Desmet

Good work is being done in smaller and middle income countries. The researchers who uncovered the nanoparticles, graphene oxide and other unexpected ingredients in the Covid injectable products were in Chile, Spain, the Philippines and other such places. If big tech is too oppressive in the United States, research can simply be done elsewhere.

The most lavishly funded research is no longer on the frontier. Government-funded biotech hasn’t given us much useful. The main result has been dangerous bio weapons. The vastly expensive nuclear colliders are interesting to nuclear physicists, irrelevant to the questions of the day. 

Governments are conducting expensive data collection in the areas of climate and medicine. Although there are preferred explanations to the phenomena they observe, such as CO2 emission for global warming and anything besides vaccines for autism, it turns out to be difficult to systematically corrupt data in the process of collecting it. First of all, the fiddling is hard to escape notice. Secondly, it is hard to anticipate which stories you will want to be telling in the future, and therefore which way to fudge the data. The bulk of the fudging in climate change has to do with interpreting the data rather than collecting it.

The same seems to be true in medical research.  Governments have collected vast amounts of data about Covid.  While collection tools such as VAERS appear designed to be inadequate, there is not much evidence of data tampering.  The same with V-Safe.  The government did not release the data until forced, but the data appears accurate.  The apparent tampering with the data in the military DMED data base highlights the problem of corrupting data.  People know.  The military gave itself a black eye, and researchers still have fairly good copies of the database before it was corrupted.

Expensive drug company research hasn’t produced many new products over the past decade. New drugs are expensive to create and often turn out to be ineffective or dangerous. Except for those that are invented in the laboratory, there aren’t many new diseases. That’s one of the reasons for the feeding frenzy we saw with regard to Covid.

Conclusion

We are witnessing in real time the degree to which money can corrupt research.  Moneyed interests are doing everything they can to distort, suppress and corrupt the process.  Their successes only make them more contemptable.  Though some promising careers have been and will be savaged (viz, Peter Duesberg, Andrew Wakefield, Judy Mikovits), other courageous souls emerge.  More than that, even the most thoroughly cancelled often have successful second acts to their lives.

Unlike education, which is terminally sick, research will find a way to straighten itself out.