Did Anyone Ever Believe Men Could Become Women?

By Daniel Greenfield@ Sultan Knish Blog

Did anyone ever really believe that men could become women? ‘Tipping Point’ author Malcolm Gladwell helped answer that question when he recently apologized for publicly asserting that men could change sex and fairly compete against women in sports because he was “cowed”.

No one bothered to follow up with the more interesting question, ‘What is Malcolm still too cowed to say in public’? It’s a question that also ought to be addressed to the various public figures, politicians, intellectuals and talkers, who have recanted the transgender heresy.

We know that they claimed to believe in one obviously wrong thing because of some combination of social pressure, manufactured consensus and intellectual incoherence.

What else do they hypocritically assert in public while privately doubting?

The intellectual crisis that led to Gladwell publicly asserting something that a small child, never mind a respected thinker, knew was wrong has its roots in the dual collapse of the western mind. Every preexisting moral and rational system, whether the Judeo-Christian ethos or the scientific method, is being dismantled as reactionary and is in the process of being replaced with the moral imperative of a revolutionary power shift from the oppressed to the oppressors.

This permanent state of moral emergency may not be questioned and its specific assertions are not subject to any of the religious or rational tests that once provided people with a consistent worldview based around clear principles rather than hysterical assertions that the crisis of the moment, ‘trans kids’, global warming, police shootings, Gaza or any of a grab bag of causes, is too grave to subject it to the rules of evidence in a search for the actual truth.

The Left claims that its various ideological flavors are rational and scientific, but they are nothing of the kind, instead they use ideology to pick and choose their science. That was why the Soviet Union could champion Lysenkoism and lock up actual scientists because the pseudoscience fit the Communist conception of how life should work. Not how it did work.

That is why skeptics are right to question environmentalist claims of human industry causing planetary destruction for matching all too closely with traditional leftist anti-capitalism, its luddite obsessions and the romanticization of the pre-industrial countryside, no matter how many PhDs assert that they represent expert opinion that just happens to match their politics.

The bizarre notion that men could become women by identifying as women fit a ‘Lysenkoist’ notion of human plasticity. There was and is nothing scientific to the entire thing. Doctors and researchers have brushed away past subjective claims of patient experiences with various medical conditions, even when those claims were later substantiated, chose to entirely discard basic biology here not because of any new data, but because ideology demanded it.

The transgender case rested on nothing more than special pleading, on long since discredited claims that ‘validating’ delusions about gender spectrums prevented suicides (and where else are doctors willing to prop up patient delusions, let alone perform highly risky unnecessary cosmetic procedures to validate those feelings) and its assertions about men being born with ‘female brains’ were the subject of feverish fantasies in online fetish groups, not research.

The ‘science’ of the transgender case lay not in its assertion of the positive, that men could become women, but in the negative, in its radical destruction of what (as part of this process) it dubbed the gender binary. The Left never really proves its points, rather it uses conspirational agitation, turning that which it seeks to destroy into a strawman, picks out-of-context pieces of information to poke holes in it, asserts conspiracy theories in which the strawman represents a broader systemic form of oppression and then politicizes the debate into a binary choice between supporting the victims or being one of the oppressors. That is what sucked Gladwell in and so many others liberals who fear being ‘on the wrong side of history’ more than a big lie.

Intellectuals and public figures who fell for an ideological case rather than a factual one and who confused ethics and morality with the tenets of leftist ideology rationalized the unreasonable and now that the case has collapsed have to rationalize why they did it.

Did anyone really believe that men could become women? It’s the same question as whether anyone really believed that redistribution of wealth by a centralized government could make society fair. They may not have believed that it was really true, but they believed that it was right. That is the tribute that liberals pay to leftists, agreeing to see the world not as it is, but as it can be made to be, and confusing their monstrous totalitarian delusions with idealism.

Modern liberals (rather than classical liberals) and leftists both share a belief in the overwhelming power of social transformation to make society ideal. The liberal border line used to be that the transformation had to be voluntary, rational and based on the realities of human nature. On the other side you had Marxism with its morass of conspiracy theories, hypothetical economics, tyrannical bureaucracies and grad student power fantasies. Liberals could accept socialism as long as its implementation was plausible and appeared to be voluntary.

The border line is long gone. As is for the most part any distinct liberal identity. The Democrats, a party of which liberals were once a fringe, base their plans for total social transformation on the same conspiracy theories, fantasy economics and power grabs that characterized Marxists. The only way such nonsense can hold up is with total ideological conformity. Shutting up opponents, whether timid liberals like Gladwell or vocal conservatives like Charlie Kirk, is the only way that any of what now passes for liberalism can continue to control the discourse.

Believing in a dozen impossible ideological things before breakfast is not a bug, it’s a test of the communications system. Extraordinary claims used to require extraordinary proof until it was reversed so that extraordinary claims like men can become women, there is no such thing as inflation unless companies choose to raise prices and the police are committing genocide against black people became overwhelmingly accepted by liberal institutions with no proof at all, only ideological emoting, while the existence of women, inflation and crime required extraordinary degrees of proof and were denounced as dangerous backward notions.

In 2024, Democrats lost an election built on all three of those arguments. The general public continued to believe in the existence of women, wanted police to protect them from criminals and refused to believe that inflation was a figment of their imagination or could be solved by blaming companies for raising prices. As consequential as each of these three issues are, encompassing economics, society and the rule of law, the lies are crucial for understanding the corruption of the intellectual class and their role in corrupting our discourse.

The nation’s intellectual class has been divided for the most part between radicals who will assert anything, such as that looting is a public good, that castrating children is best for them and that AI will soon bring us ‘fully-automated luxury communism’ so that no one will have to work, and timid liberals who will pretend to believe anything to keep their class and station.

Universities, publishing, nonprofits and the other venues for intellectuals have become echo chambers in which any ideologically correct absurdities, no matter how manifestly irrational, false and mad, can take hold, thrive and then be used as a purity test to purge heretics. They are venues where only liars, idiots and those who pretend to believe them can earn a living.

It can be hard to tell apart the liars from those only pretending to believe their lies, and both are easily confused with the idiots who may only be pretending to be idiots, but in the final analysis all three are members of a political class pretending to be an intellectual class. When a lie becomes sufficiently unpopular, the people who pretended to believe the liars apologize for that particular lie alone, rather than for the moral and intellectual failings that led to it.

What other lies do they only pretend to believe? We’ll never know until those lies become unpopular too. But transgender ideology offered the simplest possible common sense test to people who claim to be able to tackle the most challenging scientific, ethical and philosophical dilemmas. They failed. And the entire edifice of an intellectual class failed along with them.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Everything is To Be Questioned!

By Rich Kozlovich

De Omnibus Dubitandum, is supposed to be the motto of science. Everything is to be questioned, but while it sounds great...and it is....unfortunately in all of human history anyone who actually lived up to that was persecuted, ergo, it's never been lived up to. People will always be people so self interest, jealousy, envy, resentment, and hate all come into play.  

When Jonas Salk discovered his vaccine for polio the entire world of epidemiology condemned him because he created his vaccine from dead viruses, and all the world knew you could only create vaccines from live viruses.  Well, he was right, and they were wrong, but they never forgave him and when the Sabin vaccine was created that's what they pushed, in spite of the fact some became infected with polio with Sabin's live virus vaccine, and no one ever was infected by the Salk vaccine except when one batch was produced improperly. 

I'm 78 now and I got the Salk vaccine, a series of three shots, painful shots, and I remember it was in the news and talked about by everyone, including my family, but Salk was right.   In recent decades science has not only failed to live up to that motto, it's worked against the very idea of questioning everything, or for that matter anything that interferes with what is now the holy grail of science. Grant money.   Not truth, grant money, and when science becomes rich, it becomes politics. When science become politics, it becomes tyrannical.

Grant money, especially government grant money has made the term scientific integrity an oxymoron, so, since science has abandoned it, I've declared salvage rights and taken it as my personal motto and now I lay claim to it as my property.  When science changes I'll give it back to them.

Okay, I can hear it now.  You're a retired bugman, who the heck do you think you are?   I'm the guy who "questions everything", and I'm the guy that keeps being right.  Let's take a stroll through time and go over the three greatest scientific frauds ever perpetrated on mankind.

COVID:

>

uesday, December 23, 2014How Many Constitute 97%?   Remember when that was the daily meme from the media and the green activist?  It was all fraudulent and they knew it was fraudulent.  So, if the bugman could see this so clearly, how could all these highly educated and prominent people not see it?

Shall Every Knee Bow:   

"Darwin’s theories are not, in the modern phrase, settled science. They aren’t even unsettled science. They are educated guesses at best. To be science, Wolfe reminds us, “There are five standard tests for a scientific hypothesis. Has anyone observed the phenomenon — in this case, Evolution — as it occurred and recorded it? Could other scientists replicate it? Could any of them come up with a set of facts that, if true, would contradict the theory? Could scientists make predictions based on it? Did it illuminate hitherto unknown or baffling areas of science? In the case of Evolution… well… no… no… no… no… and no.”' - Larry Thornberry on Tom Wolfe's, Kingdom of Speech

Truth is the sublime convergence of history and reality.  Everything were told has a historical foundation and context.  Everything were told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality.  If what's present to us fails in either category, it's wrong.  All that's left to do is develop the intellectual response to explain why it's wrong.  

• Politicizing Science - A recent article in Nature lamented Trump's policy decisions to cut funding for specific government organizations and his call for investigations into studies laden with gender-based language. The scientific elite found these initiatives so unacceptable that some scientists are now threatening to leave the United States -- an act they frame as a protest............pushes for centralization imply that policy should be managed by government on the pretense of "science" making it easier to sideline dissenting voices. History is replete with examples of state-backed intellectuals failing disastrously, from Lysenko's pseudoscientific agriculture policies and Mao's Great Leap Forward, which serve as stark reminders of the dangers of state enforced science. Government shortcomings are not isolated incidents; they are systemic, impacting entire populations. Such examples underscore why science should inform political decisions, not dictate them.........Nature's aversion to these principles reveals that its priorities lean more toward political activism than genuine scientific advancement.

Kakistocracy: We are Ruled by Charlatans, Knaves, and Fools. Scientific Integrity, Part VIII

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” -George Orwell

 By Rich Kozlovich

(Editor's Note:  This is Part VII in this ongoing series, and has been sitting forgotten in my draft file. I've updated and added a lot of material, and I have a lot more I didn't use.  Here is  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and Part VII.  You may wish to view my entire kakistocracy file, which will include the articles from this series.  I had intended to add more but it was a difficult and massive undertaking and turning into a job.   RK)

Let's start with this profound truth.  The Holy Grail of science is no longer truth. It's grant money, and when science becomes rich, it becomes politics.  

As we watch the world move along embracing irrational self serving social, scientific political, and cultural paradigms were seeing societies striving diligently to cancel their culture, corrupting science with politics, enforcing a thought crimes from a small  segment of society that's never satisfied, and never will be satisfied, destroying great institutions because their leadership is filled with self serving invertebrates.  All science now must be predicated on race, just as in Nazi Germany you couldn't separate mathematics from race, primarily Jewishness.  

Lysenkoism is now rampant in American science, and just as scientists under Stalin buckled under, so too it's happening in America. Scientists who are prominent and respected are afraid to speak out for fear not only of their careers, but their personal safety. 

Censorship is now the agenda in academia, Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist from the University of Chicago, was invited to deliver a lecture at MIT but outraged activists filled the social media with demands he be cancelled because he had the audacity to call for "equal opportunity, fairness, merit-based evaluation, and academic freedom".  MIT caved and in spite of their alleged policy on openness, they demonstrate a culture of cowardice. 

Britain has now become a totalitarian state.  Anyone who refuses to go along with the mutilation of young children for transgender purposes must be made to suffer, and they're being arrested.  If you're guilty of "wrong thinking", you will not be tolerated.   This is an injustice that's being acted on, and it's being enacted on in the real world, and from what can reasonably and historically be called America's mother country.

SCIENTIFIC CORRUPTION

How The Left Succeeded - A truly evil man named Noah Harari, a futurist advisor to the World Economic Forum (WEF), told the forum that they must become the majority and leave the rest behind. He was saying we don’t need regular folks. We don’t need carpenters, plumbers, hairdressers, mechanics, automobile workers, farmers, and ranchers. They are all lesser lights. What we want to accomplish on this planet is all for us, Harari was saying.

For the WEF and other related organizations, this statement was acknowledging the globalist elites’ desire to activate Eugenics. It was introduced in the latter part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century in Russia, where all science that did not fit their desired narrative was rejected. In the end, it set back Russia for decades. It is happening here in the US and will likely have the same result setting our nation back decades if we don’t stop it. Deciding that emissions of carbon dioxide are bad with no science to support it is an example of Eugenics which disregards all science it does not agree with.......

 Corrupted science: The Left’s Machiavellian bludgeon - By Michael J. Maxwell November 25, 2021- Science is a noble human endeavor with the goal of discovering, examining, testing, explaining, harnessing, and preserving physical nature for the benefit and advancement of humankind.  Moreover, the virtuous pursuits of science serve to augment our understanding of the previously unknown.  In its purest application, science is never truly settled.  Science is not suited to reach concrete conclusions on the how, when, where, or why of the cosmic mysteries of the material universe, its creation, or its Creator.  For science, in its historically accepted proper application, is not based on conjecture alone.  Scientific theories must be proven factually, through exhaustive experimentation and testing, to become relevant, applied, and useful.  The publishing of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity in 1916 was followed by extraordinarily frustrating, peer-generated attacks on his groundbreaking science. A booklet was published in 1931 titled A Hundred Authors Against Einstein, featuring many ill-informed contributions. In total, 121 authors are identified as opponents to Einstein’s vaunted Theory of Relatively........

 Academic Ideologues Are Corrupting STEM. The Silent Liberal Majority Must Fight Back (quillette.com) Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman 18 Dec 2021 - Earlier this year, I (Anna) did something that my friends feared I would come to regret: I publicly spoke out against the intrusion of illiberal thought into science and education, with a letter entitled, The Peril of Politicizing Science, published on June 10th in The Journal of Physical Chemistry. In that letter, I drew on my own early life in the USSR, where communist ideology permeated all aspects of life, and survival required strict adherence to the party line and enthusiastic displays of ideologically proper behavior.  I noted that certain names and ideas are now forbidden within academia for ideological reasons, just as had been the case in my youth. My own home town of Yuzovka, I noted, was called Trotsk (after Leon Trotsky), then renamed Stalino after Trotsky was purged, then Donetsk when Stalin was posthumously canceled by Khrushchev. ............

Ten (10) Ways Science is Being Attacked - Jon Parmentola, commented on John Droz Jr.’s Substack site - I allege that if you look at those in the administrative structure of the National Academies, they are dominated by humanities majors. The same is true of universities and colleges. The assault on science comes from the humanities. I saw it when I was a professor. Those in the humanities were jealous because those in STEM could buy time off teaching through grants to do research. The humanities were subordinate to those in STEM. That is not true anymore.

You can trace this contempt for science to the poet William Blake, who referred to Newton’s discoveries as Newton’s sleep. The assault on the Constitution has to do with its formulation more along the lines of a scientific theory of managing governance and social behavior. It is also evident in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident……. It is formulated according to postulates like Euclid's plane geometry.

It's no accident since Jefferson was a scientist of sorts. For those in the humanities there is no objective truth or cause and effect. Their fields of research are riddled with storytelling and nonsense. That is what we are fighting. 83% of college/university graduates major in the humanities. They fundamentally practice pseudo-science by using a narrative to dismiss facts that contradict their narrative. It's the exact opposite of the scientific method......

Science Needs a New Paradigm - By Robert Arvay November 27, 2017 - Science and politics used to be very separate institutions. Where they did overlap, science was nonpartisan. The role of scientists was to provide objective evidence -- and dispassionate, nonpolitical interpretations of that evidence. Indeed, one rarely if ever could detect the political leanings of any particular scientist. 

Also, science and religion used to get along, at least for the most part. Today, that has changed, and the results include significant dangers for society. For example, the topic of climate change has produced the myth of “settled science.” Science is never settled. While we all may agree that the climate does change, there is an anti-capitalist agenda behind the claims of many scientists -- that we must radically reduce our standards of living to prevent climate catastrophe. Politics and ideology, not science, promote that so-called scientific view...........

TRANSGENDERISM

Scientists Shocked to Discover That Male and Female Athletes are Different! Brian C. Joondeph, M.D. A man is a man, and a woman is a woman. Claiming otherwise is magical thinking, fine for one to indulge personally, but not at an athletic, societal, or cultural level. It was once a commonsense belief and universal truth that men and women, boys and girls, are different, especially in the realm of athletics. With rare exceptions, men and women compete in their own categories, from high school level through college to the Olympic games and professional sports. Mixed competitions place women and men on the same team, such as mixed doubles in tennis, or dancing, either in the ballroom, or on ice. Equestrian sports are an exception, but the fact that a horse is a major part of the sport reduces the sex difference between competitors. ......

The leading ‘scientific’ agency behind so-called transgenderism allegedly knew its ‘treatments’ could be dangerous and ineffective -  March 6, 2024 by Andrea Widburg - Because WPATH has been the recognized authority for “trans” care in America and Europe, these revelations could bring down the once-powerful organization. On Monday, Michael Shellenberger’s organization, Environmental Progress (“EP”), published a report that may end the trans movement. It obtained what it says are leaked files from WPATH—the World Professional Association of Transgender Health—which has set the standard of so-called “care” for so-called “transgenderism” across America. These files reveal that the people behind WPATH were allegedly aware of evidence showing that their recommendations were unhelpful and dangerous......

Lack of Consent, Liver Cancer, Reduced Sexual Function: Internal Docs Reveal Experimental Nature of “Gender-Affirming Care” - By Tyler O'Neil, Daily Signal Mar. 5, 2024 - Doctors at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health repeatedly struggled with various side effects of what they call “gender-affirming care,” including cancer in teens, reduced sexual function, and the lack of informed consent for procedures with lifelong impacts, newly unearthed documents reveal. WPATH, a controversial organization that transgender advocates and health agencies use to justify “transgender” medical interventions, frames itself as the leading expert organization on medical care for people who identify as transgender. It has faced criticism for advocating experimental practices that ignore serious concerns about informed consent and long-term side effects.....The practice of sexually ‘transitioning’ children will be remembered as one of the “greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine,” a report commissioned by French senators stated......  

 

Bombshell Report: Trans ‘Treatments’ for Children One of ‘Greatest Ethical Scandals in Medical History’ -  The practice of sexually ‘transitioning’ children will be remembered as one of the “greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine,” a report commissioned by French senators stated. A landmark report produced at the behest of the centre-right Les Républicains in the French Senate found that the medical industry embarked upon the practice of giving children life-altering transgender treatments with little evidence of its effectiveness while ignoring the side effects. The report found that while parents were often pressured by doctors to put their children on puberty-blocking drugs to prevent suicide, there is little proof that this course of action has any better outcomes for the child........  

 

Transgender ‘affirmation’ has long-term consequences, Oklahoma City psychiatrist says “Affirming” a child’s belief that he or she is actually the opposite gender puts those children on a fast-track to medical interventions that have severe, negative side effects that cause that child to be a patient for the rest of their lives, according to a local expert.  And in most cases the gender distress expressed by children is often resolved within a few years when the child is not subjected to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

“Every single patient deserves to be treated with respect, with dignity, with empathy, with compassion, and they deserve excellent medical care,” said Lauren Schwartz, a board-certified psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Oklahoma City. “That’s not what’s going on here.”......... “social affirmation,” the practice of calling a child by opposite-sex pronouns or allowing the child to dress as a member of the opposite sex, “is not harmless.”

“Parents think that affirming their child is kind and loving. That’s what they’re told......But it’s not kind of loving to validate an untruth........That psychological pressure leads to further actions with permanent physical and mental consequences.......allowing a child to receive “puberty blockers” in response to gender dysphoria can fuel an iatrogenic effect in which an alleged response to a condition is actually responsible for creating or worsening the condition. Children who feel they don’t fit in truly don’t fit in with their peers after use of puberty blockers......

........ some medical websites claim that puberty blockers simply “pause puberty to give children time to think,” are fully reversible, harmless, safe, effective, and lifesaving.......“None of these things are accurate,”......  puberty blockers have significant side effects that are not fully reversible. Those side effects include damage to the hypothalamus, which regulates body and brain development, communication between hormones and the nervous system, sleep-wake cycles, temperature regulation, fluid balance, heart rate, hunger, and reproduction.  “These are not small things that we are impacting,”

The drugs used as puberty blockers have never received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval as treatments for gender dysphoria.....The side effects caused by puberty blockers also include diminished bone density, early-onset osteoporosis, chronic bone pain and fractures (which does not cease even when the use of puberty blockers is halted), increased risk of infertility, permanent negative impacts on adult sexual function, and cognitive impairment.  “It does impact IQ,”.........adding that the full cognitive impact of puberty blockers remains unknown.

Male patients who are given female hormones have increased risk of blood clots, tumors of the pituitary gland, strokes, high cholesterol, and irreversible infertility. Female patients who take male hormones experience increased red-blood cells (which negatively impacts the heart and cardiovascular system); severe liver dysfunction; heart attacks; depression; hypertension; breast, cervical, and uterine cancers; and irreversible infertility.

“They are going to be a patient for life,” ....... “If you arrest puberty and you put someone on cross-sex hormones and you remove their organs that produce their own biological hormones, they’re going to have to take hormones for the rest of their life.”......

CLIMATE

‘Climate fatigue’ sabotages the ‘net zero’ agenda - July 8, 2024 by Olivia Murray -A win is a win. Here’s this, from one of my favorite bloggers, and shared with me by one of AT’s dearest friends: Climate Fatigue strikes in Ireland: Most people don’t believe it harms them and have no plans to be vegetarian or give up their cars Yet another survey shows most people know what to say when asked banal questions of climate dogma — ‘Yes they are ‘very worried’. But more than half the population don’t believe climate change is going to harm them and they have ‘no intention’ of giving up meat, or their cars or their pets......

 

‘They’ shrieked about ‘global warming’ — but now they admit we were ‘accidentally cooling’ - July 8, 2024 by Jack Hellner - Is there anything less trustworthy or credible than government-promoted science?  When it comes to climate science, basically, researchers, mainstream media outlets, the UN, and the Democrats simply make things up as they go along to fit the narrative.  When the earth didn’t warm up as much as they predicted, they changed the terminology from global warming to climate change. When hundreds of dire predictions never came true, and they had no scientific data to support their policies to destroy industries and our quality and way of life, they just made things up, just like they did with COVID. Now, take a look at this, from The Washington Post, via Yahoo News: 

 

Protesters Who Conspired to Block Roads Get 4 Years in Prison A good start -  July 19, 2024 by Daniel Greenfield - The good news is that at least some of the radicals plotting to block roads are facing consequences. The bad news is that it’s happening in the UK, not in America, where there are still light gentle slaps on wrists being dispensed by leftists to their fellow leftists who block roads, vandalize museums, and terrorize people.....

Biden sending $120 million to tribes for climate change war - The Biden administration announced Thursday that it is giving Native American tribes across the country a total of $120 million to fight climate change. The Department of the Interior (DOI) is disseminating the money, which will be split into 146 different awards to support projects that enhance "climate resilience" in tribal communities. The funding is inspired in part by the administration's view that Native American populations are among the least able to prepare or recover from climate change's impacts.

 

Climate Change and a science we can trust -  The American left occasionally professes to have some investment in Christianity, but those are words, and as the Scripture teaches, by their fruits shall you know them. By their words, actions and boondoggles, the inevitable conclusion is their one, true faith is political power, and one of its principle tenets is “climate change.” Their revealed faith used to be known as “global warming,” but all of a sudden, the global stopped warming, and hasn’t warmed for some two decades. Embarrassing. Thus, the holy crusade was rebranded “climate change,” which has the advantage of being at least marginally true. The climate, like the weather, changes. Unfortunately, actual science reveals past climate hasn’t changed as they’ve claimed, so they simply ignore that science and make their own......

The results are in: How much will wind energy cost this one state’s consumers?"> - August 26, 2024 by Olivia Murray - About four times as much, with an additional three billion in taxpayer dollars—some might call this “price-gouging.”On Friday, The Wall Street Journal published an article by Gordon Hughes that (somewhat rhetorically) asked this titular question: “Why Is New York Paying So Much for Wind Power?” Hughes called the reader’s attention to the revelation that the state of New York had entered into a contract with two wind energy companies, an agreement that will quadruple the cost of energy for the consumer—and that’s including three billion in taxpayer dollars to offset the final price per megawatt-hour—which is “far above the break-even cost of generating electricity.” Some might call this… “price-gouging” and “corporate greed.” (Just not the progressive Democrats sanctioning seemingly-endless corrupt business schemes in the “green energy” sector with the public’s pocketbook and the power of the pen.) Mike Shedlock at MishTalk breaks it down here:.....

 

MEDICINE 

 

The ‘Can We?’ and the ‘Should We?’ of Science- The remarkable journey of the COVID-19 virus — from bat caves in Laos to freezers in Wuhan, through test tubes and gene-editing machines and “humanized mice,” and finally out into the rest of the world and through your lungs and mine, often two or three or four times by now — has made a lot of people think long and hard about whether they can trust scientists, as a whole, to do the right thing.  As well it should have.  Defenders of the status quo are quick to admonish the plebs for not trusting the experts, as they point to the fact that most professional virologists are in favor of keeping gain-of-function research going.  How can you, a pleb, act as though you know more about virology than the average virologist?.....

 

Junk Science Thirteen Years Ago

By Rich Kozlovich

I published this on Friday, November 24, 2011 calling it, This Week With Steve Milloy, saying:

My theme this week has been about alternative energy and what an abject failure it has been. All of which was perfectly predictable. We tried it during the Carter administration and it failed then. Did the technology get so much better that we would think it would work now? No! At least Carter had the excuse of ignorance…They just didn’t know then, although I have few doubts that those who worked with the engineering problems knew right from the beginning it was going to be a failure. However...this time we had some history... we knew this time it had to fail. There really is no fixing stupid. The articles linked here are a small part of what Steve and his staff link each week. I try to get the things that interested me the most. I you wish to see all of it go to Junkscience.com.

I have to point out this was 13 years ago and nothing has changed.  We know the scientific fraud perpetrated to promote global warming initiatives, we know alternative energy is a bust, we know the EPA is corrupt to it's core, we know sustainability is a code word for the imposition of big government tyranny, and we knew it 13 years ago. So why are we still listening to these misfits promoting it.  Nitwits like John Kerry who thinks the world would like Russia better if they were more concerned about emissions.  How delusional is this man?  However, we know two things for sure from that.  Kerry is a blithering idiot, and we dodged a gigantic bullet when it wasn't elected President.  We can thank the Swift Boaters for that, not Karl Rove.  

Also, I would like to throw in this July 14, 2014 piece by Hank Campbell entitled, Sexist Weather And Hermaphroditic Frogs: The Problem Of Faux Peer Review, and the reason why is I'm working on a piece highlighting the Lysenkoist mentality that permeates modern science today.  That politically motivated embrace of junk science has had a massively negative impact on humanity, whether its been about climate change, alternative energy, covid, or any number of junk science outrages they've embraced.  This is just another example of it.

Anthropogenic Climate Change Fraud

Climategate 2.0 is here!
More devastating Climategate e-mails were released today. We’ve covered juicy ones in the posts listed below. More on the way. Read ‘em all. They validate EVERYTHING the skeptics have been saying. Viva les sceptiques!

Green –Irrational, Corrupt and Misantropic

Lack of electricity, development, kills 1.5 million Nigerians annually
“Poverty is a death sentence” states whoever publicly released the Climategate e-mails and they are so right -WHO Projects 1.5 Million Cooking Stove Deaths In Nigeria — The World Health Organization (WHO) has projected 1.5 million annual premature deaths in Nigeria because of household air pollution from traditional cooking stoves, a Ministry of Environment official says. Quoting from a WHO report, Bahijjatu Abubakar, the National Co-ordinator of the Renewable Energy project of the ministry, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) here Tuesday that the projection could affect the world at large, especially sub-Saharan Africa. Abubakar said the WHO data also predicted that the premature death rate would be larger than that caused by malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

Strassel: Stringing Up Gibson Guitar
Aren’t trees the ultimate renewable resource? Kim Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal: On a sweltering day in August, federal agents raided the Tennessee factories of the storied Gibson Guitar Corp. The suggestion was that Gibson had violated the Lacey Act—a federal law designed to protect wildlife—by importing certain India ebony. The company has vehemently denied that suggestion and has yet to be charged. It is instead living in a state of harassed legal limbo. Which, let’s be clear, is exactly what its persecutors had planned all along. The untold story of Gibson is this: It was set up…

Is sustainability science really a science?
Past the fact that this is obviously a sad day for the once proud Los Alamos National Laboratory, “sustainability” is a really stupid and dangerous notion…..“Sustainability” is not a science; it’s an excuse not to growth and develop. Thomas Malthus trial-ballooned sustainability in the 18th century — and he was dead wrong. But at least he intended no malice. The modern Malthusians cynically use sustainability to thwart capitalism. We are aware of only one serious sustainability project that was ever attempted — and the enviros killed it.

Horner: A Summary of James E. Hansen’s NASA Ethics File
NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.

Horner on EPA’s Jackson: Whoa! Which time are you lying?
Chris Horner points out the inconsistencies in Lisa Jackson’s rationale for EPA regulating greenhouse gases.

Alternative Energy

Allianz: ‘Green’ energy could trigger catastrophic blackouts
‘Unstable’ renewable energy sources increase the risk of ‘supra-regional’ electricity blackouts with multi-billion pound consequences, insurance giant Allianz has warned. ‘Unstable’ renewable energy sources increase the risk of ‘supra-regional’ electricity blackouts with multi-billion pound consequences, insurance giant Allianz has warned. Green energy could trigger ‘catastrophic’ blackouts – Solar panels and wind turbines are a “volatile” source of power with fluctuations in the electricity supply risking “grid instabilities” and triggering wide-scale blackouts. Ageing infrastructure and increasingly cross-border electricity networks have heightened the likelihood of a devastating collapse of power supplies lasting months and covering several continents, according to the joint report by Allianz and the Chief Risk Officer Forum. In eastern Germany, turbines in strong wind can produce more than all German coal and gas plants put together, while the need to switch off turbines in high winds causes a drop-off in electricity of 12GW – equal to two nuclear power plants. Outages are likely if there is too little demand or storage capacity to accommodate the jumps in supply.

Bill Frezza: Alternative Energy’s Alternate Reality
The “alternative energy” experiment is unraveling, having barely begun - Alternative Energy’s Alternate Reality – Creating a “green energy” economy may be the most daunting central planning task ever attempted. It entails nothing less than the reengineering of our entire energy infrastructure. And, like all central planning schemes, it is based on a roadmap that eschews real-world experience and sound economics in favor of utopian ideology driven by political connections. Now the experiment is unraveling, having barely begun. As the parade of government-subsidized failures like Solyndra, Stirling Energy, SpectraWatt, Evergreen Solar, Beacon Power, and others mount, now is a good time to look at how all the pieces of the alternative energy puzzle are supposed to fit together—and what happens when they don’t.

Experts fear cost of California renewable energy goals
California’s increasing use of renewable power is going to hurt consumers - California’s increasing use of renewable power will come at a price, pushing up electricity bills across the state. And while it’s impossible to tell how big the cost to consumers will be, some experts fear the total cost of renewable energy in California will be in the billions of dollars. In the next three years, many long-planned solar plants and wind farms will come online, bringing California closer to its goal of getting one-third of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020. As soon as they start delivering power to utility companies, the utilities’ customers will start paying for that electricity.

Of course it’s renewable energy – it just relies on fossil fuels
Although it sounds like an advertisement for ladies’ undergarments “firmed and shaped” actually refers to intermittent “renewable energy” made useful with fossil-fueled “spinning reserve” CleanPowerSF will still rely on fossil fuels despite claims – City officials boast that the proposed CleanPowerSF public power program will offer consumers 100 percent renewable energy, but for some that sounds a lot better than what is really behind the green label.

Reformed Leftie/Greenie challenges energy statism
Robert Bryce is a reformed Leftie/greenie. The solar array he installed on his roof was a bust, and he followed the logic of energy density to conclude that wind, solar, water, crops, plants, and wood would not allow energy to be mankind’s master resource.

Gas beats renewables: fund manager
As remarkable as it seems, energy-dense fuels are more value than dilute power sources

Royal Wind Slam Update: Duke ‘spot on’
“Former Chancellor Lord Lawson yesterday led the backing for Prince Philip after he branded wind farms ‘absolutely useless’.”

The ‘Hurtful’ Idea of Scientific Merit

Ideology now dominates research in the U.S. more pervasively than it did at the Soviet Union’s height. 

By Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov April 27, 2023 

Until a few months ago, we’d never heard of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, a peer-reviewed publication whose aim is to promote “free inquiry on controversial topics.” Our research typically didn’t fit that description. We finally learned of the journal’s existence, however, when we tried to publish a commentary about how modern science is being compromised by a de-emphasis on merit. Apparently, what was once anodyne and unobjectionable is now contentious and outré, even in the hard sciences. Merit isn’t much in vogue anywhere these days. We’ve seen this in the trend among scientists to judge scientific research by its adherence to dominant progressive orthodoxies and in the growing reluctance of our institutions to hire and fund scientists based on their ability to propose and conduct exciting projects. Our intent was to defend established and effective practices of judging science based on its merit alone.................

The crux of our argument is simple: Science that doesn’t prioritize merit doesn’t work, and substituting ideological dogma for quality is a shortcut to disaster. A prime example is Lysenkoism—the incursion of Marxist ideology into Soviet and Chinese agriculture in the mid-20th century. Beginning in the 1930s, the U.S.S.R. started to enforce the untenable theories of Trofim Lysenko, a charlatan Russian agronomist who rejected, among other things, the existence of standard genetic inheritance. As scientists dissented—rejecting Lysenko’s claims for lack of evidence—they were fired or sent to the gulag. Implementation of his theories in Soviet and, later, Chinese agriculture led to famines and the starvation of millions. Russian biology still hasn’t recovered. ..............To Read More......

Points to Ponder

Progressives are by their very nature contemptuous of the natural order of things.  Everything can be improved by their superior intellects.  By virtue of the purity of their motives and the advanced understanding we have these days, they can impose policies that violate human nature and, they think, prevail.  The Marxists are explicit in their promise that communism will create a "new man" (now updated to read "new person").  Self-interest would no longer operate in the communist utopia that would follow the supposedly transitory period of "dictatorship of the proletariat."  "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."  Never mind who chose to lay about and who chose to work hard...

Of course, human nature being immutable, the "vanguard" in charge of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in every single communist country has always held onto its own power and privileges and led societies where the gap between the lives of the elite and the masses dwarfed that of any capitalist system.  Trying to change human nature — or any other aspect of the natural order (see, for example, Lysenkoism) — inevitably produces outcomes that are at best hilarious and at worst, catastrophic - Thomas Lifson October 2, 2021 Saturday schadenfreude: Prog thinks she can change nature, suddenly (and hilariously) discovers she can't

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 Biden insists that 97%-98% of the population must be vaccinated to end the COVID risk. However, as it seems possible that mass vaccination is a trigger for aggressive new variants, one can’t help thinking that he wishes to propagate the virus going forward to the midterm 2022 elections and beyond. That would explain why Biden and his CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have overruled the CDC’s own advisory panel of experts’ recommendation against booster shots, further politicizing an already fraught issue: Forcing a gene therapy agent onto Americans............

On a personal note, the FDA has failed in its mandate to protect the public. As a retired medical device design and project engineer, I can tell you that the sheer number of deaths and adverse reactions (which may run to the thousands domestically, with this just the latest example) should be unacceptable. Apparently, the FDA has become a tool of the DNC and its silence is deafening about vaccine safety. The only bright spot was the CDC advisory panel’s sober recommendation about boosters, which its Director promptly ignored.

The FDA has an obligation to safeguard the public and it’s failing in that duty considering that the fully vaccinated are contracting COVID as a breakthrough illness in too many cases. We have cheap and effective therapeutic drug therapies that have been proven to defeat this virus, though we are denied their use. Decisions about therapeutic drugs should be between ourselves and our physicians, free from government interference and the creeping tyranny of the DNC.

Why, are we only given an ineffective so-called genetic vaccine; in a vaccinate or nothing proposition, instead of proven treatment? And why does Biden seem determined to make 98% of the country guinea pigs for a leaky vaccine and endless boosters?

Remember Afghanistan. God help us. - Alan Halbert

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Whether it is anti-vaccine content or politically incorrect discourse, free speech is under heavy attack in America. Take the case of philosopher and pedagogist Peter Boghossian, a Portland State University professor who recently resigned from his position in a searing open letter in which he accused the administration of fostering an environment hostile to intellectual inquiry and dissent.  “Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues,” he wrote. “Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.” You might say he’s reinventing the wheel -- well, right, but Boghossian is a liberal, a liberal who points the finger at the illiberal university. In his resignation letter, he claimed that when he tried to speak out against harmful “illiberalism,” he faced intense reprisal. “The more I spoke out about these issues, the more retaliation I faced,” he wrote. Is it a sign that enough is enough?

 Diligent disciples of postmodern philosophers of the Frankfurt school and Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, who laid the foundation for the left’s slow takeover of the culture, leftists successfully infiltrated schools, religion, art, entertainment, the family, and, what is more, the language. Knowles’s subtitle, after all, speaks volumes: controlling words means controlling minds. What college campuses have become -- centers for leftist indoctrination -- is proof that there is a semantic context in which the game’s already lost before it starts, regardless of one’s personal feelings and beliefs. It was the leftists who won the game of semantics, and therefore, says Knowles, it is they who can set the terms and premises of any debate, especially those within elites and other important segments of public opinion and decision-making segments, and thereby win every time. If this isn’t a fight to the death, I don’t know what it is. -  S.R. Piccoli October 3, 2021 The Left and the Control of Meaning

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A thousand-piece puzzle spread out on the dining room table is easier to put together than the testimony from our top military and civilian leadership regarding America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. One of the Generals slouched his way through the hearing. Another General was defensive about improper negative interviews he gave regarding his former boss. The Secretary of Defense shifted blame for the whole thing to others and then dodged responsibility for cleaning up the mess he was partly responsible for creating. This is our top military leadership?  

 

When one is faced with a thousand-piece puzzle, one starts by finding the straight edges. The puzzle has a border. What is the ‘border’ for these witnesses? The border is what our Constitution provides.  If this has the ring of ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ it is because there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen regarding the War in Afghanistan.........Their ineptitude has cost many innocent lives. How our country is left with ‘woke’ versus ‘warrior’ in our military leadership may be partly explained by Obama’s military purges.

Isolating one issue at a time, gathering facts on the issue, and then drawing logical conclusions is part of the citizen evaluative process so important in our Republic. The Congressional hearings were very informative. By design, 1000 pieces of our national puzzle are now thrown to the public in the form of one disaster after another to encourage citizens to throw up their hands and give up on determining causation and accountability. The People are the Sovereign, however, and must judge performance to determine who is to represent them.  Eventually, as each piece of the puzzle is painstakingly put together, and action steps demanded by the public at each stage, the whole picture will be seen. What picture might this turn out to be?  The Swamp. - By M. E. Boyd October 3, 2021 The puzzling oversight hearings regarding the withdrawal from Afghanistan

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Throughout the history of civilization, people have been dreaming of a perfect world -- full employment, full satisfaction of material and intellectual needs, and equal distribution of wealth -- only to discover, to their disappointment, that this utopian system does not exist on this side of the grave.  Nevertheless, the illusory ideas of economic equality transcend time and appeal to people of all colors and races. If the supporters of economic equality, including Marxist graduates of American universities, absorb human history, they may realize that the only historical datum that points to economic equality goes back to the era of primitive communism. Ten thousand years ago, before farming, people were forced to obtain food collectively. Everything that was produced was immediately consumed. This primitive society produced no surplus and created no wealth. Under such arrangement, the private property was limited to personal articles of clothing, hunting tools, etc. resulting in total economic equality -- in absolute poverty. Ironically, this is the only way economic equality can be achieved -- economic equality and wealth are mutually exclusive.

Inspired by human’s inherent desire for well-being and passion to extricate himself from misery, wealth creation became the locomotive of economic growth. Capitalism stands out as the greatest wealth generator and distributor that has created more wealth during the last 250 years than all preceding civilizations combined in 7,000 years.  Aristotle observed this phenomenon 2,400 years ago when he concluded that, "The worst form of inequality is to make unequal things equal."

During the 20^th century, almost as if in accordance to some natural law, socialism marched triumphantly around the globe with intellectual and moral impetus to shape the world in compliance with its values. However, by the end of the century in most socialist countries, redistribution of wealth had reached the end of its potential, egalitarian values gradually eroded and socialist economies spectacularly collapsed.

The proponents of economic equality failed to recognize the immutable fact -- freedom enables people to use their ingenuity to generate wealth, whereas coerced economic equality suppresses the very freedom required to innovate and begets poverty. The greatest moral injustice is an attempt to regulate (control) wealth by the people of limited abilities who are seeking to satisfy their unlimited needs under the banner of self-serving definitions of justice and fairness.  But no lessons of history will dampen the magic of equality’s divine providence. To sell the ideology, the American socialists insist they have no intention of creating an egalitarian society; they just want to reduce the gap between rich and poor which they failed to define in commensurable terms. As long as there is a gap, the socialists will carry their convictions toward the ultimate objective -- making all of us, who are unequally rich, equally poor. 

The embracement of the malignant ideology, which signifies the total inversion of American historical traditions and values, demonstrates the magnitude of America’s psychological and political demoralization. The country is no longer having the self-confidence to define its choices. In retrospect, Marxism would never take root in America if great statesmen of earlier times that aspired to equality in liberty had not completely died out and replaced by leaders of lesser wisdom who pursue equality in perpetual human misery. -  Alexander G. Markovsky October 3, 2021, Inequality -- the Engine of Prosperity

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Yes, the Kamala cackle is incredibly annoying. The Democrats briefly thought that maybe, just maybe Kamala Harris would grow out of her repulsiveness and somehow rescue them from the doom that Joe Biden's deteriorating mental faculties portend for the party (and, incidentally, the nation).  Four days ago, The Hill optimistically headlined, "Democrats see Harris as major player in midterms," to which many conservatives (including me) reacted with the Dirty Harry catchphrase, "Go ahead, make my day."  She hasn't been subjected to "the lid" the way Biden is when he loses all lucidity, but when it comes to Kamala's visibility and popularity, Mies van der Rohe's axiom on modernist architecture applies: "Less is more."

That strategy unexpectedly fell apart when she made what was intended to be an uncontroversial visit to George Mason University to discuss "voting rights," which in DemSpeak means offering maximum opportunities for vote fraud.  It should have been a safe topic for her.  Lots of canned phrases such as "voter suppression" and students at a second-tier state university shouldn't be expected to pose really difficult questions. - Thomas Lifson October 2, 2021 When Kamala forgets to cackle under stress…

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It is tragic for the individual, family, and loved ones of an elderly person suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's.  It is a disaster for our nation if it is our president.  Is President Biden suffering from a disease that is robbing him of his cognitive abilities? President Biden's longtime personal physician and now White House physician, Dr. Kevin O'Connor, has either not performed or not released the results of a cognitive test.  President Biden's staff shield him from view, and the media continue to protect the president from scrutiny.  Since the media have not explored the cognitive abilities of the president, we will do it by comparing the CDC's "10 Warning Signs of Alzheimer's" to President Biden's behavior..........If President Biden is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, why hasn't Congress acted in removing the president in accordance with Amendment XXV of the Constitution?  It may be that the Democrat leaders in the House and Senate know they need a weakened president to enact their legacy legislation and believe they can continue to  control of the federal government with Biden in the role.  Republican leaders in the House and Senate may believe that once they control both houses, they will have the power to approve the next vice president — all while our rivals across the globe take advantage of our weakened president and our allies plot a future without the United States.

America with a weakened leader reminds me of the instruction I received when parachuting.  If you have a malfunction, you must decide how bad of a malfunction.  If malfunction results in a broken leg or two, then ride it to the ground.  Because if you go to the reserve and it malfunctions, your life is over.  We cannot survive a President Harris, House speaker Pelosi, and Senate leader Schumer leading our country.  Let us all wait until the November 2022 elections. -  Mick Rich October 3, 2021 How does Biden stack up against a list of Alzheimer's symptoms? 

 

The Silencing of Voices on College Campuses

April 3, 2021 By Donna M. Hughes

“She and I talk openly in one another's homes, but we know we can’t talk to anyone else.” This is not a historic quote from the days of Stalinist suppression in the Soviet Union. It is message I recently received from a graduate faculty professor in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) field referring to the secrecy with which she talks to her friend who works in university student services. Today on college campuses, faculty are afraid to speak about a number of issues for fear of being verbally mobbed and denounced by angry students and faculty colleagues.

I know. Faculty, students, and administrators at the University of Rhode Island have recently denounced me for daring to write in 4W.pub, a feminist public forum, that humans cannot change their sex  and children are not born the wrong bodies. I wrote that the belief that people can change their biological sex is a fantasy. Now, such commonsensical statements are deemed so offensive that I must be condemned by publicly issued university statements......To Read More...

My Take - This isn't anything new. This is leftist dogma going back to the French Revolution.  During Stalin's reign the same idiotic mentality permeated Soviet science.  Please view my piece, Let Me Tell You about Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.  You may also wish to view my

Greenies Almost Have a Monopoly on Being Wrong

By Rich Kozlovich

(Editor's Note:  I originally published this on 4/3/12, but all the same issues are at play today as they were then, so I'm republishing this with updates.  RK)

As you read this please keep in mind that we hear over educated under smart people telling us that we are at a tipping point and we must ________(fill in the blank) right now or we will destroy all living things on the Earth. What they want us to do would put mankind back into the most primitive conditions imaginable. Here is an example of their insane thinking.

Bonnie Prince Charles has warned everyone over and over again that we've reached a critical tipping point regarding global warming, and in order to save the planet we must adopt a program that would seriously reduce mankind’s carbon emissions. He then promptly jetted off to spew the same nonsense elsewhere. That "critical tipping point" time has passed, and he keeps flying, and others as loony as he, take up the same cry.  But the great leveler of truth is history and reality, and they show science has been corrupted by a pseudo-pagan green ideology.

Environmentalist in and out of the government want to abandon the Keystone pipeline because of a beetle. Not because we know it will go extinct, it's because we don’t know if it will go extinct. Please read my article, More Coprolite Anyone?

It turns out that those on my side of the argument are now, and always have been…..well..…dare I think it....dare I say it? Yes, I will say it! We were right! Oops, there it is again!  Reality staring everyone in the face.

This appeared on Junkscience.com today. Shocker: Nature Conservancy chief scientist admits ‘data simply do not support the idea of a fragile nature at risk of collapse’

"The eco-fragility trope of Rachel Carson and Al Gore is wrong, says an unlikely source. … The fragility trope dates back, at least, to Rachel Carson, who wrote plaintively in Silent Spring of the delicate web of life and warned that perturbing the intricate balance of nature could have disastrous consequences."

"Al Gore made a similar argument in his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance. And the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment warned darkly that, while the expansion of agriculture and other forms of development have been overwhelmingly positive for the world’s poor, ecosystem degradation was simultaneously putting systems in jeopardy of collapse."

"The trouble for conservation is that the data simply do not support the idea of a fragile nature at risk of collapse. Ecologists now know that the disappearance of one species does not necessarily lead to the extinction of any others, much less all others in the same ecosystem."  

"In many circumstances, the demise of formerly abundant species can be inconsequential to ecosystem function. The American chestnut, once a dominant tree in eastern North America, has been extinguished by a foreign disease, yet the forest ecosystem is surprisingly unaffected. The passenger pigeon, once so abundant that its flocks darkened the sky, went extinct, along with countless other species from the Steller’s sea cow to the dodo, with no catastrophic or even measurable effects."

The fact of the matter is the only people who were sold on this stuff are those who have an agenda and the ignorant. Being ignorant is a legitimate excuse because it means that we simply don't know.

We are all ignorant about an unending number of things. Being unwilling to find out is what makes people stupid. As for those with an agenda; they aren't ignorant, they are corrupt! They have screamed in rage about everything that makes living in an advanced society possible. They claim that modern living deprives everyone of utopia, which they can deliver by forcing everyone to ‘go green'.

Yet, all they have ever delivered is dystopia - disease, squalor, misery, deprivation, suffering and early death.

That's their history! So if they keep promoting things that leave disaster in its wake, we must conclude that absolutely is their agenda!  The greenies hate humanity!  We really do need to get that!

We also need to get this!  Everything we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality, and reality shows us over 95% of all species that has ever lived are extinct. Extinction is the rule, not the exception. When species become biologically incompetent the cease to exist! The rest of the world goes on in spite of that.

I have asked repeatedly for someone, anyone, to tell me what terrible ecological disaster occurred when the dodo bird went extinct? There was none. I understood this and I’m just a bug man, so how did these highly educated super smart people miss it?

There is a side bar to this story that fascinates me. The very ones who insist on demanding we must spend any amount of money, and bear any and every conceivable sacrifice necessary to save every species or nature will unravel, are for the most part, neo-Darwinists. Since they believe in the blatantly ridiculous Theory of Evolution - the  survival of the fittest - then shouldn’t they want incompetent species to go extinct in order for species that are better equipped to survive to take their place?

Truth and consistency of thought is a serious problem for these people.  However, there is one consistency the left/green movement embrace.  In order to promote all the things they promote they are required to embrace cognitive dissonance!  Believing in opposing views and  believing they're all correct.   Views that can only be categorized as articles of faith to a neo-pseudo-pagan secular religion! Leftism!  No amount of valid science, history or reality can disabuse them of their positions.

Here's reality we need to embrace!  Scientific integrity has been made an oxymoron by the embrace of leftist/green ideology, in effect making them Lysenkoists. In short, the question we should be asking is this.  Does ideology make smart people dumb, or insane?

Let Me Tell You about Trofim Denisovich Lysenko

By Rich Kozlovich

Editor's Note I originally posted this on December 20, 2009 and then again on October 2, 2012.  It seems appropriate to post it once again as the Trump administration is being attacked by the Lysenkoian crowd with degrees in science. RK

Born on September 29, 1898 he died on November 20, 1976. He was a Ukrainian agronomist and director of biology under Joseph Stalin. Rejecting traditional thought regarding Mendelian genetics and embryology he “reinterpreted Darwin’s thoughts to “fit the framework of what he called the ‘new creation biology’.” The only views that could be “scientific” under Lysenko had to be “consistent with social theory”, i.e. Stalin’s thoughts.

He supported the hybridization theories of Ivan Michurin that gained support from Stalin, which of course made his views “truth” and altered the entire structure of Russian biological thinking. This dominated the Russian field of biology for about 30 years and along with collectivization of the Russian farms they managed to starve millions to death. As a Darwinian evolutionist (versus Neo-Darwinism) he believed that evolution could be “forced” through something he called acquired inheritance. Furthermore anyone who disagreed with him was a scientific outcast and purged from their position, their jobs and in some cases died in concentrations camps.

As Director of the Institute of Genetics within the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences he stridently pushed the idea that plants could be forced to acquire characteristics that they had not demonstrated before through what is known as environmentally acquired inheritance, or theory of adaptation, originally promoted by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

It wasn’t just plants though. Lysenkoists believed that just as exercise could turn a normal man into a muscle man, training could “force” cows to “happily and naturally deliver 50 liters of milk per day” which would change their normal inheritable limits of production; genetics, which they rejected, notwithstanding; believing that they could imprint acquired characteristics and skills from one generation that could be passed on to the next generation. (it gets even more complicated and irrational as it goes along)

However, all his thinking was tied to the ‘social theories’ of Stalin and his communist cohorts. Bukharin, who was a “founding member of the Soviet Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a keen botanist”, stated in 1935 that “pure science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to problems of the current Five Year Plan”.

Lysenko believed that “amassing of evidence was substituted for casual proof as the means demonstrating the “correctness” of the underlying hypotheses” and those who failed to conform to the tenets of the new biology could be silenced or suppressed as enemies of the truth. It also did not concern him if his followers “manipulated” somewhat their data or their experimental results, since minor falsifications could still support the ideological cause, which represented a higher level of truth than the precise reporting of facts.”

In other words, if they could amass enough evidence to support their ideas it didn’t matter if it was factual or not, and if that which we actually see and that which is actually occurring was entirely different from their “evidence”; it simply didn’t matter. Sound familiar?

They never were able to “train” cows to deliver 50 liters of milk a day, but they did create some interesting grafting techniques that created a fruit that “looked like an apple, smelled like a rose and tasted like a prune!”

One example of this thinking was his work on rye grain. Bewteen 1928 and 1940 Stalin’s collectivization of farms starved millions to death, so getting more grain in more areas was vital. The claim was that they could turn wheat into rye by just planting it in climates “favoring the growth of rye”. Huge acreage was devoted to this program which was intended to “teach” wheat to become rye.

Literally hundreds of thousands of individual grains of wheat were examined, and some turned out to be rye. The fact that the harvesting machines used that year were used the previous year to harvest rye didn’t bother them in the least. And as for those foolish enough to point out that the rye grains may have been contaminants from the previous harvest; well…..things didn’t go well for them as truth wasn’t as important as promoting the ideological thinking, or if you will, the “consensus” science. They were silenced and branded lackeys of western imperialism and western biological thinking. Sound familiar?

What happened to the rest? For almost 30 years some of the finest minds in Russian biology either “became infected with this apparent madness” or “converted” to it. “Other scientists, who were skeptical, were threatened with loss of their working and publishing opportunities if they did not conform to these views. As a result they were forced to adjust the direction of their research or to contribute some kind of work which was in accord with the Stalinist ideology.” Some got around this by publishing entirely in Latin …which the commissars were ignorant of. Some refused to bend to the madness of the new biological ideology at all, and were permanently silenced.

Remember Bukharin? In later years he said “mass annihilation of completely defenseless men, with women and children" under forced collectivization and liquidation of kulaks as a class that dehumanized the Party members with "the profound psychological change in those communists who took part in the campaign. Instead of going mad, they accepted terror as a normal administrative method and regarded obedience to all orders from above as a supreme virtue... They are no longer human beings. They have truly become the cogs in a terrible machine." He later found out how true this was when his onetime close personal friend Stalin had him killed; after a trial of course.

Why do I bring this up? The views and thinking in the green movement and those within the political realm as compared to Lysenkoism and those monsters that murdered millions of innocent people with their policies are very similar.

Lysenko came to prominence because he was “discovered by a sensational journalist by the name of Fedorovich.” Articles appeared in Pravda praising his abilities, which mostly amounted to attacking real science and making promises that never had a chance of becoming reality based on his unfounded views of reality, which amounted to junk science.

Here is one such example of his meddling. They could only use seed potatoes from Northern Russia because a degenerative virus existed in Southern Russia. This was expensive so when Lysenko made the pronouncement that it wasn’t a virus causing this at all, but was in reality a problem with hot temperatures; the Politburo jumped on it.  His solution was to plant in the summer for a fall harvest and he claimed that this would eliminate the degeneration problem. The result was disastrous, in spite of the selectively favorable reports, which made the “studies” fit the preconceived conclusion that promoted his junk science.

In point of fact, Lysenko later proclaimed that there was no such thing as viruses, setting Russian virology back for years, and yet much of his work is now considered fraudulent. Not just wrong, but fraudulent, and he was the driving power in Russian agrarian science for almost 30 years. Thirty years of fraud, thirty years of watching disaster swirl around them, thirty years of knowingly manipulating the data to promote nonsense for personal gain.

How different is it today? Many have come into prominence in modern times promoting junk science in order to promote environmental issues, the “higher truth” if you will, in much the same manner. As Viv Forbes notes, ““The public has been misled on this issue by an unholy alliance of environmental scaremongers, funds-seeking academics, sensation-seeking media, vote-seeking politicians and profit-seeking vested interests.” Truth is not the holy grail of science. It is grant money. Grant money that is only distributed to those who tout a certain “socially” acceptable line.

• Global warming will destroy the world.
• Global warming is caused by western industrialization.
• Global Warming can only be fixed if we give the rest of the world all our money and shut down our manufacturing plants.
• The world is reaching a “tipping point” from which we can’t recover, so we can’t wait.
• Cancer is on the increase as a result of modern lifestyles.
• Only solar and wind energy can save us because there is no oil any longer and even if there was its use must be opposed.
• Eating meat causes global warming.
• Pesticides cause every known disease and infirmity that can be conjured up.
• Drinking water is contaminated and causes an unending list of ailments.
• Plastic toys impact reproduction.
• Vaccinations cause autism.
• DDT causes…..oh….just stick anything in there and it will be approved.
• And the one I really like the best; Multiple Chemical Sensitivity syndrome, which displays “the symptoms of every disease or disorder known [in] psychology, psychiatry, and the general medical profession." And there is no cure!

Try applying for a grant that proves otherwise. What is sad is that so many have to suffer before everyone realizes that what has happened in the past is being repeated now. More subtly of course; after all, no one is being taken out and shot or sent to concentration camps for scientific disagreements, but those who haven’t touted the “acceptable” line have lost grants, jobs and been prevented from publishing articles in scientific journals that are critical of the “science” promoting these issues. The fact of the matter is that Lysenkoism is a pattern of thinking that is the same today as it was then; and over the long haul just as deadly to humanity.

Sources:
Ecology Sanity, by Claus and Bolander
Sick of It All, by Michael Fumento
Wikipedia

I would also like to draw everyone's attention to a recent article;

Politicizing science - Thomas Sowell: Do not expect disinterested search for truth when money's