Matthew Harrison Brady: Does right have no meaning to you, sir?
Inherit the Wind 1960
Henry Drummond: Realizing that I may prejudice the case of my client, I must tell you that right has no meaning for me whatsoever. But truth has meaning… as a direction!
One of the most perverse attacks that the left in general and the Biden administration in general have made on people these days has been claiming that people who opposed them were “anti-science” and “science deniers”. For me this type of thing is the ultimate end in the rush to redefine words and meanings to serve an agenda. While I may no longer work in an engineering field one of the things about being having a Computer Science degree from the 1980’s in the days before “woke” entered everything was the idea of evidence driving conclusions.
Thus the famous quote from Feynman
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
Richard P Feynman
There was a time when the left and even Hollywood believed this and in fact the most celebrated episode of the entire Star Trek TNG franchise celebrated Science as it was
Picard (as Kanin): Hey, that’s my hobby. Find your own.
Star Trek The Next Generation The Inner Light 1992
Meribor: You’re the one who taught me. Don’t complain if you’ve turned me into a scientist.
Picard (as Kanin): And what has the scientist been up to today?
Meribor: Analyzing soil samples. There isn’t any anaerobic bacteria. The soil is dead. This isn’t just a very long drought, is it, Father? I have entries in my log that go back ten years. You have data preceding that for fifteen years. You’ve reached the same conclusion, I know you have.
Picard (as Kanin): I haven’t reached any conclusion. A good scientist doesn’t function by conjecture.
Meribor: A good scientist functions by hypothesizing and then proving or disproving that hypothesis. That’s what I did.
Note that he doesn’t prioritize if the data confirms to some “woke’ theme or advances a social standard, it’s observation, experimentation and deduction. You go where the evidence takes you no matter how much China or a particular industry might want to pay. Why? To serve the truth:
Meribor: You’ve taught me to pursue the truth, no matter how painful it is. It’s too late to back off now. This planet is dying.
Picard (as Kanin): Perhaps I should have filled your head with trivial concerns. Games and toys and clothes.
Meribor: I don’t think you mean that.
Picard (as Kanin): No, I don’t. It just saddens me to see you burdened with the knowledge things you can’t change.
It’s practically impossible to think of an episode of Star Trek advancing such a line now in an age where everyone has their own “truth” which can be whatever it is. Today science must serve the cause or it must be suppressed.
Thus when a black Harvard professor, a winner of the MacArthur Genius Fellowship, the author of dozens of papers studied interactions with the police and came to a conclusion contrary to THE NARRATIVETM and his own expectations It and he must be attacked
“All hell broke loose” immediately after the 104-page economics paper with a 150-page appendix was published, according to Fryer.
Within four minutes of publishing the paper, Fryer received an email that read: “You’re full of s**t.”
He explained, “I had colleagues take me to the side and say, ‘Don’t publish this. You’ll ruin your career.'”
The hostilities toward Fryer were so intense that he required police protection for about a month, including his then-7-day-old daughter.
“I was going to the grocery store to get diapers with the armed guard. It was crazy. It was really, truly crazy,” Fryer said during a recent episode of “Honestly with Bari Weiss.”
Mind you he was surprised at his own results but unlike people who trusted “The ScienceTM” he took steps to confirm they were not mistaken:
Fryer said he was surprised by the results because he “expected” to see racial bias towards blacks in police shootings.
He hired eight fresh researchers to ensure the results were correct, and the results remained the same.
Richard Feynman would have been proud but he’s been dead for 36 years plus he’s a white guy so obviously today his opinion wouldn’t count.
I bring all this up because of a story I saw today about a study out of Japan that is rather troubling:
A team of researchers in Japan say that, based on the volume of evidence that has come to light about post-vaccination harms, medical professionals worldwide should be alerted to potential dangers in using blood derived from people who have had the jab, as well as from those suffering persistent symptoms from covid itself (‘long covid’). They say methods to identify and remove the contaminants are urgently needed, and propose a range of specific tests and regulations to deal with the risks.
Again this was not the expected result:
Contrary to initial expectations, the genes and proteins are now known to persist in the blood for prolonged periods, and post-vaccination syndrome, or ‘spikeopathy’, has become a major global problem, the researchers say. The jabs should have been regarded as biomedicine, but because they were classified as vaccines, huge numbers of people were inoculated and many areas of medicine are beginning to become involved with the consequences. ‘This has never happened before in the history of biomedicine, and consequently it is highly suspected that blood products for transfusion have been affected.’
Now as this is from the pre-print of the paper and is yet to be peer reviewed so it’s a tad early to have an opinion it but I predict we will see two different methods of dealing with this study by the media
- Ignore it
- Attack it
However I being a believer in actual science rather than THE SCIENCETM I’m going to do what an engineer or a scientist of the old school, of the Feynman school would do: Take in the evidence given while awaiting the peer review of this paper before I make any final conclusions. Because that is how the old time science works.
It’s good enough for me.
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