There follows a guest post by former Google software engineer Mike Hearn.
How can we avoid a repeat of the last two years?
To ensure policy failure on such a scale never happens again, those of us who oppose them need concrete legislative proposals that could be implemented by a parliament or congress, and which address the root causes of the failed policies themselves. Very often in history we see that ideas for political reform have to be kicked around the public sphere for a while before being picked up by politicians. In that spirit I lay out some proposed changes to the law, designed to encode lessons learned from the Covid pandemic. Not all of these proposals apply to every country and they take for granted the acceptance of a viewpoint that is still contested – namely, that Covid non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were a mistake. But the ideas here will hopefully prove useful as a launching point for further discussion – and perhaps, eventually, political campaigns.
My goal here is to make proposals that are only partially within the Overton Window of currently acceptable political thought. The justification: ideas fully within the Window will be generated by politicians during any normal public inquiry anyway. Ideas fully outside it won’t be considered at all. All proposals should be somewhat uncomfortable to read for someone fully committed to mainstream politics, but not entirely so. Please note that anything related to pharmaceutical or financial interventions are out of scope for this article. Further work (perhaps by other people) may address legislative proposals around these.
Repeal all Emergency Acts
Many countries have one or more Acts which grant ministers near arbitrary powers in the event that they declare a state of emergency. These Acts have a history of abuse without providing concomitant benefits.
The U.K. Public Health Act 1984 (PHA) has little or no history of use before Covid. NPIs were implemented primarily using the PHA and the Coronavirus Acts. However, NPIs were not effective, and their implementation led directly to many negative outcomes including severe acts of injustice against citizens and levels of government spending that have triggered an inflationary cost-of-living crisis. In the case of Canada, the Emergencies Act 1988 has only ever been invoked once, and that was to end what was otherwise a lawful protest. That Act replaced the previous War Powers Emergency Act after it was heavily criticised by the McDonald Commission, due to another case of abuse: Justin Trudeau’s father invoked it during a peacetime kidnapping crisis.
Modifications to Emergency Acts are thus well within the political mainstream and in fact a proposed reform of the U.K. Public Health Act has already been tabled in Parliament. Politicians seeking the centre ground often prefer to think in terms of reform rather than repeal. However, I think the case for a simple repeal of all such laws is a strong one, along with constitutionally forbidding the creation of new Emergency Acts in countries that have a constitution.
The argument for full repeal is as follows.
Prior reforms haven’t worked. The Canadian experience is informative. After their Wartime Powers Act was abused to intervene in a non-military crisis they replaced it with a reformed Act. But after decades of non-use the successor was invoked for the first time only to eliminate political dissent that could have been easily handled in other ways. Thus the Canadian Emergency Acts have never provided the country with any clear benefits, only international embarrassment.
Emergency Acts are unfixable by nature. Because of the open-ended nature of Emergency Acts, the only means available to prevent abuse are either to narrow the scope of what can be considered an ’emergency’, or to narrow the scope of what is allowed during an emergency. However, by its very nature an emergency is defined as a situation in which normal oversight mechanisms are too slow. Thus, by the time a Parliament, Congress or court is able to debate whether the powers have been invoked correctly it’s already too late. Once again, the Canadian experience is informative. Trudeau’s powers expired after 30 days, but this was more than enough time to complete the process of crushing his political opponents.
The underlying intuition is incorrect. The justification for Emergency Acts is that while the safeguards and procedures developed over hundreds of years by democratic societies lead to slower but better lawmaking, there are times when making law fast is better than making law well. For this justification to be valid requires several things to happen at once:
- The situation of an entire country or society must change overnight in ways that nobody could have anticipated or planned for.
- A response is required that only a government can implement.
- That response is nonetheless required only temporarily (usually declared to be a matter of weeks).
- The Prime Minister or President is able to both immediately determine what that response should be, and correctly implement this plan without making any major mistakes, even though in non-emergency times this isn’t really possible (which is why Parliaments developed alongside monarchies in the first place).
- For undefined reasons the populace refuses to agree that the government response is correct, and must be forced to comply by violent coercion. If this condition wasn’t met then no emergency powers would be needed because the government could simply issue advice.
The problem is, the set of situations in which all these conditions apply simultaneously is the empty set. There are no cases in which a temporary, correct and yet coercive response that only governments can mount is required for a completely unanticipated situation. It’s for this reason that Emergency Acts often go decades without being used after they are passed, and when they finally are used they are often reformed afterwards.
Covid fails at least requirement 1, given that global pandemics were widely anticipated by the public health community to the point of misfiring (e.g. for Swine Flu). There should have been no need for new law. It’s plausible that the open-ended nature of the Public Health Act actually discouraged Parliament from writing higher quality law, under the impression that what to do in a pandemic was a solved problem already. In the beginning it would also have failed requirement 5, given that lockdowns were based on widely held intuitions about how respiratory viruses spread, and thus voluntary compliance in the population was very high. Finally, given the widely discussed problem of expert failure during the pandemic it also failed requirement 4.
Emergency powers are often claimed to be necessary for fighting wars. Again, we can see that they should not be required for these situations. Nothing about war invalidates the requirements above and nothing in war is likely to ever meet them. War is not only something that can be anticipated; anticipating it via wargaming is a key activity of any competent military. War rarely starts overnight without warning but even when it does governments have either pre-prepared via defence spending and thus already have the necessary laws debated and on the books via the usual processes, or they’re unprepared and thus about to be defeated anyway, in which case questions of law are irrelevant.
Conclusion: there are no situations in which the underlying philosophical justification for emergency powers are valid, and they are prone to abuse. Therefore they should be repealed.
2. A legal requirement for pre-publication of information presented to the government
Establishing the principle that policy should never be defined in response to a (real or claimed) emergency enables other critical reforms.
Freedom of Information Acts are one of the great achievements of liberal democracy. By converting the default state of government information to public rather than private, FOI Acts open up government decision-making to scrutiny by journalists, the wider public and the members of Parliament who can be bothered to read them. The culture of open data that follows along with these acts is why it’s possible for the public to produce and consume sophisticated data analysis, often revealing facts that governments find embarrassing.
Despite the greatness of FOI Acts, they can be improved. One of their biggest weaknesses is their retroactive nature. Someone must surmise that information exists, explicitly request it and then wait for a response. By the time this response arrives it may already be too late. A good example of this is how the UK FOIA was used to force the release of the source code to the Ferguson/ICL Covid model, revealing that it was so buggy that it wasn’t fit for purpose. But by claiming they were in an extended, long drawn out process of releasing it, ICL was able to delay the opening of the code until months after it had already influenced government policy. By the time the model’s inadequacy was revealed it was too late.
A very similar second situation occurred when sceptical doctors were invited into No.10 in 2020 to argue against lockdown as a so-called red team. SAGE presented new modelling that the red team hadn’t previously seen and thus was unable to immediately respond to. SAGE therefore won by default and presented the new models at a press conference just hours later, leading ministers to claim they were “bounced” into another lockdown. The modelling was shown to be nonsensical just two days later by one of the invited scientists (Dr. Carl Heneghan), but by then it was too late and the decision had already been made.
If the principle that governments must sometimes change the law within hours is successfully discredited, that enables FOI Acts to be strengthened by requiring publication of any data or information before it is presented to ministers or civil servants by third parties. A suggested change could be as follows:
- The government is mandated to run a website on which all documents, presentations, data sets and supporting research artefacts to be presented as part of any government meeting or event to government employees can be uploaded, downloaded and commented upon.
- No externally generated document, presentation or dataset may be viewed by any minister or civil servant until it has been available via that website for a minimum of three days beforehand.
- This requirement does not apply to:
- Internally generated emails, e.g. between ministers or civil servants.
- Documents that are generated regularly according to a pre-agreed schedule, e.g. status reports, dashboards, etc.
- Contracts, commercially sensitive information, etc.
- These sorts of exceptions would undoubtably be abused immediately, but starting with broad exceptions provides a foundation that can be further refined.
- Presentation of information to the government before the pre-disclosure period has expired is subject to fines. ‘Presentation’ is defined as including provisioning of the document in any form, including links to the documents on the document collection website (i.e., ministers and civil servants should always be the last to know what’s about to be presented to them).
There would be no requirement for anyone in government to actually pay attention to any resulting comments, only to provide infrastructure for collecting them. The primary burden would be regulatory compliance: anyone interacting with the government would have to be prepared enough to write their PowerPoint slides at least a few days in advance, and in large institutions that interact with the government regularly that would probably require new compliance controls to be put in place.
On the other hand, for government agencies themselves it may actually save money in the long run because pre-publication would largely eliminate the need for dedicated staff to handle FOI requests. In a few cases government departments have already realised this and published everything they have on frequently FOIAd topics, e.g. the U.K. Ministry of Defence stated it opened up its UFO report archives specifically because it was easier than responding to FOIA requests individually.
During review, a common objection to this part was that it would cause advice to go underground and unwritten, or the compliance burden would cause people to simply not present evidence to the government at all, or to significantly change that advice due to fear of backlash. I don’t feel like this is a major problem because Freedom of Information Acts already establish the principle that any advice or written documents given to anyone in government can be made public anyway, and for important issues probably will, so that bridge was crossed long ago. Also, if freedom of information actually does cause people to moderate their advice to governments, then we haven’t seen much evidence of this during the Covid pandemic. SAGE scientists were more than happy to repeatedly go to the press to make their views even more public than what was already being achieved by the release of their meeting minutes.
3. Establish a Parliamentary Scientific Methods committee
A major weakness exposed by the Covid response is that governments want to “follow the science” but lack any formal definition of what science actually is. This has been repeatedly exploited by academics who present themselves to ministers and the public as scientists, yet whose work doesn’t meet any standard definition of the scientific method.
The root cause of this problem can be traced to the grant approvals process. Governments treat the necessity of spending of money on research as a matter of bipartisan agreement, so there’s little incentive to ensure the money is spent well. Grant money is dispersed with little regard for whether the resulting papers correctly utilise the scientific method or even if they have anything to do with the original grant proposal at all.
This approach is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. By flooding the research world with undiscerning ‘dumb money’, governments have been incentivising the production of cheap but bad research papers that not only pollute the scientific literature, but which starve good work of oxygen. The fixation on unvalidated modelling (cheap to produce and in endless supply) would appear to be an example of this.
Fixing it requires governments to start caring more about how exactly public research budgets are used. In turn this requires creating a rigorous definition of what is and is not scientific. Existing scientific institutions are sadly of little use here:
- Scientific journals define science as anything which is both interesting enough to publish and which has passed peer review. This definition can sometimes catch individual papers with low standards, but can’t arrest a general decline across an entire field.
- Universities appear to define science as anything that grant-making bodies are willing to fund, or journals are willing to publish. From an outsider’s perspective they really couldn’t care less about the credibility of their academics.
- The commercial sector is also of no use in defining science, because industrial labs are typically focused on measurable results rather than the philosophical question of what is or is not scientific. The question arises in the public context only because:
- Governments force people to pay for basic scientific research on the grounds that it’s a public good that would otherwise not be funded by anyone at all – thus deciding what is or isn’t scientific is about responsible use of taxpayer funding.
- Governments force people to change their lives in major ways on the grounds that ‘science’ says it must be done – thus deciding what is or isn’t scientific is also about basic civil liberties and quality of governance.
Wikipedia’s article on science defines it as follows:
Science (from Latin scientia ‘knowledge’)[1] is a systematic enterprise that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Here are just a few examples of common cases where publicly funded research doesn’t appear to meet this definition of scientific:
- The production of models which are never tested for predictive validity, or in which the predictions cannot actually be tested at all due to lack of falsifiability, determinism or clarity (not testable).
- Claims in psychology that don’t replicate (non-replicating claims aren’t knowledge).
- Papers with logical fallacies in them (not systematic).
- Fraudulent practices like making up data or Photoshopping images (not building true knowledge).
- The practice of presenting probability-free scenarios as science (not testable).
- And I would be remiss if I didn’t take a pop at my own field of ‘Computer Science’ (not about the study of nature).
Many of these points are obvious. In theory, nobody should claim that a fraudulent paper is scientific, except that our current system actually does so and it happens all the time. Therefore the first step to raising standards is to write down why they are presently unsatisfactory.
Because it’s ultimately about tax and spending, this is a task for Parliament. Therefore, a standing committee could be set up tasked specifically with creating and maintaining a legal definition of the scientific method, which granting agencies are obliged to implement and audit. The committee could meet on an occasional but regular schedule and take evidence from the public on cases where the definition doesn’t seem to be correct; either because it’s allowing unscientific work to be funded, or because it’s incorrectly excluding a new area of research that should be considered science. For example such a committee could define national standards around the threshold for something to be considered statistically significant. Although such a committee could, should and would receive wide ranging input from many different people and organizations about what is or is not scientific, only people outside the system have any hope of imposing a working definition: people within the public sector research sector have visibly failed at imposing standards on themselves.
Conclusion
For the correct lessons to be learned from the pandemic, actionable ideas are required.
These ideas should fall on the border or just outside of the window of currently acceptable thought because, by definition, people within the system will already come up with the ideas that are considered acceptable to propose. Additionally, the sort of public health workers who came up with lockdowns, mandatory masking and so on have demonstrated a willingness to go well outside the window of previously acceptable ideas. Indeed, they entirely redefined the window almost overnight, so the importance of ‘reasonableness’ or ‘acceptability’ as political concepts is open to question anyway. It certainly didn’t stop anyone in SAGE.
I argue for three actionable ideas: repeal of emergency laws that suspend the usual decision making process, changes to the way information is presented to ministers, and an attack on public sector pseudo-science via reform of the granting process to include a rigorous definition of the scientific method. Combined these would have blocked large amounts of the output of computational epidemiology (because it’s unvalidated and thus unscientific), slowed down the initial response (which in the end didn’t matter anyway), and given time for sceptical views to be fully presented to decision makers.
The author would like to thank Toby Young, MTF and Harry Richer for their review.
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I have an important question for everyone.
The NHS appears to have shut down in many important ways. It is increasingly difficult to be seen by your GP and the GPs themselves do not appear to be resisting the barriers imposed between themselves and their patients.
I was speaking to a pharmacist recently and he implied that what was going on in the NHS was not imminent privatisation, but something worse, yet was afraid to say more.
I have noticed that the real difficulties people are having in accessing medical care IS NOT REPORTED ANYWHERE- total media blackout, which is the most telling part.
Does anyone have any inside information on what is planned? Because it is clear that whatever it is, we are not being told.
What is happening is what inevitably will happen to any non-contestable monopolist, self-serving, inefficient, State-run, Socialist dinosaur, it will collapse under its own weight and hubris.
People who talk about privatising the NHS, quite comically, expose their complete ignorance of what the NHS is and how market economics work. You can no more privatise the NHS than a food-bank. They are both charities, have no revenue, no profit, are a cost centre so the more you do the more it costs, and have no commercial value. They cannot then be market valued for sale and purchase.
What can and should be done is remove its monopoly to allow a competitive private market to develop in insurance and provision.. People could then choose whether to hand their money over as NIC and use ‘free’ NHS, or buy private insurance. Time to realise medical care is not a Right, it is a luxury.
Access to ‘free’ healthcare is not the same as getting it – ask the 6 million on the waiting list and those who can’t see their GP.
Time to realise medical care is not a Right, it is a luxury.
I’m sorry, but are you serious? Do you mean that the wealthy are entitled to medical care, but not those who can’t afford luxuries?
Or are you saying that is what is actually happening?
To the extent that is so – and I’m quite certain it is in places for particular people and conditions – it is surely an outrage that must be addressed.
Charities do not have a revenue as they do not receive payment in return for goods and services. They receive charitable donations which are not obligatory and entirely at the discretion of the donor.
Equally the charities are under no obligation to provide goods or services when they receive that donation. It isnt a contractual arrangement.
The problem with the public sector(in this example) is that there is an obligation on individuals to ‘donate’ – ie pay tax/NIC etc – whether hey access the service or not, and there is no obligation for the service to be provided after they have received the payment.
Healthcare and education should be accessible and affordable to all but there should be an option for those who choose not to access it to not pay for it.
“Charities do not have a revenue as they do not receive payment in return for goods and services.”
Eton College doesn’t charge fees?
The NHS receives a revenue from the state. It is supposed to provide an efficient service and we all know it doesn’t, but the idea is that the state has taken on the responsibility and hands out money to the NHS in return for what the NHS provides. I’d agree that this isn’t really a sale.
Charities provide a service.
People give them money in return for ‘feeling nice about themselves’.
They then spend that money in wages, plus they given a sufficient amount of it to causes that will make the suppliers of the cash continue feeling good about themselves and thus continue the revenue stream.
I think he means treatment is a “product/good” like any other and as such marxist interventions just produce a shortage, although the feudalist nature of medical patents (another state invention) causes other issues as well..
Almost all charities have a revenue.
Your approach is somewhat strange because your assertion that “medical care is not a right” is a statement of opinion – it is not a statement of fact, and so it is not something that can be “realised”.
I totally agree with the above and you can extend the logic to the whole public sector. People in their ignorance view what is provided for by the government/local councils/the public sector as ‘free’ when of course it is nothing of the sort.
This lack of perception, particularly by the public sector itself, that it isnt in a commercial and contractual arrangement with the tax payer, means that there is no incentive to provide quality of service or to pay costs and/or damages when the agreed level of service isnt delivered.
The state should only provide what the individual cant do for themselves (or provide an option but not a monopoly). As in your comment the NHS can remain an option that people can opt into but equally they should be able to go elsewhere if they choose.
The same applies to education.
Obviously things like defence of the realm, the justice system, the road network etc cannot be decided on an individual basis but there are a lot of things where the state over-reaches and should not have a monopoly on, or should not be involved in at all.
The only thing the NHS has a “monopoly” on is receiving tax.
It doesn’t have a monopoly on selling healthcare.
Out of interest, what if your wish for the state to slash NHS spending and to lower taxes so that people are more “free” to buy healthcare from the private sector would lead to a “population reduction” down to say 20% of the current level within, say, 2 years? Would that be an acceptable pavestone on the way to being ruled by the Law of the
JungleMarket?Why would the NHS have its funding ‘slashed’? Reduced maybe as people opt out, but not ‘slashed’.
And why would it reduce the population by 80%?
There are many countries in the world that operate infinitely better healthcare models than us – contrary to the government peddled myth (ring any bells recently?) the reality is that the NHS is not the envy of world. Most Western countries see it a a hugely inefficient, bureaucratic, dysfunctional nightmare that should be seen as an example of how not to provide heathcare for the population.
I would have thought the vast majority here are because they believe personal choice and personal responsibility is paramount, and that the idea that the government should provide – whether its services or information on a ‘pandemic’ – everything from cradle to grave is an anathema.
Yes, but the problem is that, the UK being a US satrapy, the US vultures, whose healthcare system is the worst in the developed world for the bottom 40% (who tend to be the ones who get ill more), will see any weakening of NHS position as a reason to threaten the UK Establishment with armageddon if they don’t let US HMOs in.
If we want NHS reform, we have to start from the premise that we are NOT having anything to do with the US system and that’s non-negotiable. The US system is an organised crime syndicate that should see huge numbers of criminals locked up for life.
The extortion funded sector (also known by the PR term public sector) by it’s nature has no direct customers.
Obviously things like defence of the realm, the justice system, the road network etc cannot be decided on an individual basis
That’s far from obvious. Eg, the realm is an abstract concept and there’s no point in defending it (specifically, it’s just the territory claimed by the state), what matters is people’s safety among other people. And this can certainly be handled privately, as it used to be done in the middle ages prior to the invention of public peace as a concept: Sufficient powerful/ wealthy individuals can form private armies warring against the private armies of other such people and the non-powerful/ non-wealthy can appeal to these for protection in return for services. I mean, reintroducing feudalism could be regarded as a step backwards, but it would shrink the state!
It would probably lead to another 30-years-war where the (no longer existant) realm decomposed into spintered fiefdoms of varying sizes ends up being the scene of mass murder, plunder, devastion and robbery carried out by marauding warriors who went unpaid for too long (serious simplification) but why should we learn anything from history when Americans who are blissfully unaware of most of it already know everything better than anybody else?
NB: This is sarcasm. People who do not know how states came into being because their knowledge is generally restrict to the (recent) history of a particular, pretty recent republic which is mostly composed of near-empty rural backwater districts aren’t the ideal advisors in dealing with such matters.
An excellent post and one that I would have disagreed with a year ago. What use is free service if you can’t use it?
Especially when it’s not free, the cost of the NHS is paid in income tax caused unemployment.
When you fine someone for speeding you expect them to drive slower, when you fine someone for working you should expect them to work less.
It used to be widely acknowledged that centrally planned states and industries eventually implode as you point out JXB. Many philosophers and economists have written extensivley on this over the centuries. However Political bodies exist to increase their influence, in a constant battle for balance, for ying and yang, so the same lessons must be relearned again and again.
In other words perhaps its human nature to face the same debates, even a quirk of recessive PP1 gene could be to blame.
Anecdotally, decades living in developing countries have shown me private healthcare is perfectly fine. You’re not extorted to pay National Insurance and can use your capital to seek the care, medicine or treatment you wish, from vibrant, competitive providers. There may exist in theory a situation where someone without their own earnt resources, family, friends, and devoid of any voluntary charitable assistance (which is perfectly reasonable) could suffer without access t ‘free’ NHS healthcare, but I don’t know any and would suggest those who claim it would alter their standing if they were forced. Cycles of life and death, day and night even natural selection, are sadly the fate of all mammals, despite an insatiable clamour to rail against these natural phenomenon and feel kinder and more compassionate. Indeed, what unexpected consequences may befall us if we reject mother nature, if we stick two proverbial fingers up to the universe and could overturn natural phenomenon? …Sorry I think I went through a tunnel there.
If privatised capitalist marketplaces become monopolised through corrupt practices, standards and regulations, it is not the fault of ‘capitalism’, it is the fault of corruption and bribery, yet this misattribution is frequently a complaint of (to generalise, somewhat tongue in cheek) socialist utopian-dreaming children who form lobbying pressure-groups on social media, women, cry-bullies, Moet Marxist control freaks and those who stand to benefit economically, ideologically, via nepotism etc.
I like Kates points however I believe she has cited capitalist ‘asset strippers’ in the past as a knock for capitalist societies, yet fails to cite centrally-planned asset strippers. The asset stripping problem is a problem of human nature, its criminal corruption; just witness the uniform corruption across all societies in COVID responses, which I would file largey under economic benefit, from development bank and NGO funding thats easy for policy makers to syphon off.
Humans are all jealous, greedy, dumb, violent etc to varying degrees, and I think I speak for many wary of greater socialism or central-planning when I consider the bigger the government the bigger the danger.
Capitalism isn’t perfect but I’m suitably convinced its the best system we’ve come up with yet, and allows marginally more people to asset strip than centrally-planned more socialist arrangements; where absolute power leads to absolute asset stripping, or those more-equal than others get to more-asset strip than others.
Elon Musk was briefly worth >$0.25 trillion. Even someone adverse to big central state governance can agree this is an absurd amount of resources for a person to control. I would love to have solutions to this that make sense; simply taxing him just gives these resources to an obese government, which may or may not be less dangerous than the individual, especially when our democracy is currently so unrepresentitve and flawed (like capitalism, ‘democracy’ is another of our systems that in theory is as good as it gets but in practice for us is entirely corrupted).
Depending on ones definitions we can say the NHS is Britains largest most ‘centrally-planned’ instituion. Its a state monopoly getting asset stripped to the tune of £300m a day, and imploding under its own deadly malfeasance and corruption. As the closest incarnation we have of pure socialism, its rotten, no longer fit for purpose and serves as an abrogation of personal responsibility.
Bonus point: everyone automatically being entitled to free healthcare and longer life irrelevant of their background and personal choices doesnt occur outside the West. This surely epitomises systemic White privilge?
Time for my medicine.
Edit Bonus point: the great success of Western capitalist societies since the age of enlightenment has led to amazing uses of energy that provide a better quality fo life than mankind has ever witnessed through freedoms of thought, travel, electricty, food farming etc, for all the planets human inhabitants. Alongside this we have the vaccines, medicines and treatments that have led to the planet having far more inhabitants surviving and living longer than would oterhwise be alive.
Repressive socialist societies and institutions like the NHS collapsing would lower the number of humans alive, alleviating the human burden on the planet. For any conspiracy theorists out there, could this be a goal of those promoting it? The ‘trope’ of Green-boosters leading a Malthusian drive to unwind the humanitarian success story capitalism ushered in? Or at least get a firm totalitarian grip on it through digital surveillance IDs?
Personally I’m a big fan of people like jacinda Adern saying she wants to cede more agency and control to indigenous folk, and must insist she, Trudeau and anyone else virtue signalling in this identitarian manner prove it by stepping aside to make way for indigenous people to assume all governing roles. Infact, anyone not indigenous should be required to ask for a work/residency visa, and if denied should be deported immediately. The way any one residing in foreign places must (that is if you believe in borders, and like the skull border that protects the brain, or the front door border that protects the home, or the ozone layer border that protects the earth, or the cell-wall border that protects the nucelae content, or the email password that protects the email content etc, there is simply nothing more god-given or universally common in nature than borders).
The world would be a far more right and intersting place if indigenous American Indians, Austrlaians, Maoris, Inuit etc had full agency and governship of their own domains and countries. It may be better, worse or similar, but it would be ‘right’, n’est-ce pas?
And to confound Green-boosters and climate alarmists the rubber tree was indgenous to Brazil until a Westerner stole the seeds and started cultiavting them all over (thats theft, not ‘capitalism’ by the way kids). If Brazil received global rubber tree royalties for all rubber products it may have financed a higher quaity of life to comfortably enforce more strident stewardship of the Amazon? Although greed and corruption (again, not ‘capitalism’) may still have prevailed there as it has today.
It is also to be widely acknowledged that private sector systems end inevitably with absolute inequality, slavery, cartels of the ueber rich and widespread misery and humiliation.
The richer the get, the more evil they get is the evidence of the past 25 years. All they do is constantly depress worker wages to slave levels, they tell them to wear nappies and shit themselves on the shop floor, they refuse to pay any taxes but demand to write all the laws, now they are starting to kill the slaves using vaccines and graphene technology.
But the private sector is nirvana?
Much more complex than the usual good-bad arguments, friend.
The phrase ‘they always accuse you of what they are’ springs to mind.
I’ll pretend yours is a good-faith reply, despite you’re inexplicable reduction my complex message, that never once implied capitalism is nirvana, into the usual good-bad arguments, and repeat:
Capitalism isn’t perfect but I’m suitably convinced its the best system we’ve come up with yet, and allows marginally more people to asset strip than centrally-planned more socialist arrangements; where absolute power leads to absolute asset stripping, or those more-equal than others get to more-asset strip than others.
As for 25 years and workers wages (?), I have no problem with much higher minimum wages. If the US was still on the gold standard the 50s minimum wage would be ~$50 an hour, a level where the American Dream could survive. Only vast reductions in the size of the state/taxes and profit margins could cater for min wages this high. Capitalism doesn’t deny this, greed and corruption does.
The painfully obvious COVID scandal is not due to ‘capitalism’ either, it is corruption and greed, in Pharma today as it was with Swing Flu in 2009. I argue corruption and greed are sadly present in societies of all shades of political and economic system, because its human nature.
That the NHS is terminal and should be allowed to pass shouldn’t be controversial; especially if you’re funding the bugger and have experienced far more efficient, better value for money from privatised systems, even in developing coutries, unencumbered by legacy state monopolies.
I’d rather the IEAs arrangement, at least to start:
https://iea.org.uk/publications/universal-healthcare-without-the-nhs/
I’m open to new ideas, new solutions and could be wrong, because theres an awful lot that is wrong in society, but I don’t think the basic tenets of the West are, when they’re not corrupted, which is hard.
This article, sent to me by a friend in Texas of all places, explains a lot. I was able to reply to him that the rot began years ago, before I retired seeing the writing on the all for general practice.
Apart from the legislation appearing oh-so-silently, and the capture of the BMA etc by corporate interests, the key point overall is the de-professionalising of medicine that was so apparent during COVID. My generation was trained to think and act independently, in consultation with our peers, for the good of the patient in front of us. That is rapidly being replaced by salaried (and therefore controlled) executors of policies set at the top. You are not trained to think independently, and nor (unlike an independent contractor) do you dare.
Those policies are for the sake of commercial interests or, at best, “the greater good of society.” The patient is merely a means to an end.
“My generation was trained to think and act independently, in consultation with our peers, for the good of the patient in front of us.”
Adverts to medics in the 1960s used to say things like “Librium – whatever the diagnosis”.
Protocols instead of individual treatments. When my mother was failing, I always asked why a particular protocol was being implemented and no-one could tell me – it was just what was done.
We are clearly moving to the European healthcare model, part NHS part private. Your medical practitioner will be able to place you in either system based on speed of delivery, cost, ease of treatment etc. The bill will be picked up by state, the problem being is that ours will be so poorly designed and led that it will fail within a couple of years.
The NHS will find itself swamped with the old/difficult cases and is currently that broken that it will be unable to handle it. Sorry to sound so defeatist, it’s not my normal persona but it’s the NHS it has that effect.
From my personal observation, the Australian healthcare system is deteriorating rapidly.
When it was a good system (within the last ten years), it saved my life and the lives of many others: with care, efficiency and a minimum of bureaucracy. I signed no forms; saw no bureaucrats – just received outstanding care and after-care.
No such thing as the ‘european’ healthcare model. Almost all countries have different models. For instance the French system is 100% insurance based, but also 100% state. Although there are ‘private hospitals’ they have to charge the same and accept the same insurance payments. This is quite different to say the Dutch or German models which itself is different in different states.
There is only one model the UK will be changing to and its an awful one, the US. at its best its wonderful, the level of service can be great and no problem cannot be overcome. But at its worst its NHS times 10. ( and the multiple applies equally to costs for the most basic intervention).
Of course its completely dominated by the insurance companies and big pharma. The talk of a UK/US umbrella trade deal has died a death, but there are lots of deals happening around ‘services’ which can happen without Senate approval, This potentially benefits the UK because of its strength in services, but it can and does work both ways. The doors have been opened for US insurance companies in the health field to apply their model in the UK. It won’t ever be announced, its just slowly slowly catchee monkey, and in 5 years the provision of health in the UK will be changed for ever.
Excellent post, @Kate. I don’t have any inside info unfortunately.
I do have a suggestion though. Listen to BBC Radio 4 early in the morning and to what they are saying about “food security” almost every day. Major food shortages are planned, and not only that but incentives are in place not to counter them but to EXACERBATE them. This comes across loud and clear, for all who have ears to hear, whatever angle they are coming at it from – whether they are talking about the supply of sunflower oil, fertiliser prices, solar grants, or whatever.
Yes this is exactly the messaging I’ve picked up from the British Bullshit Corporation. Our apocalypse cupboard is very well stocked…
What we are fast approaching is the end of medicine as we knew it – medicine which has nothing to do with the knowledge and experience of the practitioner but is purely a question of bureaucratic diktat. In the future there will simply be technology, AI and junk bio-engineering with outcomes becoming ever more nightmarish, but it won’t matter because it is new and politicians are corrupt, arrogant and foolish. Our present medical profession is much diminished particularly after the last two years but it is nothing to where we are heading if we don’t call out the lies.
Goes well deeper than that – forgot a meaning enquiry and anything remotely informing you of the mess health and social care is in and the infamy of the past two years. A mess it is and experienced the madness of it all these past weeks leading up the the death of a good friend today. Harrowing story and the insulting part to the story is his death will be recorded as a covid death, though his infection was totally incidental – but the brutal inhumanity of it all shames this country. I openly wept today.
I am very sorry to hear this and my thoughts are with you.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/ukcolumn-news/uk-column-news-9th-february-2022 at 31.15
Total digitisation is the plan, your first point of contact will be an AI doctor, online. To be honest, they will probably not be massively worse than most GPs. The triage system we have now where receptionists decide who lives and who dies will continue until the tech is ready, and then they will be dispensed with too.
The era of “family doctors” is totally over. that is never coming back. No one was asked, no one agreed to it, but get used to it.
No. The future is not written. What the hell happened to “Never surrender”?
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/solving-issue-gp-access
Not enough GPs. Proposed introduction of alternative staff to supplement the service just doesn’t work. With “free at the point of access” there is no efficient way of rationing services so it’s a fight for the front of the phone queue. No matter what idea you think you have to improve services, it won’t work and it will have already been tried before. More GPs is the only solution. All other attempts have just fattened the service with ineffective zombie jobs. Removing these would go some way to reducing the tax burden (although might the unemployment cause tax issues?)
I think a good part of the solution would be GPs opening the doors of their surgeries, admitting patients in and seeing them face to face.
To my mind over the course of the last 2 years they have demonstrated nothing short of abject cowardice, unless, of course, they were only following orders.
That’s kind of a separate issue. Much of this pre-dates covid. GP practices are essentially private businesses. They have contacts to supply a service but these can’t be changed easily/quickly so mostly the gov can just make advice. If a practice is providing poor access they maybe under staffed or just doing a bad job. Unfortunately it sounds like this is fairly wide spread. However bear in mind there are lots of good exceptions. More centralised control (which the gov would like) is very likely to make things worse. As above, more GPs is the only real solution.
How about complete transparency of the political/industrial and media pharma complex?
Covid management was one great hosepipe squirting taxpayer’s cash into big pharma for negligible benefit. As a PS, why was pharma not held liable for vaccine side effects?
The first task is to make our politicians accept that they made mistakes — and not just ‘trivial bits slightly wrong’ but important mistakes in our response at a fundamental level that made things much worse.
But politicians won’t admit to this unless the evidence is completely and utterly overwhelming. As a rule they’re not scientists (who consider varied sources of information and will happily change their minds when the evidence changes) — they’re typically lawyers who are trained (selected) to push their position as ‘correct’, with selective use of whatever evidence supports their position. Politicians are the ones that’ll say ‘we’re completely correct — trust us’ and aren’t the ones that’ll say ‘we don’t know yet’ or ‘I was wrong and have made things worse’.
As it stands we’re probably going to have a whitewash of an inquiry that comes out saying that some trivial mistakes were made and that the biggest problem is that we didn’t do enough fast enough.
Ie, the politician’s favourite excuse — I was actually right, and the only reason I was wrong is because people didn’t do enough of what I said — next time jump faster and higher and all will be well.
That is exactly right.
And the global bureaucracy that seems to have so much power over our daily lives is revising its policies and protocols so that when the next “pandemic” comes testing, masks and vaccines will be rolled out in record speed.
As far as I can see, the working assumption is that lockdowns are bad and the way to avoid them is to do all the other population control things we did quicker and better.
I really hope you’re wrong, but I’m worried you’re right.
I’m not sure scientists are so happy to change their mind when the evidence changes, if the last couple of years are any indication.
You’re probably right about whatever comes out of an official enquiry. We’ll see. It’d be nice if politicians could self correct without any external input (e.g. new political parties, external campaigns) and some of the people on the UK Parliamentary Science Committee seem competent/willing to ask tough questions. But most likely it’ll be a whitewash and not worth paying much attention to.
Still, politicians follow the crowd. We’ve seen some astounding reversals recently, like over the severity of Omicron and the lab leak hypothesis. If people pick up reform ideas and start repeating them, pressure will build. For example fringe parties can pick up on these ideas and incorporate them into their manifestos.
Fake scientists, the modern Lysenko types of the world, didn’t draw their conclusions from evidence and won’t change their minds based on evidence.
If some scientists won’t change their mind some will, so the general consensus amongst the scientific community can and does change. This could be reflected by adopting the blue team/red team approach whenever scientific advice is given to governments. This would obviously require that politicians are able to understand and analyse the evidence put forward by each team, possibly a big ask, but at the least it would ensure they were presented with more than one set of data/models/interpretations of the data.
Real scientists do change their minds, fake scientists, the Trofim Lysenko types like Whitty, Fauci, Vallance etc, never do.
They change their propaganda but that’s not the same thing.
The two examples you gave in your last para were not ‘reversals’, they were selective messaging. The economy could not continue after 2 years of covid, an end was manufactured. certain people have outlived their usefulness so there is no longer a need to protect them, hence the lab story has been allowed to be normalised.
Sorry to sound cynical but this enquiry will not break with tradition. The report was already drafted months ago by a bunch of permanent civil servants. It will throw out a few titbits, but nothing that will rock any boats.
a.k.a the cock-up theory. Well it doesn’t wash.
It doesn’t.
What does wash is understanding the ideology behind this, it’s green ideology and doomsday cultism is common to both lockdown and environmentalism.
What has happened is that the ideas taught for more than a century have been put into practice in what was perceived to be an emergency.
How? Arm the citizenry.
This is the only way. Without it we are just a herd of super-educated farm animals for those in power to deal with as they please.
We also require true civilian control over military, law enforcement and the fruits of government/military expenditure.
We’re not going to get there by just talking about it and we’re not going to get there through representative democracy. So we need to stop talking about how this can never happen again because the next phase is already underway. We need to talk about what we’re going to do about it.
Even better, have Tom Stoltman slap the legs of every politician who advocates lockdown with a wet fish.
and allow them to use them……
All of them? Wouldn’t there be problems of people getting rid of personal enemies (like difficult spouses)?
That didn’t help in the USA.
Sorry, not picking on you.
But I’m not sure about your bold statement. Vaccine mandates were always going to be rather difficult to enforce in many States, and the 2nd amendment certainly concentrates minds. Australia has undergone significant changes since it repealed its version on what was a similar society.
Combat green ideology, the ideology of doomsday cultism. It’s no coincidence that the most enthusiastic greens are the most enthusiastic Branch Covidians.
There is one requirement for Emergency Powers in time of warfare – the need to counter spies and saboteurs. This is the job of the Security Services, and to do it effectively they may need to breach numerous laws. They may need to steal items or lock people up covertly on suspicion – actions which are illegal. Security Service in the 1960s were happy to operate outside the law – to do so nowadays would require a permanent state of emergency only applicable to them.
what, like this lot infected with Common Purpose…..
That’s a predictable need, and a “license to kill” can (if actually needed) be written into law far in advance of war.
The thing to understand about emergency acts is they’ve got nothing to do with whethe something is an emergency, they are to do with suspending the normal process of debating law changes and handing absolute power to ministers. That’s justified by the possibility of an unanticipated emergency, in which the law is inadequate in unanticipated ways – not the fact that emergencies happen.
This means that, almost by definition, if you can come up with examples of what an emergency act might be needed for then you don’t need it. You could just pass a law in non-emergency times to handle that situation up front.
War and security services- across all nations- destroy morality and serve the Lord of the flies. It was ever thus. It takes a long time and a lot of goodwill for a society to recover balance, purpose and decency.
My personal feeling is that laws don’t “ensure lockdowns never happen again”.
Laws can be changed – as we saw during the pandemic they just suspended normal processes and made up some new laws.
In my view a stronger protection would be building precedent into the hearts and minds of the electorate. People need to believe that if someone flagrantly abuses basic human rights, they will be held accountable.
Hypothetically speaking, the best way to prevent lockdowns from happening again would be to punish those who instigated it – severely, violently and publicly.
Yes, I have been thinking for some time that at least some decision makers should face criminal prosecution.
Here in NL I would certainly prosecute whoever was in charge of closing down the shops, etc. just before Christmas 2021. They knew full well by the time they decided to do this that Omick-take was not that serious, they had promised that vaxxing would avoid the same lockdown we had last year, also just before Christmas; they claimed they needed this to ‘buy time’ – even though they had supposedly been buying time for a year and a half. This time there was no compensation for the shops, who will have already blown any savings they had in the preceding year and a half.
The only explanation for this was that the cabinet still wished to get the 2g part of the apartheid app through, as parliament was being particularly stubborn about it. Former Health minister De Jonge withheld a report from parliament necessary for the debate on the matter for 5 weeks (it said 2g was highly questionable from a legal perspective) then only, quietely, presented it just before everyone took off for Christmas break. It only came out because a particular MP who is making his life’s mission to hold these b’stards accountable made this public.
Although one could argue all measures were illegal, this last lockdown before Christmas, when virtually no other country in Europe was locking down, can only be deemed to have been for a purpose in no way related to public health. IMO, the relevant cabinet members should be held personally liable, both civilly and criminally. And then severely punished for abuse of powers and public trust.
Yes, though some countries have constitutions. Supposedly Sweden’s response was calm partly due to their constitution and laws already in place.
Fundamentally, laws follow society as well as as society following laws. Changing the law after some sort of extensive debate is the sort of publicly visible move that helps change hearts and minds. If someone is still pro-lockdown after law changes meant to prevent it happening again they have to explain why they disagree with Parliament / the will of the electorate, etc. Just like how lockdown sceptics had to deal with the fact that in the beginning the policy was popular.
Violence against people who came up with or implemented the policies, beyond being morally wrong (they were – again – popular at the time), would be the declaration of open season by anyone who felt strongly enough. Think woke takeovers are bad enough now? If violent attacks on decision makers become tolerated when the attacker believes it badly enough it’ll be riot time, all the time, and the riots will be of the BLM variety, not nice polite libertarians.
I have advocated for a constitution here several times. A document that sets out the unalienable rights of the population.
However, it needs a judiciary that is up to it and consequences for a breach of the constitution by government officials.
Spaniards were ultimately protected by its constitution. The lockdowns were eventually declared unconstitutional by the highest court and so cannot be repeated. However, the decision came months afterwards and no one in government faced any consequences for it.
A constitution counts for nothing when the jurists are all either compromised or supine. Italy has a constitution. So do Ireland and France. This didn’t stop the political mis-representatives from riding roughshod over any rights those constitutions purport to guarantee.
Those who came up with and implemented policies that resulted in countless needless deaths need to be held to account, preferably with the ultimate penalty.
Strongly agree and I’m unsure on why people have downvoted your comment to be honest.
My comment wasn’t meant to insinuate that law changes are somehow not valuable, or that the only outcome that would have any value would be something violent.
In fact I feel that legal changes are very valuable, but that these alone won’t offer much solace if they happen in isolation. I think that lengthy prison sentences are warranted for those who restrict peoples rights for reasons that are not demonstrably proportionate. I think that we should be willing to assign instigators the “murderer” label if they have constrained basic rights in such a way that has resulted in deaths. I do feel that’s the reality we’re up against, and I don’t think being honest about this necessarily leads to some open season free-for-all.
I do fully agree with the concerns you’ve raised around this though… my argument sits on a knife edge and there’s a every chance you are more right that me.
how about personal and professional liability for harm, enforced on the perpetrators with gusto by public reparation and rehabilitation committees staffed by US.
These locusts don’t get it and never will. You’re feeding the crocodile hoping he’ll eat you last.
How can we avoid a repeat of the last two years?
the buck stops with the people, if, on mass the majority said “na, no thanks” then there would have not been any lockdowns if people just ignored it. unfortunately most people went along with safety and furlough over liberty and then look stunned when the consequences hit them.
You can’t ignore the schools being closed.
You can’t ignore the NHS being shut to all but the covids.
You can’t ignore the care homes locking visitors out.
You can’t ignore all venues for just about everythign being shut down.
You can’t ignore international travel being banned.
You can’t ignore your employer telling you to f off on furlough etc.
The police were enforcing them, so yes, there would have been lockdowns anyway. Some people tried to ignore them and were severely punished. It’s entirely possible for governments to force the majority to do things they don’t want to do, if it wasn’t then there’d be no dictatorships in the world, especially when they control the systems people are using to figure out what’s right to begin with.
I think it is misguided to think that dictatorships don’t have the support of the majority. I’m pretty sure many if not most do.
In short:
“Repeal of emergency laws that suspend the usual decision making process“.
“changes to the way information is presented to ministers”
“an attack on public sector pseudo-science via reform of the granting process to include a rigorous definition of the scientific method”
“Repeal of emergency laws that suspend the usual decision making process“.
I like the idea of such a repeal – if only because of the shock value of the proposal. It would serve as a declaration that such laws are dangerous.
In the war of ideas, that counts for something.
‘Covid non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were a mistake.’
They were not a mistake, they were a critical tool for scaring the living piss out of people and as such formed a core tactic for looting the nation and furthering the globalist agenda.
Emergency acts should require emergency elections.
The average voter is such a mong that they will vote for the Tory/Labour uniparty yet again.
DAILY SCEPTIC REALLY MUST PAY ATTENTION TO PROPOSED PANDEMIC POWERS TO BE HANDED OVER TO THE WHO BY TREATY TO RATIFIED BY JAVID IN MAY. APART FROM THE EXTINCTION OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY IT WOULD MEAN EVEN. MORE ARROGANCE AND LESS DISCUSSION THAN BEFORE.
If I could have upticked you a thousand times I would have – this is the most pertinent post in this whole set of responses to this article.
We can debate the rights and wrongs of politicitians ordering lockdowns until the cows come home but it will only be nothing more than naval gazing when we continue to ignore the MASSIVE elephant in the room which is the prospect that the UK govt will sign its sovereignty over to the WHO who will then be able to order lockdowns at the whim of whatever vaccine manufacturer has something to sell and there will not be a thing we can do about it.
The one part I would take issue with is the comment, “there will not be a thing we can do about it.”
On the contrary, what we have learned these last two years is that a government with a majority can pass any damn laws it likes and F. the rest of you. So trying to con us with a “not me guv” does not work and Bozo has proven it so.
What we need is a set of inalienable rights that the thieves in parliament can’t infringe.
Rights that the courts respect and uphold, rights the people recognise and would fight to maintain.
Rights like not being forced to take an injection you don’t want and for there to be no political consequence for deciding not to.
But as such rights would stop those in power from looting the nation and grabbing power for their globalist overlords it isn’t going to happen any time soon.
They have that in the USA and Canada, but the courts chose not to get involved.
I think it is fair to say that the US government circumvented the constitution. It was written 200+ years ago in a pre-industrial world, when the idea of bodily autonomy was not even remotely in question. It could probably use an update.
And certainly without independent courts to enforce it, a constitution is almost worthless.
At the very least though it’s a well defined line to be defended.
It probably depends to what extent under English common law the people still have any power, apart from a citizen’s arrest. Have we really granted parliament the right to pass statute laws which negate some of the ‘inalienable rights’ we were allegedly born with?
If I don’t have my inalienable rights any more, what’s the point in being born here, as opposed to a country like France or Italy. There the state has more power and their legal approach is very different … they don’t have juries, for a start.
(Bliar also tried to abolish juries here.)
inalienable rights are restrictions on the state.
What bureaucrat is going to hold themselves to account?
Make politicians legally liable and enforceable by the people with no political involvement. To be enacted and enforced by a separate body that politicians cannot influence. As politicians and the MSM have committed gross treason against the people then the death penalty should be included as a sentence the enforcing body can pass.
I think this is just wishful thinking but I can dream.
How to Ensure Lockdowns Cannot Happen Again
Nuremberg-style trials and lengthy prison sentences.
I’d prefer just overnight prison sentences, then a hearty breakfast.
and a taxpayer supplied Tumbril for their last trip as public servants?
Off topic but: Inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy after the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine may follow a chronic course
https://www.jns-journal.com/article/S0022-510X(22)00093-4/fulltext
I’m sure it is on the list of side effects (there are pages and pages of them) which Pfizer knew about before its jab was approved by the FDA
I would like to know exactly who these “Bill Gates type people” were and how they managed to influence our governments to throw out years of planning and follow the actions of the CCP.
They turned up on day one with a plan, and clever-sounding claims that there was an impossibly huge crisis that required immediate action. There probably wasn’t much more to it than that.
That’s why it’s important to move beyond analysis and news reporting, and move onto proposing concrete plans. The people who want more lockdowns, masking and universal vaccine mandates for all, are certainly willing to write down such plans (lockdowns were being discussed in epidemiology papers as far back as 2005).
And huge amounts of cash to buy access to the administration or executive, wall to wall biased coverage in the MSM and to distort Academic output by funding unscientific research and its subsequent publication, with yet more biased coverage by the MSM.
The President of Ghana warned his nation in January what was happening.
This transcript is more or less what he read out:
transcript-the-covid-plan_rockefeller-lockstep-2010.pdf (wordpress.com)
It is unnervingly similar to what happened, but I can’t make out the exact provenance of it. Can anyone shed further light?
Lockstep 2010 is a legitimate document and was put out by Rockefeller.
Hiding in plain sight it’s called.
Great article. Thank you!
laws can be reversed
the way to make sure it never happens again is to make sure the collective consciousness realises what a terrible idea it was
sack the terrible scientists and advisors
sack anybody that thought locking down was ok without a cost benefit analysis
prosecute people that called for lockdown (hate speech at the least – manslaughter at worst)
stop the censorship of other opinions
stop the smearing of S Gupta GBD etc
go back to being modern, evidenced based scientific society rather than fear driven, groupthinked quasi-religious morons
the top people that threw away the pandemic plan should be prosecuted. media companies that censored discussion f lockdown should be annihilated
if the tax exempt foundations of the United States, who wield billions, are one of the facets of the funding, what do we do about them? Funding can corrupt people, and mega-funding can corrupt them to sell their neighbours for the sake of enriching their descendants. Human nature, unameliorated, can be a very nasty thing indeed.
I saw the interview with Norman Dodd about the Reece report 10 years ago, and it has haunted me since:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=g+edward+griffin%3b+reese+report&docid=608008923743671707
Norman Dodd – Tax exempt foundations – Manipulating politics and culture – YouTube
I looked into it for some time, and discovered that Norman Dodd had great integrity (as his face would indicate) and that the report (which I have read most of) was as he said, and that it was blocked from full completion by political shenanigans and threats to Carol Reese.
People underestimate how much capital these foundations control. Charity laws in some states in the US are a complete disgrace.
Mike
Thanks for the opportunity to review this material before publication. I have thought a bit more about the committee for defining scientific standards. There is no scope for a sound file here so I will risk aggravating the RSI.
First, as I understand it, this committee is about setting criteria for deciding what research should be funded, therefore these are standards to be applied before the research begins – correct?
It seems to me the examples of standards in your article, and the draft you sent me, fall into three groups.
One group are things such as results that don’t replicate, papers with logical fallacies, fraudulent practices. It seems to me that you don’t need a standards committee to determine these are bad science. Who is going to consciously fund fraudulent science? The trouble is they not typically apparent until after the research has been done. What is needed here is not new standards but better processes for detecting projects likely to fail standards that are clearly already accepted and also appropriate redress when they do.
The second group is things like open access and preregistration. These seem to me like good criteria for funding research – but they are battles that are already being fought. Maybe a parliamentary committee might help but it is primarily a change in global research culture.
The third group is perhaps the most fruitful for the committee. Things such as what types of models are acceptable, the requirement to include some kind of confidence interval/error bar, and, in the draft you sent me, lower P thresholds . The problem here is going to be expressing those standards without getting swamped in detail and bureaucracy. For example, take lower P thresholds . A P threshold is not a probability. A p value of 0.05% in one field is not comparable to a p value of 0.05% in another field. In many fields they make no sense at all and if the research uses Bayesian techniques they don’t apply. How do you define what is acceptable? Something similar could be said about models – but I know that is rather controversial here. I am not saying it is impossible or undesirable to set these standards but I think it may be extremely hard in practice.
Anyhow – excellent article as always.
Thanks Mark. Modern speech recognition can work very well especially for prose like this – definitely worth checking out! Alternatively, you can send me recordings and I’ll transcribe them for you if they aren’t too long.
Yes, there are lots of details to work out here, hence the need for a group to focus on it (ideally of non-scientists, as people within the system are conflicted). The research community itself doesn’t in my view have a great track record of self-reform. Though they generated some useful ideas internally, and there’s been progress on open access and (some) progress on pre-registration, they have no way to enforce any of it because grants are funded regardless of whether the ideas are followed or not. And in most cases, higher standards = lower publication rate = less grant income = fewer job opportunities, so all the incentives are wrong.
My thinking on this is heavily influenced by Alvaro de Menard’s writings, e.g. “What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers“, which points out that results with low P values (i.e. better) have hardly become more common over time. There are still floods of P=0.049 results obtained from a single class of undergrads, and the papers that seem likely to replicate are generally ones that are saying obvious things (hardly worth funding, though it’s always nice to have a study to back up an “obvious” point). Toughing the standard for statistical significance by 10x in the fields where it applies would have an immediate and massive impact on the quality of the research literature, but it’s probably not going to happen until politicians get a grip on science funding.
Another great quote from de Menard: “Right now I believe the most valuable activity in metascience is not replication or open science initiatives but political lobbying.”
In other words, it seems the only reforms the system is currently capable of are purely internal reforms that don’t reduce the amount of money being given out or the prestige of science. So: pre-registration OK, as long as there’s no general requirement for it, and as long as there are no penalties for incorrectly pre-registering/ignoring the pre-registration (so no surprise, this happens all the time). Reducing P thresholds, not fine, because the outcome would be lots of null results and massive reduction in the influence and prestige of scientists. And of course what does it do to replication – immediately almost all social science papers would no longer replicate under the new standards. Prosecuting research fraud: basically never discussed, even though it should be the top focus.
W.R.T. models, the biggest win would be defunding work that produces unvalidated models. It seems obvious that scientists shouldn’t be allowed to publish claims about nature without actually testing those claims, yet this would immediate cause the defunding of basically all of epidemiology, climatology, economics, criminology, etc. Any field where you can’t do experiments or where the predicted events are very rare or very slow, couldn’t be funded if you insisted on this most basic of scientific requirements, so that one is a really massive battle that would require many years of laying the groundwork beforehand.
Who is going to consciously fund fraudulent science?
An exhaustive number of malign actors.
The trouble is it’s just not over. Last week in the dentist I was shouted at for not wearing a mask, yesterday masks were on in a legal office I visited (no thank you was my reply) and today my child has been asked to test daily during her weekend school trip. It’s all mental and really getting me down. What can we do?
Can you issue a notice of liability to the bastards?
(Oboviously not where it would make life too difficult for your child.)
A simple denture that 3 years ago my dentist was able to have produced overnight, ie impressions taken first thing on day one, new denture fitted last thing on day 2 has now been in the works for two weeks. And nobody seems to give a phlying phuque.
I had a conversation with an elderly relative today. Turns out my sister (covid on the brain, regularly tests herself, wears mask in open air – I could go on but you get drift) had already given her a strongly worded lecture on “the importance of continuing to wear the mask”
I tried really hard to explain that they are nothing more than theatre, virtue signalling and protect no one from nothing – but I knew I wasn’t getting through. So I know precisely how you feel. My family are all 100% bought into this utter crap and deride me because I speak out against it.
it is very hard being the only sane person in the room.
Milo, I think me and thee are in the same canoe.
Sadly.
Commiserations huxleypiggles. It isn’t a great canoe to be in is it?
Literally tl;dr, and therefore not persuasive.
Briefly bullet point the whats, then make the argument for them. Preamble is just ramble.
I probably agree with most of this, but I only skimmed it. Anyone who disagrees won’t even get to the first suggestion/demand.
There’s a big problem with opinion pieces such as this – the author starts from the basis that we had a pandemic and the government simply mismanaged their reaction to it.
The cock-up theory.
Except that there was NO pandemic and the reaction to a wholly manufactured crisis had been planned months, if not years in advance and the crisis is ongoing and still being managed.
This article is naiive to the point of gross stupidity.
As I see it, for what the author is proposing, it’s neither here nor there whether it was a real pandemic or a fake one with ulterior motives.
Whatever works for a real pandemic will work for a fake one.
More generally, the problem is one of abuse of power by the state and anything that reduces the power of the state to dictate the daily lives of citizens works.
Bad actors who manufacture such crisis are generally trying hijack the state in some way. It’s not much use hijacking a state if it has limited powers.
Horrible picture!
Please spare us!
Please don’t put politicians in charge of defining the scientific method!!!
Who should, then? For as long as people calling themselves scientists get to access taxpayer funding and the public demands that politicians follow them, there has to be some way to decide who is and isn’t a scientist. The current approach is mere institutionalism and has failed. The correct approach is to define science as a methodology, not a bunch of universities and committees. To do that, we need an actual definition, which means someone has to write it. And as it must be outsiders (the insiders have failed, IMO) and those outsiders control the funding, it should be MPs.
THEY don’t want it to end, its lucrative and it gives them a power buzz, “There is a ‘high chance’ that a new COVID variant that is worse than Omicron will emerge in the next two years”, Chris Whitty has warned today”. Worse than omicrom, that like, covid, the majority only knew they had when they used of those nose sticks that make money for investors and manufacturers of nose sticks which give a false postive
The problem with any legal implications is that government makes the law. If the law or even a constitution gets in the way the government can just claim and emergency and over rule it a-la Trudeau. A free and honest press should be the solution but most of the media is owned by powerful vested interests. A law forcing advertising of all significant funding to media organisations at the front of the paper/website/new show might help open peoples eyes to this??
Just don’t follow what the government tells you. Sadly…. That isn’t going to happen. Far too many people still wearing their face nappies in their own cars. They’ve done a fantastic job of scaring people half to death.
‘The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house’ – Audre Lorde
If 3 is to have any relevance, then you need a quorum of sufficiently educated MPs to sit on it. It’s entirely pointless having a committee like that stacked full of Oxford PPE blowhards, because they will have zero ability to scrutinise anything. They will pick an expert out of a raffle and hope the winning ticket is scientifically correct.
The problem there is that the British people have an antipathy towards scientifically trained people. They want people they can have a booze up with, who tell them what they want to hear, who make promises they don’t keep.
Scientists tend to tell the people the truth, tend to argue based on data, not propaganda. They tend to NOT defer to ‘experts’ without subjecting that expertise to due diligence.
It’s not necessarily an attractive set of traits either to the Selection Committees in major parties NOR to voters if they actually get on the ballot.
I was actually pleasantly surprised by the S&T committee, and listening to the Westminster Hall debate on modelling. The Labour/SNP members were useless and didn’t seem able to engage with the problems at all, but the Conservative members were actually remarkably good. They asked focused questions, knew a lot about the issues (just as much as any DS reader would at any rate), and were happy to ask tough questions of the witnesses.
They also had background knowledge. For instance several of them had done modelling and data analysis in their past careers.
One big weakness was that the relevant people sometimes didn’t show up. The S&T members really wanted to question the behavioural psychologists at the session I watched, but, none of them appeared! Perhaps they need to be able to compel people to testify, a bit like the legal system.
Still, you do need outsiders. Insider reform goes nowhere in science. Just read about the efforts of Elizabeth Bik and friends, for example. On the rare occasions a bad scientist actually gets investigated and fired it’s so astonishing they write long posts all about how astonished they are. The default outcome of discovering evidence of scientific fraud, not just bad science, is that journals and universities ignore it or whitewash it.