tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3141759542968821728.post8994024144670743301..comments2024-01-01T16:01:35.711+00:00Comments on Dick Puddlecote: Peer Review: How Daft Headlines Are MadeDick Puddlecotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01481866882188932892noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3141759542968821728.post-4849920759548355072012-03-08T06:15:33.735+00:002012-03-08T06:15:33.735+00:00I always like to mention 'memory of water'...I always like to mention 'memory of water', the original paper on which was not only peer reviewed, but was published in Nature. <br /><br />Thoroughly debunked later, but peer reviewed nonetheless.Legironnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3141759542968821728.post-13887816736318555622012-03-08T00:03:21.977+00:002012-03-08T00:03:21.977+00:003
Just an example on the influence of Health Off...3<br /><br /><br />Just an example on the influence of Health Officers. Over<br />the last few years I’ve kept an eye on antismoking policy at holiday resorts<br />(not that I could afford to attend such). The larger resorts have at least one<br />Health Officer. Smoking bans were first instituted in some 5-star resorts.<br />Smoking was banished to the outdoors generally, then to designated outdoor<br />areas, then to a complete ban indoor/outdoor ban for some resorts. Most 5-star<br />resorts now have severe smoking restrictions. Then the antismoking trickled to<br />the 4-star resorts with the same progression. Now even some 3-star resorts have<br />severe smoking restrictions.<br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br />Cruise lines for a time seemed immune to the antismoking<br />madness. But they have caught up quite quickly. And it is the Health Officers<br />that set the policies in motion. They follow the propaganda protocol, e.g.,<br />conduct their “polls” that indicate that 70% of travelers don’t want to be<br />exposed to smoke, and the usual inflammatory antismoking rhetoric. So, now, the<br />major cruise lines all have severe smoking restrictions. For some, smoking is<br />not permitted even in cabins and on balconies, and is only permitted in<br />designated outdoor areas. On one major cruise line, smoking is permitted in the<br />cigar lounge, cigarette/pipe smokers not welcome.<br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br />The Health Officers are in many, many other corporations.<br />The larger corporations even have on-site gym facilities. The message is<br />constantly reinforced that health is only a physical phenomenon.<br /><br /><br /><br />The major theme that emerges is that antismoking is elitist as it was<br />earlier last century. It is the wealthy and “educated” that are most prone to<br />medical faddism and supremacism while the poor are little moved by the<br />self-serving propaganda? It is the wealthy and the “educated” that are prone to<br />starting destructive “society/world-fixing” bandwagons?<br /><br /><br /><br />Consider the eugenics of America<br />and Nazi Germany earlier last century. Eugenics was embraced/funded by the<br />mega-wealthy (e.g., Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie), the wealthy, and the “educated” in<br />their well-intentioned, albeit terribly misguided, quest to “fix” society; it’s<br />what “proper” people did. While the “educated” snobs sneer down their noses at<br />the poor and their “bad habits” (e.g., smoking) viewing them as burdens to<br />progress that must be “fixed up”, it is the upper classes, when they venture<br />into social engineering to quench their thirst for importance, that pose the<br />greatest danger to society, and only recently helped produce utter catastrophe.<br />And the “proper” people are well on their way again.<br /><br /><br /><br />It’s not the poor that create social-engineering catastrophes; it’s not the<br />poor that create economic catastrophes due to endemic fraud and greed; it’s not<br />the poor that create political decisions with disastrous ramifications. It’s<br />the white-collar, well-educated folk that are the greatest danger to society. It<br />is they that need constant scrutiny. It’s the poor that usually bear the brunt<br />of the “good intentions” of the educated.Mag01noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3141759542968821728.post-35489467668008869552012-03-07T23:58:16.113+00:002012-03-07T23:58:16.113+00:002
The critical problem in Public Health is its d...2<br /><br /><br />The critical problem in Public Health is its domination by<br />physicalism and the medical model. Health has again been perversely reduced to<br />only a physical phenomenon, e.g., absence of disease. Assaults on<br />psychological, social, moral, and ideo-political health – and their<br />consequences – through agenda-driven propaganda do not register as health issues<br />in physicalism. Medicos, dieticians, and the newly-created “personal trainers”<br />are the “oracles” of the time. Immediately post-WWII, it was this sickly,<br />reductionist definition of health that was identified as the foundational idea<br />of the eugenics madness of Nazi Germany (and America).<br />And, yet, here we are again having learned nothing from very painful lessons of<br />only the recent past.<br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br />Public Health and government health bureaucracies have long<br />been dominated by physicalism and the medical model. Newly appointed Health<br />Ministers meet with their health bureaucracy and within days are turned into<br />rabid antismokers able to parrot the standard antismoking rhetoric. There is<br />now an established, entrenched infrastructure from the WHO to countries/governments<br />the world over that forms a closed propaganda loop. The major agent of this<br />network in transforming society is the Health Officer that has typically been<br />trained in some Public Health course. These Health Officers are everywhere;<br />they are in governments and in corporations, small and large. It is these<br />Officers that institute “initiatives”. They have been trained that they should<br />be changing culture (to the edicts of physicalism – whether they know it or not),<br />e.g., anti-tobacco. This social-engineering within physicalism is eugenics,<br />where the major target over the last few decades has been behavior rather than<br />race.<br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br />Following the eugenics of America<br />and Nazi Germany, if it was openly proposed immediately post-WWII that the<br />State would sponsor behavior-modification initiatives such as antismoking,<br />there would have been utter outrage, if not more. Yet, whatever was understood<br />then is now gone. Over the last few decades there has been a collective loss of<br />insight, a sort of amnesia. The worldly framework is heading again for disaster<br />– the cost of superficiality – and this time on a far grander scale.<br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br />We are now even seeing denial of medical treatment – another<br />eugenics favorite - for the medically-defined “undesirable” and “unworthy”,<br />e.g., smokers, the obese. Again, this conduct could not have been openly<br />advocated/instituted until recently. The conduct is so contrary to the<br />Hippocratic Oath that an outcry would be expected. But there is no outcry.<br />There has been an assault on the Hippocratic Oath for decades similarly to what<br />occurred in the German medical establishment in the lead-up to Nazism. While<br />there is copious [questionable] research on antismoking, little attention is<br />given to the attack on the Hippocratic Oath or, say, iatrogenesis. While<br />certain social groups are declared as “costly” to the system, there is<br />essentially no scrutiny of the squandering of taxpayer funds by the medical<br />establishment that is typically lucrative for those who run the medical<br />production-line: The health budget is a constantly growing “black hole” that is<br />certainly profitable for particular medical groups. While the medical<br />administration demands that all lead a medically/statistically scrutinized/led<br />life, it avoids scrutiny like the plague. These are all terrible, terrible<br />signs.<br /><br /><br /> Mag01noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3141759542968821728.post-11074054387424806102012-03-07T23:56:02.542+00:002012-03-07T23:56:02.542+00:001
The question that is typically not asked is ho...1<br /><br /><br />The question that is typically not asked is how this<br />agenda-driven trash passes for scholarship? Pell occupies a professorship at a<br />university! In typical scientific/coherent enquiry, erratic claims immediately<br />attract peer scrutiny and critique; baseless and over-interpreted conclusions<br />are quickly brought into line. In “lifestyle epidemiology” and pet issues in<br />contemporary Public Health, e.g., anti-tobacco, this self-correcting scrutiny<br />is <b>non-existent</b>. Peer review is useless when all the “peers”<br />are equally daft, where incompetence, lack of integrity, and agenda are<br />endemic. The conduct is anti-scientific and anti-scholarly. Particular university<br />departments with direct access to public policy formulation have become<br />manufacturers of agenda-driven propaganda.<br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br />This is not a recent phenomenon. It has been occurring for<br />decades and getting worse. We have Glantz’s, Crapman’s, Daube’s, Banzhaff’s,<br />and a string of others occupying senior university positions that have<br />published agenda-driven trash for decades and that typically attracts no official<br />critique whatsoever. How many critiques in the peer-reviewed medical literature<br />are there of Glantz’s “heart-attack miracles” study? It is this failure of<br />academia that is the lead point in this unfolding insanity.<br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br />If Public Health has no coherent self-correction, it would<br />have been expected that other disciplines may have recognized by now that<br />something is terribly astray, e.g., statistics, psychology, philosophy, ethics.<br />Surely there must be some smoker academics, in particular, in other disciplines<br />that would have taken time to examine what is occurring in Public Health, given<br />that the antismoking bandwagon would certainly be affecting their movements. If<br />there are such individuals, they are not making their thoughts known in the<br />mainstream, i.e., published literature. The few critiques that exist are<br />occurring in the blogosphere by people that are not typically in the<br />mainstream. The few others that have voiced concerns are retired from the<br />mainstream, e.g., retired academics, retired physicians.<br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br />Consider for a moment that in all the published literature,<br />this long-term, serial assault on scholarship, as is the norm in Public Health,<br />has not been identified/highlighted. Given all the universities around the<br />world, there are no current academics that have come out in force scrutinizing<br />the conduct of Public Health researchers <b>in detail</b>. This is<br />extraordinary. It is catastrophic failure. Academia, on a global scale,<br /><i>repeat - on a global scale</i>, is dangerously lame. Academia<br />has been taken over by the very mentalities that genuine scholarship is<br />supposed to guard against, e.g., fanaticism, superficiality.Mag01noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3141759542968821728.post-82059593589414780632012-03-07T22:42:31.520+00:002012-03-07T22:42:31.520+00:00"leaving aside the conflict of interest in th...<i>"leaving aside the conflict of interest in the funding which to me is tantamount or comparable to a research study on organised crime being funded by the Mafia"</i><br />That'll be the study financed by the American Cancer Society. I kinda agree. ;)Dick_Puddlecotenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3141759542968821728.post-67307458455255975662012-03-07T22:32:22.332+00:002012-03-07T22:32:22.332+00:00It's odd, but I get at least as much satisfact...It's odd, but I get at least as much satisfaction from eating ice cream three times a week (someone in my household bought a tub of Neopolitan recently), as I do from eating it, say, once a month. <br /><br />I haven't eaten any for at least a week, though. I'm probably an atypical user of Ice-C, however; my dopamine receptors perhaps haven't had enough time to adapt yet.<br /><br />If I'd been a mainliner of Luxury Choc (sorry - I never reveal drug sources) though, I might well have found myself in dire straits.<br /><br />I would have had to visit a registered pharmacy in order to swallow a glass of milk, under supervision, in case I sold the milk on to persons of possibly nefarious character.<br /><br />Bring it on, I say - the next target should be chocolate bars. Has no-one heard of pieces of insects being found in them?<br /><br />Malaria, people. The high you get from the dairy products doesn't justify the risks that you uneducated proles put your children through.Rob Fnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3141759542968821728.post-44960751570381078202012-03-07T22:01:37.407+00:002012-03-07T22:01:37.407+00:00Said by Liam Donaldson in evidence to the Health C...Said by Liam Donaldson in evidence to the Health Committee regarding the Enstrom/Kabat study --- "Quite honestly, I do not think that study stands up to any scientific scrutiny whatsoever, leaving aside the conflict of interest in the funding which to me is tantamount or comparable to a research study on organised crime being funded by the Mafia."<br />I seem to remember anti-smoking 'peer study' being described as valid as a class of 6th. formers marking each others A level exam papers. Yet these people have the nerve to publish total crap believed only by politicians and those wishing to feed from Government and pharmaceutical troughs.ChrisBronoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3141759542968821728.post-42010735785946525562012-03-07T20:49:51.357+00:002012-03-07T20:49:51.357+00:00All I can say is, thank God for the blogosphere, a...All I can say is, thank God for the blogosphere, and the likes of DP and his fellow bloggers. The truth will out, eventually, and it will be because of the bloggers-who-will-not-be-lied-to. This is a grassroots movement at the moment, but it will go mainstream soon. That's when the shit will hit the fan.<br /><br />Expect a run on piano wire in the not too distant future. <br /><br />And a website pinpointing suitable lamp posts. A sort of Google earth for the newly aware.nisakimannoreply@blogger.com