By Jo Nova

We’ve reached a point of Maximal Bureaucratic Psychopathy in Science

That’s where committees of committees aim to improve your health by giving one human the ability to kill a billion.

In 2015 a scientist at Anthony Fauci’s agency thought it would be neat to mix two Monkeypox strains together to make a nastier one. For no reason anyone can explain, the National Institutes of Health’s Institutional Review Board thought it would be neat too, and approved it.

A normal person might worry that doddery Joe Biden has the nuclear codes, but all along, unnamed, unaccountable countless others might have their fingers on equivalent bombs, and they won’t need to input any codes to set off the bombs, just have a bad day.

The idea was to mix a deadly but slow strain of monkey pox with a tamer monkey pox strain that spread quickly. This could have created a virus with the “best of both” — an agent with a 15% fatality rate and a reproduction rate of 2.4, which would make it very much “pandemic potential”. (With one infected person infecting 2.4 others, this was a similar rate of spread to the original Wu-Flu, but so much deadlier).

So any normal human would know this was a stupid risk to take, but the NIH did it anyway. Worse, they knew it was bad, and they hid the approval for nine years. Even when the investigators from a House Committee came knocking, they concealed the project approval. They now say the experiment was never done, but they can’t point to a single email or memo to show it was stopped. The original approval has only recently been reversed.

As long as the festering mess that gave us Covid is not dealt with — it’s just a matter of time before we get the next one.

Four years on and no one has been sacked for the lab leak that infected the world, or the cover up that hid the origin.

Fauci swears that a biosecurity breach in Wuhan could not possibly have anything to do with his former agency NIAID, but since they hid the monkeypox approval, and told journalists it never happened, then stonewalled and denied it to a congressional committee, Fauci’s assurances are worth about as much as nine years of active deception suggest.

Reckless Gain-of-Function experiments with viruses is like letting the local university make nuclear bombs in basements of skyscrapers. Except it’s more dangerous.

Is there any reason the NIH should not be razed to the ground?

Thanks to David Archibald for sending the story:

For nearly nine years Anthony Fauci’s institute concealed plans to engineer a pandemic capable mpox virus with a case fatality rate of up to 15 percent, congressional investigators revealed in a new report Tuesday.

In June 2015, a scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases received formal approval from the National Institutes of Health’s Institutional Review Board for experiments expected to engineer an mpox virus with high transmissibility and moderate mortality.

NIAID — the institute Fauci oversaw for nearly four decades and which underwrites most federally funded gain-of-function research — concealed the project’s approval from investigators with the House Committee on Energy and Commerce over the course of a 17 month-long investigation.

It’s getting hard to tell the difference between an enemy threat and a normal government operation:

Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, caused a public health emergency in the U.S. from August 2022 to February 2023. It is endemic in Africa. The more deadly clade circulates in Central Africa (clade I) while the more transmissible clade circulates in West Africa (clade II). Mpox has infected more than 20,000 people and caused more than 1,000 deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where clade I predominates, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — though some experts believe that is an undercount of true cases. A strain of the clade II virus drove the American outbreak.

The mpox experiment first came to light in a September 2022 article in Science.

The gain-of-function project proposed by NIAID virologist Bernard Moss would splice genes conferring high pathogenicity from the clade I virus into the more transmissible clade II virus. The new “chimeric” (combined) virus could have retained up to a 15 percent fatality rate and a 2.4 reproductive number, a measure of transmissibility indicating every sick person could infect up to 2.4 people on average, giving it pandemic potential.

When it’s a matter of life and death, why not put a lying agency in charge of checking its own funding? This is what the experts do:

“The new [Office of Science and Technology Policy] continues to give funding agencies, like NIAID, primary responsibility for oversight of GOFROC [Gain of Function Research of Concern] and DURC [Dual Use Research of Concern] experiments involving potentially dangerous pathogens,” the committee’s report reads. “In almost any other scientific field or industry, this arrangement would be immediately recognized as a conflict of interest, necessitating independent review and oversight.”

They are talking about some of the nastiest plans known to man. DURC or “Dual Use Research of Concern” is the polite way to label a discovery that has a dual purpose, meaning it could be a cure for cancer or a weapon of war. They could just as easily have called it Potential Bioweapons of War, but they don’t want to scare the funders (us).

What if researchers were high on the thrill of the discovery-of-a-lifetime and most of the costs and risks (global pandemics) are externalized, and the committees that approved them worked as well as “peer review” does in the rest of government strangled science?

What if some of those committees were infiltrated by foreign adversaries? That might actually improve things. The Russians might leak the news of what’s going on in Western labs to the media…

The one “good” thing about this story is knowing that the last pandemic could have been so much worse.

Mad scientist image by Lisa Yount from Pixabay

Essay by Eric Worrall

The new Conservative New Zealand Coalition Government has cancelled a climate flatulence tax which was due to start in 2025.

New Zealand ends plans to price agricultural emissions

By Lucy Craymer
June 11, 202410:11 AM GMT+10

WELLINGTON, June 11 (Reuters) – New Zealand on Tuesday ended a plan to put a price on agricultural emissions including methane produced by belching sheep and cattle, relenting to farmer pressure that the plan would make their business unprofitable.

The conservative government said in a statement it would establish a Pastoral Sector Group with representatives from the agricultural sector to find other ways to reduce biogenic methane.

…

The previous government had introduced a plan to charge farmers for their gas emissions from the end of 2025, in what was hailed as a world first.

New Zealand, home to 5 million people, has about 10 million cattle and 26 million sheep. Nearly half its total greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, mainly methane.

New Zealand had been planning on including agriculture in the emissions trading scheme as part of its commitment to stop global warming. However, the plan was unpopular in many parts of the rural sector and the current government promised to end it if elected.

…

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/new-zealand-ends-plans-price-agricultural-emissions-2024-06-11/

While this is a promising start, New Zealand is not out of the woods when it comes to climate insanity.

In 2023 current New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Luxon said “If you’re a climate change denier at the moment or even a minimalist, I just don’t understand how you can hold that position to be honest.“. Junior coalition partner ACT wants climate action at a slower pace, and New Zealand First, while they place a heavy emphasis on cost of living issues, still have climate action on their list of policies.

Having said that, any relief from the madness of the Jacinda Ardern years is probably a welcome change for ordinary New Zealanders. Whatever doubts I have about the current New Zealand coalition government, former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was far worse. In my opinion, nobody who thinks climate denial is linked to the Christchurch mass shooting should ever again be trusted with any kind of political authority.

If you haven’t yet read Andy West’s book “The Grip of Culture” about the sociology of climate catastrophism, please do. You can download it free here
or buy the print edition

 It’s billed as a summary of the articles he contributed at Climate Etc. on the research he conducted on international opinion surveys about attitudes to climate change, but it’s much more than that.
 
Very briefly, and at the risk of distorting his message, what I take Andy to be saying is this:
Climate catastrophism is a culture, understood in the specialised sense used by a growing number of academics in the fields of anthropology, psychology, & cultural history, i.e. an irrational belief system that performs important social functions. Others have had this insight, but Andy proves it.
 
What makes Andy’s book important is that he provides the kind of evidence that social scientists respect, in the form of strong correlations between strength of religious belief in dozens of countries and belief in dangerous global warming. What’s groundbreaking is the finding that the correlation turns out to be strongly positive or negative, depending on how you formulate the question: if you ask people to rate a list of different global threats, you get a positive correlation with national religiosity, while if you ask people to name a threat, you get a negative one. 
 
A possible explanation (for which Andy is not responsible) is that people in countries with a stronger religious ethos may tend to believe in catastrophic climate change because they recognise it as being like a religion, something they’re happy with. People in non-religious societies, on the other hand, may believe because it replaces the religion they’ve lost, or never had. In the first case you’re merely acknowledging that a belief in global warming exists, and is something of which you approve. Only in the second case is belief likely to turn into religious zealotry. If you’ve already got a religion, you’ll like climate catastrophe because it’s familiar; if you haven’t, you’ll go for it because you need something to believe in. Either way, Andy’s meta-analysis of dozens of surveys demonstrates a high correlation of belief in catastrophic climate change with both religious belief and non-belief in society, depending how you measure climate belief. It’s difficult to imagine a more convincing demonstration that belief in catastrophic climate change is fundamentally irrational. 
 
The point about identifying climate catastrophe belief as a culture, (or “cultural narrative,” a term I prefer, since it avoids many misunderstandings) is that it’s a wider term than religion, embracing a variety of ideologies. Andy makes a number of observations based on the research in this wide, though ill-defined field, the most interesting one being that a culture (in this sense) is necessarily irrational. It won’t do its job (of inculcating a sense of social cohesion etc.) if it’s based on rational grounds.
 
This has huge implications. What’s the point of opposing a belief with rational argument if the whole point of it is that it must necessarily be irrational?
 
We can all agree that ideologies that we don’t agree with are irrational. But what about your own ideology, be it religious, political, or simply a deeply held belief? If Andy West is right, we are all prey to irrational beliefs. 
 
I tried to test this claim by conducting an honest introspective examination of a belief of my own, namely socialism, and I assure you the results were enlightening – and disturbing.
 
–  What’s Socialism ever done for us?
–  Well, it brought us one man one vote, equal rights for women, and before that, free street lighting and piped water. Then free education, the National Health Service, an end to colonialism..
-Yes, but apart from that…
 
You know the sketch.
 
Of course, I had no difficulty identifying things in the history of socialism that I reject, from the Bolshevik revolution onwards. Orwell & thousands of others have already trodden that path. More seriously, in playing this game of introspection, I came to admit are features of any imaginable modern attempt at socialism (say, the policies that might have been enacted by a putative Corbyn government) which I can see would cause problems that would almost inevitably lead to disaster, and to which I have no solution. It’s only a mental game after all, but however I play it, I come to the same conclusion: to overcome the difficulties and resolve the problems I encounter, I would need to take charge of everything. 
 
And I’m not Stalin, even when playing mind games. I don’t have his talent.
 
Anyone with a minimum of historical knowledge can make an impressive list of the failings of socialism. (And I’m not talking about extreme claims, like that once made by Jordan Peterson, that Marx was responsible for the deaths of 40 million people.) And any socialist will have as stock of replies to these claims. The truth is, they may be partially or even largely true. But they don’t work, at least not always. And the more you try to make them work, the more you’re forced to admit that they can’t work. You can’t make them work without positing a situation of total omniscience and ultimately total control. This is the sense of 1984, I think. It’s not so much a prediction as a pursuit of an idea (an ideal) to its logical conclusion. Anyone with a smattering of knowledge of modern science or mathematics will appreciate the quandary. It’s like being faced with a theorem that can’t be proved, or a system that is inherently chaotic, or a logic that can never be both complete and internally consistent. 
 
This doesn’t stop me from being a socialist, but it does make me more reticent about any claims I make. Try it with your own deeply held beliefs. I promise you it will make you think.
 
Of course, my introspective musings concern no-one but myself, but they have convinced me that Andy is on to something important with his insistence that belief in catastrophic climate change is not just a sum of mistaken beliefs, like thinking that average global temperatures can be measured to a hundredth of a degree and that installing heat pumps will save the planet. The idea that cultural narratives are a driving force in societies seems to me to be one of the most useful and interesting ideas of recent years. 
 
*******   
 
There are signs that the climate catastrophe narrative may be dying, or at least declining. Greens were in retreat in the recent European elections, and even here in France, where they are still treated with the deference formerly reserved for philosophers and religious leaders, there is a noticeable change in emphasis in the Green agenda for the coming election, with talk of climate catastrophe and electric cars giving way to more mundane subjects like banning pesticides and stopping unnecessary motorway building. 
 
The Greens themselves, like all ideological believers, are largely unaware of the radical cultural narrative they are enacting. To reduce global temperatures by 0.01°C per year requires a world government with powers to regulate every aspect of your life, while keeping pesticides out of your breakfast cereal merely entails passing a law, changing a molecule or two, maybe hiring a few more busybody inspectors – something that any healthy democracy should be able to manage. To remain acceptable (and get elected) Greens are forced to become more realist, which of course makes them less interesting. 
 
Anyone can martyr themselves to save the planet, if they’re persuaded that it’s a matter of life and death. Few are willing to devote their lives to making your fly spray less toxic.