And BTW -- Brownstone is large scale epidemiologic data, for which nobody, and I mean noone, ever extrapolates to cause/effect relations. I have made this point on your rookie substack, barely worthy of high school level inquiry, yet you refuse to engage. Again -- Correlation does not equal causation. Why are you so willing to cherry-pick data that can be refuted by a college freshman? Take a Statistics 101 class, Sir. If you had any academic chops you would respond in detail to your denial of basic epistemological claims, which that dismantle your arguments. I await...
In the spirit of engaged inquiry — nudge: you’re a prof and ought respond to substantive rebuttals — why do you insist upon ignoring evidence that dismantles your claims concerning the COVID vax coverup? Would not a spirited repartee fortify your position? If you’re so convinced, why do you ignore rock solid counterfactuals? An legit Christian would not back down. Or are you afraid because you know, perhaps unconsciously, that evidence requires more than a plethora of disgruntled right-wingers, whose claims fall on deaf ears precisely because of the paucity of evidence? Your silence corroborates my position.
The only reason you're alive is because of medical mandates and evidence based science. Clowns like you are so profoundly informed that health care professionals just laugh at your claims. If you're so bold -- don't go doctors when you're sick. Don't take antidepressants. Don't get check ups to prevent cancer and heart disease. Don't wear seat belts. Ignore advice of healthy diets. The notion that you can decide what you want and don't want assumes you have sufficient knowledge and training to actually know what you need. This amounts to narcissism.
What’s your take on Trump’s chaotic assertion of control? Firing gov’t officials for the flimsiest of reasons if they don’t do as he says, openly praising the leader of N Korea, embracing Putin, sending troops into DC where the crime rate is at a nadir, almost throwing world markets into a tailspin by threatening to fire Powell, thereby eliminating objective market data, altering art exhibits saying the Smithsonian takes too grim a view of slavery, saying the Jan 6 felons were heroes… on & on. I could name twenty more instances.
A good example of the utter nonsense being spewed by Trump, et al
As I watch the Trump White House and its orbiting debris field of oddballs and charlatans, a single long-ago movie scene keeps returning to my mind. In “Annie Hall,” waiting in line in a movie theatre, Woody Allen’s character becomes irritated by a guy behind him, an academic blowhard pontificating to his date about the culture. When he mentions the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan, Allen erupts and then, in a delightful spectacle of comeuppance, produces McLuhan himself, who tells the man, “I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. . . . How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.” Allen then says, to the camera, “Boy, if life were only like this.”
Every so often, it is. On Tuesday, eighty-six climate scientists delivered a four-hundred-page response to a Department of Energy https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/DOE_Critical_Review_of_Impacts_of_GHG_Emissions_on_the_US_Climate_July_2025.pdf from July which had attempted to show that global warming is no big deal. That report was the scientific equivalent of a bespoke suit. Given that President Trump had declared climate change to be a “hoax,” and given that Energy Secretary Christopher Wright had previously declared it to be a “side effect of building the modern world,” it stands to reason that Wright’s department picked to conduct its report exactly five climate researchers, all notable for careers in which they’ve stood conspicuously outside the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is a grave and immediate danger. These five duly concluded, among other things, that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and excessively aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”
News & Politics For more stories like this one, turn on curated notifications.
The rest of the Trumpian apparatus then swung into motion. Lee Zeldin, the former congressman and failed gubernatorial candidate from New York who somehow ended up as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and who had declared that his goal is to drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate-change religion,” embraced the findings, and quickly moved to use them in his effort to overturn the “endangerment finding” that the E.P.A. had previously relied on to regulate greenhouse gases.
The D.O.E report, however, had to be opened up for public comment, and so a climate scientist at Texas A. & M. University, Andrew Dessler, used the social-media platform Bluesky (which has largely replaced X for scientific conversation) to start assembling a global team of eighty-six researchers from all the relevant disciplines who, in a matter of a few weeks, subjected the report’s findings to peer review. Their “comment” is two and a half times as long as the report, and it is almost painfully hilarious to read. For instance, the five skeptics contended that “meteorological drought” was not increasing in the United States; as the researchers point out in their response, this is cherry-picked nonsense. In the first place, “meteorological drought” is only a measure of how much rain falls; the hotter temperatures associated with climate change have been increasing evaporation, which dries up more of that rain. And, in any event, the contrarians used the entire continental U.S. as the statistical basis for their finding, which makes no sense: as global warming increases evaporation in the arid West, it also increases rainfall in the moist East, producing the flooding rains that have caused so much damage in regions like the Appalachians. As the comment archly points out, “taking an average across the CONUS runs the risk of averaging out these trends.” Indeed, the authors note, with all the scientific citations, that “research has indicated that recent droughts in the WUS were more severe than droughts over the past 1000+ years: while megadroughts have occurred in the paleoclimatic record, the western US megadrought of 2000-2018 was the worst since the mid-1500 (Williams et al.2020) and from 2000-2021 was the worst since 800 (Williams et al. 2022) as defined using soil moisture anomalies. Similarly, climate change made the 2012-2014 period in CA the driest period in 1200 years (Griffin and Anchukaitis 2014; Williams et al. 2015).”
The comment has sections like this on every topic raised by the D.O.E. report; it’s a blitzkrieg of studies, observations, and data which makes clear that the authors were miles out of their depth, and further still out of the mainstream. But, of course, that doesn’t necessarily count for much in the current dispensation, where reality is becoming a Choose Your Own Adventure story. In the wake of the resignations of four officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week, some early-summer remarks from the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., started popping up again on social media. He’d told Tucker Carlson that “trusting the experts is not a feature of science. It’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of religion and it’s a feature of totalitarianism. In democracies, we have the obligation—and it’s one of the burdens of citizenship—to do our own research and make our own determinations about things.”
That’s clearly not true about vaccines—we’ve trusted the experts for a century, and it’s worked out pretty well, including during the covid pandemic, when vaccines saved millions of lives. And it’s a clearly absurd thing to say about global warming: Are we planning to “do our own research” on, to pick a topic covered at length in Tuesday’s response by the eighty-six researchers, the “hemispheric symmetry of the planetary albedo”?
The American scientific enterprise, the source of so much wealth and national prestige, is being unravelled before our eyes—research grants are being cut off, satellites disconnected, reports cooked up to meet the needs of particular industries and ideologies. It is as sad as any of the other dismal effects of the past election. But the scientific method will not, perhaps, go quietly. With hundreds of years of patient work behind it, with some educational institutions willing to protect their scientists, and with researchers hard at work in less-benighted nations, the human desire to know and to understand will continue to produce results. Many of those findings will be contrary to the interests of the blowhards who, at least temporarily, control our nation, and so they may be suppressed for the moment. But whether or not they are heeded, in the end, the truth will out. If it’s not in the form of enlightened policy, it will be in the form of pandemics and wildfires, of untreated disease and rising sea level. Because life really is like this. ♦︎
Let’s address YOUR '“sloppiness”, Sir. Failing to respond to nearly a dozen well researched rebuttals to your delusional conspiracy theories, with more than ample evidence of your utterly laughable claims. Let’s be clear — you are claiming the ENTIRE medical community, aside from a handful of nurses and right wing quacks that have been laughed out of mainstream media — is in cahoots with some world wide conspiracy. Somehow nobody has spoken up? Again, why would nobody speak ip except for extremists? Are there zero academics willing to callout the industry? Again, nobody. CDC — nope. Med schools — nope. Residency programs — nope. AAP — nope. AAFP — nope. Not one, except those whom I have thorougjly demolished in previous posts; NONE of which you have responded to. Whose the sloppy one, permanently unemployed prof??
Yeah, I don't know what's up with that "universal vax" nonsense. Maybe it's something set up to fail.
Anyway, did you see the interview with Professor Levi of Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices? I think Robert Malone reposted. Quite encouraging, while acknowledging they need to build a strong case.
Universal vaccination saves lives. Millions. Every medical school in the country agrees. Every legit healthcare facility agrees. Where is your counter claim?
This will be my last response to you, given the character of your recent comments. As to the question you ask here, notice that you don't even ask it with the needed specificity. The reader cannot know if you mean to ask me about vaccination generally, or the Covid-19 "vaccines" specifically. Such quick-draw sloppiness is an aspect of your apparent inability to engage in useful dialogue on this, I would suggest. But assuming you mean the second question, I will respond to you with one post from the Brownstone Institute, and another from The Ethical Skeptic. Anyone who had read more than a few of my pieces would know I have presented similar evidence before, though these two summary reports are particularly hard (even though the first's estimates of Covidvax deaths are surely too high by 5 or so millions, given one mistaken move they made when extrapolating the US numbers to the world ones). But again, for this season, I am done talking with you Finnegan, so you can send any objections you have with these reports to the writers of these pieces. https://brownstone.org/articles/into-the-abyss-how-bad-can-the-covid-vaccine-story-get/https://theethicalskeptic.com/2025/08/28/the-state-of-things-pandemic/
Shouldn't we check how much contributions the president and each member of Congress receive from the pharmaceutical industry? I'm a foreigner, but it seems to me that the United States is not much different from the Republic of Banana in South America.
And BTW -- Brownstone is large scale epidemiologic data, for which nobody, and I mean noone, ever extrapolates to cause/effect relations. I have made this point on your rookie substack, barely worthy of high school level inquiry, yet you refuse to engage. Again -- Correlation does not equal causation. Why are you so willing to cherry-pick data that can be refuted by a college freshman? Take a Statistics 101 class, Sir. If you had any academic chops you would respond in detail to your denial of basic epistemological claims, which that dismantle your arguments. I await...
You're a fraud Professor. Respond to those who find your claims lacking, or assume they're right.....
In the spirit of engaged inquiry — nudge: you’re a prof and ought respond to substantive rebuttals — why do you insist upon ignoring evidence that dismantles your claims concerning the COVID vax coverup? Would not a spirited repartee fortify your position? If you’re so convinced, why do you ignore rock solid counterfactuals? An legit Christian would not back down. Or are you afraid because you know, perhaps unconsciously, that evidence requires more than a plethora of disgruntled right-wingers, whose claims fall on deaf ears precisely because of the paucity of evidence? Your silence corroborates my position.
The only reason you're alive is because of medical mandates and evidence based science. Clowns like you are so profoundly informed that health care professionals just laugh at your claims. If you're so bold -- don't go doctors when you're sick. Don't take antidepressants. Don't get check ups to prevent cancer and heart disease. Don't wear seat belts. Ignore advice of healthy diets. The notion that you can decide what you want and don't want assumes you have sufficient knowledge and training to actually know what you need. This amounts to narcissism.
"The only darkness is ignorance."
-- Bill S.
What’s your take on Trump’s chaotic assertion of control? Firing gov’t officials for the flimsiest of reasons if they don’t do as he says, openly praising the leader of N Korea, embracing Putin, sending troops into DC where the crime rate is at a nadir, almost throwing world markets into a tailspin by threatening to fire Powell, thereby eliminating objective market data, altering art exhibits saying the Smithsonian takes too grim a view of slavery, saying the Jan 6 felons were heroes… on & on. I could name twenty more instances.
Trump's Surgeon General just demanded RFK, Jr be fired. Oh no -- is this part of your ubiquitous Republican conspiracy to denigrate RFK Jr?
A good example of the utter nonsense being spewed by Trump, et al
As I watch the Trump White House and its orbiting debris field of oddballs and charlatans, a single long-ago movie scene keeps returning to my mind. In “Annie Hall,” waiting in line in a movie theatre, Woody Allen’s character becomes irritated by a guy behind him, an academic blowhard pontificating to his date about the culture. When he mentions the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan, Allen erupts and then, in a delightful spectacle of comeuppance, produces McLuhan himself, who tells the man, “I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. . . . How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.” Allen then says, to the camera, “Boy, if life were only like this.”
Every so often, it is. On Tuesday, eighty-six climate scientists delivered a four-hundred-page response to a Department of Energy https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/DOE_Critical_Review_of_Impacts_of_GHG_Emissions_on_the_US_Climate_July_2025.pdf from July which had attempted to show that global warming is no big deal. That report was the scientific equivalent of a bespoke suit. Given that President Trump had declared climate change to be a “hoax,” and given that Energy Secretary Christopher Wright had previously declared it to be a “side effect of building the modern world,” it stands to reason that Wright’s department picked to conduct its report exactly five climate researchers, all notable for careers in which they’ve stood conspicuously outside the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is a grave and immediate danger. These five duly concluded, among other things, that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and excessively aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”
News & Politics For more stories like this one, turn on curated notifications.
The rest of the Trumpian apparatus then swung into motion. Lee Zeldin, the former congressman and failed gubernatorial candidate from New York who somehow ended up as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and who had declared that his goal is to drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate-change religion,” embraced the findings, and quickly moved to use them in his effort to overturn the “endangerment finding” that the E.P.A. had previously relied on to regulate greenhouse gases.
The D.O.E report, however, had to be opened up for public comment, and so a climate scientist at Texas A. & M. University, Andrew Dessler, used the social-media platform Bluesky (which has largely replaced X for scientific conversation) to start assembling a global team of eighty-six researchers from all the relevant disciplines who, in a matter of a few weeks, subjected the report’s findings to peer review. Their “comment” is two and a half times as long as the report, and it is almost painfully hilarious to read. For instance, the five skeptics contended that “meteorological drought” was not increasing in the United States; as the researchers point out in their response, this is cherry-picked nonsense. In the first place, “meteorological drought” is only a measure of how much rain falls; the hotter temperatures associated with climate change have been increasing evaporation, which dries up more of that rain. And, in any event, the contrarians used the entire continental U.S. as the statistical basis for their finding, which makes no sense: as global warming increases evaporation in the arid West, it also increases rainfall in the moist East, producing the flooding rains that have caused so much damage in regions like the Appalachians. As the comment archly points out, “taking an average across the CONUS runs the risk of averaging out these trends.” Indeed, the authors note, with all the scientific citations, that “research has indicated that recent droughts in the WUS were more severe than droughts over the past 1000+ years: while megadroughts have occurred in the paleoclimatic record, the western US megadrought of 2000-2018 was the worst since the mid-1500 (Williams et al.2020) and from 2000-2021 was the worst since 800 (Williams et al. 2022) as defined using soil moisture anomalies. Similarly, climate change made the 2012-2014 period in CA the driest period in 1200 years (Griffin and Anchukaitis 2014; Williams et al. 2015).”
The comment has sections like this on every topic raised by the D.O.E. report; it’s a blitzkrieg of studies, observations, and data which makes clear that the authors were miles out of their depth, and further still out of the mainstream. But, of course, that doesn’t necessarily count for much in the current dispensation, where reality is becoming a Choose Your Own Adventure story. In the wake of the resignations of four officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week, some early-summer remarks from the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., started popping up again on social media. He’d told Tucker Carlson that “trusting the experts is not a feature of science. It’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of religion and it’s a feature of totalitarianism. In democracies, we have the obligation—and it’s one of the burdens of citizenship—to do our own research and make our own determinations about things.”
That’s clearly not true about vaccines—we’ve trusted the experts for a century, and it’s worked out pretty well, including during the covid pandemic, when vaccines saved millions of lives. And it’s a clearly absurd thing to say about global warming: Are we planning to “do our own research” on, to pick a topic covered at length in Tuesday’s response by the eighty-six researchers, the “hemispheric symmetry of the planetary albedo”?
The American scientific enterprise, the source of so much wealth and national prestige, is being unravelled before our eyes—research grants are being cut off, satellites disconnected, reports cooked up to meet the needs of particular industries and ideologies. It is as sad as any of the other dismal effects of the past election. But the scientific method will not, perhaps, go quietly. With hundreds of years of patient work behind it, with some educational institutions willing to protect their scientists, and with researchers hard at work in less-benighted nations, the human desire to know and to understand will continue to produce results. Many of those findings will be contrary to the interests of the blowhards who, at least temporarily, control our nation, and so they may be suppressed for the moment. But whether or not they are heeded, in the end, the truth will out. If it’s not in the form of enlightened policy, it will be in the form of pandemics and wildfires, of untreated disease and rising sea level. Because life really is like this. ♦︎
Let’s address YOUR '“sloppiness”, Sir. Failing to respond to nearly a dozen well researched rebuttals to your delusional conspiracy theories, with more than ample evidence of your utterly laughable claims. Let’s be clear — you are claiming the ENTIRE medical community, aside from a handful of nurses and right wing quacks that have been laughed out of mainstream media — is in cahoots with some world wide conspiracy. Somehow nobody has spoken up? Again, why would nobody speak ip except for extremists? Are there zero academics willing to callout the industry? Again, nobody. CDC — nope. Med schools — nope. Residency programs — nope. AAP — nope. AAFP — nope. Not one, except those whom I have thorougjly demolished in previous posts; NONE of which you have responded to. Whose the sloppy one, permanently unemployed prof??
Yeah, I don't know what's up with that "universal vax" nonsense. Maybe it's something set up to fail.
Anyway, did you see the interview with Professor Levi of Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices? I think Robert Malone reposted. Quite encouraging, while acknowledging they need to build a strong case.
Yeah, saw it a day or so after putting this up. It is a countervailing piece of evidence. I hope to post on it soon. But thank you, Alan.
Universal vaccination saves lives. Millions. Every medical school in the country agrees. Every legit healthcare facility agrees. Where is your counter claim?
This will be my last response to you, given the character of your recent comments. As to the question you ask here, notice that you don't even ask it with the needed specificity. The reader cannot know if you mean to ask me about vaccination generally, or the Covid-19 "vaccines" specifically. Such quick-draw sloppiness is an aspect of your apparent inability to engage in useful dialogue on this, I would suggest. But assuming you mean the second question, I will respond to you with one post from the Brownstone Institute, and another from The Ethical Skeptic. Anyone who had read more than a few of my pieces would know I have presented similar evidence before, though these two summary reports are particularly hard (even though the first's estimates of Covidvax deaths are surely too high by 5 or so millions, given one mistaken move they made when extrapolating the US numbers to the world ones). But again, for this season, I am done talking with you Finnegan, so you can send any objections you have with these reports to the writers of these pieces. https://brownstone.org/articles/into-the-abyss-how-bad-can-the-covid-vaccine-story-get/ https://theethicalskeptic.com/2025/08/28/the-state-of-things-pandemic/
Shouldn't we check how much contributions the president and each member of Congress receive from the pharmaceutical industry? I'm a foreigner, but it seems to me that the United States is not much different from the Republic of Banana in South America.