Damned Heretics

World changer, but his personal aim was simple

Let’s hope that he wasn’t despatched early by medical myopia

Steve Jobs is, sadly and predictably, dead from pancreatic cancer, as long expected. Kept alive for seven years by the barbaric techniques of modern medicine when faced with a particular brutal form of cancer – surgery, poison and eventually a liver transplant – he finally died under the assault. Let’s hope that the alternative that is increasingly pointed to by recent decades of stunningly promising research into how phytochemicals – plant chemicals – aid the body in fighting off cancer was not neglected by his doubtless expensive medical consultants.

Did Jobs benefit from phytochemicals?

One might expect it probably was, of course. Awakening the medical profession to what may be the most important modern trend in medicine – how a range of chemicals extracted from food have proven especially over the last five years to be strongly effective against human cancer cells in the lab and in mice – is proving an uphill battle, even though a flood of research has appeared in mainstream peer reviewed journals in the last ten years.

Perhaps, however, it wasn’t . Perhaps Steve Jobs was helped by his own core character as instinctive heretic, if not also by good advice from his wife and other people who can be wiser than the professionals. We understand that Jobs was interested in alternative medicine, and did take advantage of what some Chinese herbalists had to offer. This may have helped keep him alive far beyond the three to six months his doctors originally forecast that he had left of life when he was diagnosed. Luckily, it was a rare kind of pancreatic cancer which forms about five per cent of the cases of this terrible killer, one which responds to surgery. Surviving seven years is evidence that he benefited from good treatment, though, as well as luck.

The great heretic, flipping the world of personal tech into art

It’s not surprising if Jobs was one of the few to take a look at what alternative medicine might have to offer him when he fell sick. After all, Jobs spent his life trying to move beyond the norm, forcing the merely talented to craft the ideal consumer tool from the geek idea of computers as digital engineering incarnated. He made ugly and unreliable products user friendly, beautiful to look at and reliably useful in ways which seem beyond the engineering and technical talent to concieve, for some reason. Even the marketing arm of computer companies seemed to think of this aspect only after Jobs led the way, and only Sony and eventually HP seemed able to compete in looks, though, saddled as they are with Bill Gates’ atrocious mishmash of an operating system, never caught up to Jobs in the realm of reliable and easy use.

Why was this range of virtues mysteriously beyond the leaders of other technology companies and their marketing people before Jobs showed the way, and even after he did so? The source of this odd design blindness to what now seems so obvious remains a bit of a mystery, but it must reside somewhere in the blocked mental arteries of of the group mind. Jobs thought for himself, on behalf of the average user. People who think in group terms cannot think independently very well, it seems.

So it wasn’t surprising to hear Jobs at the 2005 Commencement at Stanford where he gave the address saying the following:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Jobs was not a genius in mind but in action

What kind of genius was this man who changed the personal world of billions? The questions which Jobs asked were not after all rocket science. We remember ourselves asking them in print and on the Web as early as the mid nineties. Why shouldn’t computers be easy to use? Why shouldn’t they be reliable and easy to tinker with? Why shouldn’t their cases be colorful, chic and even simply beautiful in the manner desired, consciously or not, by all sane people, and most especially by women?

These are not difficult questions to pose and Steve Jobs was not a genius for asking them. What was unique was his strength of purpose in bringing them about. Like all pioneers and visionaries who try to move the mass of conventional me-too thought in any field, he faced a great group edifice of inertia born of lazy thinking and the general assumption that if consumers didn’t know better or demand better then there wasn’t any point in exerting oneself in one’s job to take the initiative and create something new and different in the realm of design or ease of use.

Jobs knew that he could put himself in the place of the buyer and work out what that buyer might grow fond of without that buyer telling him or even knowing what it was that he would like, once he experienced it. Jobs spurned focus groups for that reason. He liked to quote the hockey player Wayne Gretzky, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been,” and he often said that “it is not the job of the consumer to telll us what he wants. He doesn’t know until he sees it.”

Or as Jobs told Fortune more fully, quoted by James Stewart in his fine Times piece today, How Jobs Put Passion Into Products:

Mr. Jobs made no secret of his focus on design; in a Jan. 24, 2000, interview, Fortune magazine asked if it was an “obsession” and whether it was “an inborn instinct or what?”

“We don’t have good language to talk about this kind of thing,” Mr. Jobs replied. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together. … That is the furthest thing from veneer. It was at the core of the product the day we started. This is what customers pay us for — to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.”

Jobs the supreme heretic

The trait that you believe you know exactly what the world needs and wants is of course is shared by many crackpot inventors who are sure they know what the world needs, even if they show no sign of wanting it when offered, so it was truly Jobs genius to be correct in his forecasts, especially, for instance, in dreaming up the iPad when Microsoft’s clunky tablet computers had failed so dismally four or five years earlier. Jobs must surely have recognised the future of the iPad notion once he encountered the touch screen, which makes all the difference. But why didn’t others? Incidentally, the capacitive touch screen was invented at CERN in 1976, and the home of the LHC also boasts that it was where Tim Berners Lee invented the Web – on a NeXT screen!

Steve Jobs was a man who not only followed his own star, but brought the world along with him into a new era where the resources of the Web could be as portable as an iPhone. To us he is the epitomy of the maverick, the heretic, the originator who comes up with something new because he has freed himself of the chains of group think.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

What was truly marvelous though was the fact that he could combine all the roles needed – not only the independent minded visionary, but the team player who could lead a talented group to the world series without losing sight of his dream.

Here is the whole of that speech which he gave at the Commencement at Stanford in 2005:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.
Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Denials of danger depend on obsolete cosmic ray argument peddled shamelessly by top physicists

Could it be that safety arguments have all but expired, but no one cares that Earth could go pfft!?

Like all well informed supporters of progress in science for the benefit of humanity we normally trust and celebrate the highly intelligent, benignly motivated and often extremely personable (Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Brian Cox) physicists who lead the charge to uncover the truth at the core of physical reality as we know it.

From long experience in uncovering the truths found at the core of human nature, however, at least as exhibited by leading scientists in fields vexed by a mismatch between their claims and their published literature (HIV/AIDS and cancer, for example), we are sorry to see signs of public irresponsibility in the actions of the 3000 or more fine men and women in charge of the LHC and its pioneering research.

To be more specific, to ward off public scrutiny and the danger that the LHC might be put on hiatus while its safety is independently reviewed, top physicists, we have found, habitually reply to public safety concerns by quoting an argument which they know not to be true – for when challenged, they immediately admit it.

The well known argument we have in mind is what was helpfully labeled “Cosmic Ray 1″ by Brian Greene, famed string theorist and popular author, when we asked him at Philoctetes about the safety of the LHC two years ago at the session on Mathematics and Beauty on November 14, 2009. (The Philoctetes Center is a distinguished platform for discussion of creativity and the imagination in Manhattan). “Do you mean Cosmic Ray 1, ” he asked, “or Cosmic Ray 2?”

What’s wrong with Cosmic Ray 1?

Cosmic Ray 1 is simply the idea that cosmic rays of subatomic particles generated by supernovae have been whizzing at the Earth for aeons and if their impact on any particles they encounter had created planetivorous black holes we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. This implies therefore that there won’t be any such danger from similar collisions within the Large Hadron Collider.

Unfortunately this overlooks a very simple difference between conditions of such collisions in Nature and those inside the Large Hadron Collider. The first will give rise to particles which will fly away at speeds far in excess of the escape velocity of the Earth, so even if they include mBHs (mini Black Holes) or other fearsome entities they won’t linger to do any damage here. In the collider, however, the collisions between protons or lead ions are head on, like those of cars when one crosses the divider on a highway and smashes into another. So the debris may well be ejected at speeds well below terrestial escape velocity (25,000 mph) all the way down to nil, and thus any tiny black holes, strangelets etc will linger to cause whatever havoc they might be capable of.

In fact, this problem with the logic of Cosmic Ray 1 was noticed as early as 2003 by the celebrated British astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees in his doomwarning book “Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future In This Century–On Earth and Beyond”.

In other words, despite lay defenders of the LHC in Web discussions jumping to quote it as the decisive rebuttal to conCERN about the LHC, the argument has been dead at the starting gate for a decade.

The three card monte physicists play

But this drawback has not stopped Greene and others cheerfully telling the public that they can forget any worries about micro Black Holes being generated by the LHC on this basis. In his Op Ed piece for the New York Times on September 11, 2008 The Origins of the Universe: A Crash Course Green wrote:

The collider’s workings are straightforward: at full power, trillions of protons will be injected into the otherwise empty track and set racing in opposite directions at speeds exceeding 99.999999 percent of the speed of light — fast enough so that every second the protons will cycle the entire track more than 11,000 times and engage in more than half a billion head-on collisions.

And why wasn’t this effort to penetrate to the very edge of speed and the conditions at the beginning of the universe dangerous? Why? Cosmic Ray 1, of course!:

Micro Black Holes

Now for the possibility that’s generated the fuss.

Recent work in string theory has suggested that the collider might produce black holes, providing physicists with a spectacular opportunity to study them in a laboratory.

The common conception is that black holes are fantastically massive astrophysical bodies with enormous gravitational fields. But in reality, a black hole can have any mass. Take an orange and squeeze it to a sufficiently small size (about a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a meter across) and you’d have a black hole — with the mass of an orange.

Physicists have realized that the collider’s proton-proton collisions might momentarily pack so much energy into such a small volume that exceedingly tiny black holes may form — black holes even lighter than the one theoretically created by the orange, but black holes nevertheless.

Why might one worry that this would be a problem? Because black holes have a reputation for rapacity. If a black hole is produced under Geneva, might it swallow Switzerland and continue on a ravenous rampage until the earth is devoured?

It’s a reasonable question with a definite answer: no.

Work that made Stephen Hawking famous establishes that tiny black holes would disintegrate in a minuscule fraction of a second, long enough for physicists to reap the benefits of having produced them, but short enough to avoid their wreaking any havoc.

Even so, some have worried further that maybe Dr. Hawking was wrong and such black holes don’t disintegrate. Are we willing to bet the fate of the planet on an untested insight? And that question takes us to the crux of the matter: the collisions at the Large Hadron Collider have never before occurred under laboratory settings, but they’ve been taking place throughout the universe — even here on earth — for billions of years.

Cosmic rays — particles wafting through space — constantly rain down on the earth, the other planets and the wealth of stars scattered throughout the galaxy, with energies far in excess of those attainable by the Large Hadron Collider. And since these more powerful collisions haven’t resulted in astrophysical calamities, the collider’s comparatively tame collisions most assuredly won’t either.

So if the Cosmic Ray 1 argument is wrong, it reduces Greene by his own admission to betting the fate of the planet and the entire human race on an untested insight of the renowned Stephen Hawking, which is something of a responsibility for the wheelchair bound physics genius, especially since he has been wrong about major cosmological matters before, by his own admission.

A sop to the public

This brazen use of an argument which has already been exploded as a sop to the public is standard practice among leading physicists, as it happens. We have found it is shamelessly produced at every event where conCERN is expressed.

For example, just before being instructed by Professor Greene at Philoctetes (on November 14 2009 Sat) we had encountered two other very distinguished young physicist-astronomers, Gregory Gabadadze and David Hogg, at their own New York University, just after they had briefed a very large packed hall on the wonders of black holes and other galactic phenomena in a lecture (on September 29, 2009), labeled Hubble Trouble: The Expanding Universe and the Dark Energy Enigma. Both gave extensive replies to us and a small group of attentive listeners after their lectures, when we raised the topic of CERN’s dangers, dismissing them on the basis of Cosmic Ray 1.

David Hogg held forth gladly for several minutes as a group of listeners gathered round us at the post lecture reception, along these lines, until when he finished we asked gently if it was not true that that rationale had been debunked. Without a moment’s hesitation he acknowledged that indeed it had already been exploded, and without any sign of embarrassment went on smartly to invoke a quite different reassurance (what Brian Greene called “Cosmic Ray 2″, to be explained below) which has lately become almost as questionable.

Michael Tuts too

The pattern of fobbing off public doubt by invoking a spurious rationale – in the manner of parents reassuring a child that everything will be alright as the plane heads for a dicey winter landing amid less than perfect visibility, if any at all – seems to be standard. Only the other week the handsome Columbia physicist Michael Tuts spoke at the Guggenheim. Tuts has an important role at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. As the US ATLAS Operations Program Manager he is the titular head of a pack of 400 scientists who are helping to spend $40 million a year in US tax dollars running the world’s greatest “scientific instrument”, as he calls it.

When the Guggenheim Work and Process series invited him to explain all to their arts audience recently, an unusual double header resulted. On a Sunday evening, he explained the Standard Model and the next evening (Feb 7 Mon, which we attended in the front row) he explained to his second packed house the exciting prospect that the LHC might complete the Standard Model by finding the Higgs boson, the final piece of the theoretical jigsaw, not to mention confirming the possibility of additional dimensions and bringing gravity into the fold to pair it with quantum physics for the ultimate “theory of everything”.

We were lucky enough to get to ask the last question. “Given the stature of at least one of the critics of the safety review of the LHC, isn’t there at least a tiny risk of major catastrophe in its operation at peak energies?” Needless to say, Dr Tuts confidently reassured us that there wasn’t, and the chief reason he produced upfront was none other than …. Cosmic Ray 1! And the meeting broke up.

Since there were then refreshments in the Guggenheim museum ground floor, however, where Tuts was surrounded by admirers, we were able to follow up by asking him there whether Cosmic Ray 1 had not been busted long ago by Martin Rees in 2003, if not earlier. To which he replied with admirable frankness, Yes, indeed, and he then proceeded to expound Cosmic Ray 2, that the existence of neutron stars and white dwarfs served the same purpose, to show that cosmic rays flying at heavenly bodies did not generate black holes to eat them up.

Why do they do it?

So we do have a pattern here. The only safety argument physicists use in public until it is challenged is Cosmic Ray 1, and they know it is invalid. Since Cosmic Ray 2 is their fall back position, it is now the sole safety argument they still have for stating that any black holes that are generated will not consume the planet. Why don’t they tell the truth, and state the neutron-white dwarf rationale straight off? Could it be because that justification is crumbling also?

We suspect that this may the case, because the Cosmic Ray 2 argument is indeed crumbling, for different reasons. But since this post is already too long for comfort, we will go over that ground in a later installment, which will deal with the risk of the LHC creating strangelets, which might turn our planet into a small asteroid of strange matter.

Let us simply end here by noting that CERN physicists are so determined to avoid interference from outside with their marvelous project that they use every propaganda tool they can to allay doubt and evade having to account for themselves.

Including asking us to bet on a horse that is dead at the starting gate, and they know it.

Has the LHC already created a baby Black Hole? Strangelets? The Japanese earthquake? New startup proceeds…

Fresh worry: will Higgs turn out to be an inflaton which will swallow CERN thru wormhole into new universe?

In theory if not in fact, all is not necessarily well at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, despite CERN’s proud parental press releases to the contrary. Yet the latest news is that the LHC has started up again, ignoring the opinion of a German federal judge that a public outside review is in order.

As a matter of fact, collisions resumed on March 2, after the beams of the world’s largest machine were quietly switched on and ramped up in February, the CERN brass having decided to ignore its previous plan for shutdown for inspection and renovation next year. The media were not invited, or even alerted, presumably in case the megasized toy fell apart, as it has done twice so far when started up in previous years.

Now that renewed high energy operation is a fait accompli sans catastrophe, however, the public has been informed, but without also notifying us – the 6.8 billion other humans riding the same planet as the clever, if apparently emotionally autistic, physicists operating the LHC – of the theoretical dangers involved in opening up the throttle to ever higher beam intensities.

Expanded list of risks

As things stand, in fact, the issue of safety is quite unresolved, with top physicists brazenly placating the public with an out of date, long ago refuted safety argument, while their own supposedly more viable private rationale crumbles. As the collider moves further into unknown territory, the list of dangers unearthed by those who have, unlike most of the media, troubled to actually read what CERN has published, and compared it with the current literature, has expanded now to at least six dire possibilities: mini Black Holes which might gobble the Earth, strangelets which might turn it into strange matter a la neutron star or white dwarf, rapid hydrogen bomb sized explosions which will wreck Geneva and the world economy, magnetic monopoles (ruled out by the same specious rationale as mini Black Holes), a vacuum bubble to restart the entire universe (denied for the same reason), earthquakes of which the catastrophe in Japan may just possibly be an example (coincidence, anybody?), and finally (you heard it here first) the possibility of producing the dreaded inflaton, which may swallow CERN into a baby universe grown to the diameter of 46 Earths in the first second.

On the face of it, yes, the world’s vastest and fastest working mechanism, the celebrated – among physicists and science buffs, at least – CERN collider outside Geneva, did pass through its potentially more dangerous ALICE phase smoothly before Christmas. Instead of protons, heavy lead ions were smashed into each other from opposite directions at new and record levels of energy before the plug was pulled for the holiday without visibly creating any untoward particles, as feared by the redoubtable LHC critics who belong to what we might call the “Very ConCERNed” Brigade.

Reasons for conCERN – about a CERNCon

By the “very ConCERNed” we mean the handful of interested and fairly expert observers who, having read and reviewed what CERN has published, not merely whatever has been reported by the assiduous stenographers who go by the name science journalists these days, believe the world is now dealing with a CERN shell game where valid doubts are concealed from the public eye.

In this “CERNCon”, the propaganda wool is being pulled over the eyes of the public by the PR apologists of an organized army of egghead boffins who won’t brook any interference with their rush to penetrate the inner sanctum of Mother Nature even at the risk of universal annihilation.

Readers of Science Guardian are of course fully cognizant of this phenomenon in other areas of science where funding has trumped truth and professionalism, most secretly in the case of cancer and most blatantly in HIV/AIDS, another field where scientists have far outpaced the will or capacity of almost all journalists to catch up with the mischief they are perpetrating.

Is the Higgs really the lethal inflaton?

In the case of the LHC, according to the critics’ theories the potential consequences are infinitely vaster, up to and including the destruction of life, our planet, the solar system and even the universe itself.

Not only that, but according to some conCERNed theoretical calculations based upon the very premises on which the LHC operates, it may be too late. The immense contraption which excites CERN physicists into a paroxysm of intellectual, aesthetic and social ecstasy may have already doomed us all by invisibly creating either a mini blackhole (mBH) or a strangelet, either or both of which may have now fallen to the center of the Earth and be busy decimating the only blue and white planet on which Life is known, from the inside out.

Added to this, we now have papers in hand by British and Russian physicists which suggest that the Higgs boson, which CERN physicists are breathlessly and publicly hoping to turn up as the major prize of the current phase of tweaking Nature’s tail, may be none other than the notorious inflaton, an entity supposedly responsible, when it came into being just after the Big Bang, for inflating the universe from an invisible speck into a large football field, at least, and possibly its current, inconceivably vast size. (Now a busy field, this was initiated by F. Bezrukov, “The Standard Model Higgs Boson as the Inflaton,” Physics Letters B, 659:703-6, 2008).

Is it possible that the Higgs when it appears will immediately suck the CERN HQ though a wormhole into another, baby universe in the blink of an eye? We can only hope not. But according to what one can discern in a currently booming field treating the Higgs as an inflaton, this may be on the cards. And there does not appear to be at present any good reasoning offered to contradict this alarming possibility, judging from Brian Greene’s latest book, “Hidden Reality” (p279). Even the renowned physicist Frank Wilczek is now apparently equating the Higgs boson with the inflaton.

Derided but responsible critics

Normally, we hasten to note, we would be reluctant to join the LHC critics, the largely scorned but certainly socially and morally responsible observers who publicly, if so far ineffectively, have strenuously objected to the runaway operation of CERN’s gargantuan baby far beyond the restraining leash of public review.

These well intentioned and worry prone global citizens, however right they may be, don’t seem to respect the renowned physicists and engineers (see pic) who run the LHC as the brilliant, wise and highly competent specialists beyond ordinary ken that the general public seems to assume they are. On the contrary, they see the behavior of the LHC’s ministering echelons of physicists and engineers and their leaders as childish and irresponsible, in fact see them as thoroughly reprehensible and alarming arsonists of the planet, no better than tots armed with a box of matches and setting light to the living room curtains “to see what will happen”.

Naturally, we would not approve of this disagreeable skepticism in normal circumstances, where it would undoubtedly be the result of uninformed iconoclasm driven by Freudian patricidal impulses and unrestrained imaginative fears and not by logic and evidence, which is the pyramid on which valid science stands.

In this case, however, our long investigation behind the scenes has revealed that – Alas! – the nays have it, and the CERN-LHC affair is indeed yet another example of science out of control, and scientists getting away with (planetary, in this case) murder, so to speak, for lack of any outside reviewer in the media or the courts able to penetrate the dark veil of expertise with which they can shield their operations from outside view.

And they do have a point, in that it is now clearly established that said elite professional physicists are intent on escalating the beam energy of the LHC to higher and higher levels to explore conditions hitherto unseen since one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, while holding off public scrutiny with a misleading camouflage of gung ho propaganda and inaccurate public statements, the latter often self contradictory, CERN evidently being a large organization where the right hand knoweth not what the left hand is up to, as we will show.

A massive review is called for, we agree

So, having read fully into both sides of the issue, which it appears very few outsiders have troubled themselves to do (though the few that have are exemplary, and we will point to them) we conclude that the situation deserves a comprehensive review by objective parties unallied to CERN on any basis. In particular, given the abject fellow traveling of the science and general interest media, reduced by James Gillies, CERN spokesman and head of communication, to the role of notetakers so bewildered by the claims of experts that their critical faculties have been entirely spiked, we step up to the plate in the hope of persuading someone in the media to investigate (Pro Publica, anyone?).

Ideally, of course, a public review board or court should be set up, as a German judge has specifically opined:

German court pleads for CERN/LHC safety conference

While the world`s largest atom smasher, CERN`s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva/Switzerland, these days is going to be restarted after a two months break, a German Court, although rejecting a claim to oblige German CERN deputies to stop LHC`s scheduled high energy running, urges the German government to convene a safety conference on collider`s potential catastrophic dangers.

“The court points out its opinion that it should be possible to let discuss the various safety aspects that have been the issue of both safety reports of 2003 and 2008, within the framework of a safety conference“ – that`show chairman Mr. Niemeyer, chief judge at the German administrative court at Cologne, logged after three hours of intensive court hearing.

… Such catastrophic scenarios are even discussed in CERN`s safety reports but there are found to be all falsified.

However, the critics still regard their serious warnings as not having been disproved. They state that safety reports would have to be reviewed for reasons of fundamental new astronomical findings that appeared for the first time in 2009, thus a year after CERN`s last safety report, and postulate a safety conference including not only CERN and CERN-related scientists but also the critics.

…”Even though the administrative court in general repeated last year`s constitutional court`s decision, it has put out a strong new signal that cannot be ignored by German government and even CERN”, summarizes Mr. Möhring.

(Source at Achtphasen.net: http://tinyurl.com/6yvmtor)

What we will do is merely point out the contradictions, insufficiencies and evasions in CERN’s various publicly available statements and accounts of its activities, and ask for clarification, in the name of the people of the various 20 nations of ordinary citizens whose taxes are paying for this adventure, not to mention the rest of humanity whose future is mortgaged to the validity of CERN’s evidently increasingly hollow safety reassurances.

However, we know that long texts on the Web are troublesome for many people to read, so we will break up our treatment into several posts, of which this is the first.

Railroaded onto Devil’s Island, Dreyfus was without doubt an innocent patriot

Modern science twisted by like irrationalities, especially in HIVnot/AIDS

Anyone who thinks the Dreyfus Affair is an irrelevant episode which has no bearing on modern life should read today’s well executed summary of this shameful story in the New York Times Book review, where Leo Damrosch boils down Ruth Harris’s new tome, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century to its essence.

An entirely innocent man was convicted of espionage and suffered four years of hell on earth on the notorious Devil’s Island before his brother enlisted Emile Zola and other intellectuals to reverse the monstrous injustice, with the Army and conservatives resisting all the way with lies, manufactured evidence and persecuting the whistleblower who discovered the real culprit, not to mention attacking Zola for libel and hounding him out of the country. Even then a zealot nearly killed Dreyfus with a pistol after he was freed.

Sound familiar? There are parallels in every facet of the appalling story of how HIV(not)/AIDS zealots who believe that HIV causes AIDS have managed to maintain their entirely irrational paradigm in the face of an avalanche of books, articles, contrary scientific papers and critics of all stripes, from both inside and outside the system – in this case, Big Science, rather than the French Army.

Nothing could be more obvious than the innocence of this harmless wisp of retroviral RNA of all charges of harming humans brought against it, yet the bulk of the world’s population has been led to believe it a very damaging and ultimately fatal threat to their health, and that the antibodies they form to it which repel it from their bodies in short order somehow much later will ruin their immune system and kill them, and anyone they have miraculously transferred those antibodies to, in a sequence of reasoning which is irrational in every step and which contradicts the basic premises of infectious disease as demonstrated throughout the rest of medicine and its science.

Have a look at Damrosch’s review and you will get a very clear picture of what happened to Dreyfus, and how human behavior in the leading civilizations of this planet has not changed one iota from over a century ago.

July 15, 2010
At War With Itself
By LEO DAMROSCH
DREYFUS
Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century
By Ruth Harris
Illustrated. 542 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $35
The scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair still resonates after more than a century, though it has been blurred for most Americans by time and distance. It is the goal of the Oxford historian Ruth Harris to extricate the story from the myths it has generated, on both the left and the right, and to trace its tortuous evolution from 1894 to 1906 in all of its human complexity. Combining an even-tempered tone with generosity of imagination, she has achieved that goal, charting a steady course through the voluminous literature that the affair inspired and exploring the reactions of scores of soldiers, politicians, journalists, salonnières and ordinary citizens. A helpful “Dramatis Personae” at the end of the book lists nearly 150 people, all of whom are given substantial treatment during the course of the narrative.

Alfred Dreyfus grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Alsace, a disputed eastern territory that many French people regarded as covertly German. He was 10 years old at the time of the Prussian invasion in 1870, when the French Army suffered a humiliating defeat, and he remained fiercely patriotic ever after, which motivated his choice of a military career. Intent on improving its leadership, the army began to promote officers on the basis of success in examinations rather than through the old-boy network, and Dreyfus was one of those selected for special training. The old-boy network was predictably resentful, especially when beneficiaries of the new policy were Jews, who numbered fewer than 100,000 in a nation of 38 million and were regarded by many as an insidious “enemy within.”

On Oct. 14, 1894, a few days after his 35th birthday, Captain Dreyfus spent the evening in his Paris apartment with his wife, Lucie, and their two young children. The next morning he was summoned unexpectedly to headquarters, subjected to a bewildering interrogation and placed under arrest. During the star-chamber trial that followed, he was never permitted to know the actual charges against him, which were based entirely on a torn-up bordereau, or memorandum, that a cleaning woman had retrieved from the wastebasket of the German military attaché. It was clear that someone was offering to sell low-level secrets to the Germans, and a chain of flimsy circumstantial evidence was said to point to Dreyfus. He wasn’t short of money and wasn’t entangled with women, two of the most frequent motives for espionage at the time, but his superiors decided that the handwriting on the bordereau was his, and an Alsatian-Jewish scapegoat was convenient.

Early in 1895 Dreyfus stood at attention in the courtyard of the École Militaire while an officer publicly broke his sword in two (Harris mentions that it had been broken and soldered together in advance to preclude any embarrassing difficulty). He was then condemned to solitary confinement in the ferocious tropical heat of Devil’s Island in French Guiana. He spent four appalling years there, forbidden to speak with his guards and with no knowledge of what was happening in France. As Harris comments, “Dreyfus, in fact, was one of the few French alive who knew nothing of the Dreyfus Affair.”

Alfred’s brother Mathieu, tireless in support despite constant threats, managed increasingly to attract the attention of politicians and journalists who suspected that in its zeal to defend its honor, the army had perpetrated a monstrous injustice. The “Dreyfusards” appealed to Enlightenment ideals of truth and justice, while conservatives, with the support of the Roman Catholic Church, argued for nationalist traditions that the army was held to embody. As Harris shows, allegiances were often complicated and illogical. Some important Dreyfusards were personally anti-Semitic, and some conservatives who believed that Dreyfus was innocent nonetheless were convinced that defending the army, and hence its persecution of Dreyfus, was more important than justice.

The case against Dreyfus, such as it was, began to unravel when Lt. Col. Marie-Georges Picquart stumbled on evidence that the real spy was Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a commandant whose handwriting did indeed match that of the bordereau, and who did indeed need money to cover huge debts. In the tragedy of errors that followed, paranoid army leaders punished the whistle-blower Picquart and did everything in their power to protect Esterhazy. They even abetted the forging of a letter by a commandant, Hubert Joseph Henry, that allegedly confirmed Dreyfus’s guilt. Amazingly, after the forgery was exposed, the anti-Dreyfus press claimed that Henry had acted out of patriotism to defend his nation’s honor, and when he slit his throat in prison they proclaimed him a martyr.

In fact, the forces of reaction proved impervious to argument and evidence. The novelist Émile Zola became fascinated by the case and ignited a huge protest by analyzing its details in “J’Accuse,” a celebrated open letter to the president of the Republic. Zola was thereupon convicted of libel in a trial whose judge ruled nearly all the relevant evidence inadmissible and was forced to go into exile in England.

Dreyfus himself was brought back to France in 1899, a broken man after four years on Devil’s Island, and put on trial once more. His prosecutors claimed, as more recent governments have done, that national security forbade them to reveal secret evidence that would have been decisive if known, and he was convicted all over again. To forestall further controversy he was immediately granted an official pardon, which did nothing to clear his name. It was not until 1906 that a court finally declared him innocent. In 1908, after he had retired from the army, a would-be assassin wounded him slightly with a pistol; the attacker was tried and acquitted. Dreyfus died in 1935.

The story is clearly a very rich one, exposing the determination of military and political leaders to cover up their errors at all costs and, still more profoundly, the bigotry that foreshadowed the genocidal horrors of the 20th century. It was apparently at this time, too, that the word “intellectual” assumed its modern connotations, with writers and thinkers acquiring a prestige in public debate that they have retained in France to this day.

In the splendidly terse “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters” (2009), Louis Begley brought a lawyer-novelist’s insight to untangling the deceptions through which Dreyfus was framed, and he suggests explicit parallels with post-9/11 legal abuses by the United States. More spacious, and also more densely detailed, is Frederick Brown’s “For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus” (2010), which traces the development of racist nationalism and reactionary Catholicism from the mid-19th century onward until they culminated in the Dreyfus Affair.

For readers who want a concise account of what Harris calls “the most famous cause célèbre in French history,” Begley’s book and Brown’s chapter will appeal. For the story in depth they should turn to Harris’s excellent “Dreyfus,” which deserves a wide audience for its patient, fair-minded exploration of human ideals, delusions, prejudices, hatreds and follies.

Leo Damrosch’s most recent books are “Tocqueville’s Discovery of America” and “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius.”

Anyone who remains innocently skeptical that today’s leaders of science and society and their unthinking followers can behave like braying asses in intellectual matters should read “Dreyfus” through for a good understanding of human folly, and how easy it is to mislead the faithful, even in science, when it turns political, and fights over its truths in the media rather than in peer reviewed journals.

Our not so modern era

What makes the Affair resonate so strongly even today, in this supposedly more enlightened Information Age, is that its exhibition of so many facets of crowd behavior in all its foolishness is still matched today in great issues ranging from the Iraq war to the nonscience of HIV/AIDS. For example, the US military adventures in Vietnam and Iraq were also initiated with deceptions and lies, with the Tonkin Gulf incident as imaginary as Saddam Hussein’s possession of “weapons of mass destruction.” Just as with the unfortunate Dreyfus, these false facts nevertheless became catalysts of huge waves of public feeling and misapprehension, with political responses from leaders in every social realm, and the truth of the matter quite irrelevant to the psychological forces called into action.

Likewise, the simple scientific misdirection published in Science in 1984 by Robert Gallo of the NIH that he had demonstrated that a retrovirus was the primary cause of AIDS (the key phrases being “strong evidence of a causative involvement of the virus in AIDS” and the “data suggest that HTLV-III is the primary cause of AIDS”), despite finding it in all too few AIDS patients (around a third) and despite finding the said virus thrived like Topsy in cultures of the very T-cells it was supposed to decimate, catalyzed a scientific boondoggle which is now the Worldcom of science, an enterprise whose essential bankruptcy is as yet unexposed behind the screening cloud of emotions and political and financial exploitation that has surrounded it for 26 years.

Whether Dreyfus’s sorry tale is worth going through page by unhappy page to see all the parallels with these modern debacles is probably dependent on how sophisticated the reader is in his/her perceptions of what is going on today, since the naive will probably feel it is all anachronistic old hat, now that we are free of all the problems such as anti-Semitism, blind trust in authority, belief that the law courts seek and find the truth, raging rumor mills and the tendency of a large national system such as the French Army to protect itself at the expense of justice for the individual, which France suffered then and which we don’t have any more.

If you do want to read up on this primer on mob politics and misdirection, however, we recommend the earlier book by Jean-Denis Bredin, “The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus”, which has all the important details knit together in a more effective, even novelistic dramatic structure, as against the comprehensive but rather plodding academic style of the current effort, which doesn’t add any updates which make any difference to the moral of the tale.

“Does it matter that Dreyfus was innocent? At Rennes, did Commander Merle, who wept while listening to Demange,, and Commandant Beauvais, who hesitated, it was said, until the last moment, believe that Dreyfus was innocent? It is not improbable, but his innocence was not enough to make them change their judgment. “I am convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence,” a French officer said to Emile Duclaux, “but if his verdict were up to me, I would convict him, again for the honor of the Army.” (Bredin, p.536)

The social principle that politics trumps truth in a court of law is one of the hardest lessons for the young idealist to learn. That it extends even into the heart of science is even more difficult to conceive, until one opens the Pandora’s box of skepticism about the claims of the generals of that Grand Armee, especially those in HIV/AIDS.

Greg Mortenson teaching Army new tactics of winning hearts and minds as both lose on the ground

UPDATE: Wikileaks sends heat missile into US policymaking

The NYTimes sees fit today (Jul 18 Sun) to carry on the top left front page of its presumably well read Sunday edition a story by Elizabeth Bumiller on an Unlikely Tutor Giving Military Afghan Advice.

Turns out the tutor is Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea”, and builder of more than 130 mostly girl schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the US Army under McChrystal has been paying a lot of attention to his ideas for the past year. The story gives the impression that “Three Cups of Tea” is now the unofficial army manual on how to achieve victory in Afghanistan ie how to leave it to the Afghanis without the Taliban taking over again. Mortenson’s answer, as we noted in an earlier post, is to educate the better half of Afghanistan, its women. And who is the group behind this sudden enlightenment after eight years of floundering in a military quicksand which has swallowed every other conqueror in history? Army wives:

“We will move through this and if I’m not involved in the years ahead, will take tremendous comfort in knowing people like you are helping Afghans build a future,” General McChrystal wrote to Mr. Mortenson in an e-mail message, as he traveled from Kabul to Washington. The note landed in Mr. Mortenson’s inbox shortly after 1 a.m. Eastern time on June 23. Nine hours later, the general walked into the Oval Office to be fired by President Obama.

The e-mail message was in response to a note of support from Mr. Mortenson. It reflected his broad and deepening relationship with the United States military, whose leaders have increasingly turned to Mr. Mortenson, once a shaggy mountaineer, to help translate the theory of counterinsurgency into tribal realities on the ground.

In the past year, Mr. Mortenson and his Central Asia Institute, responsible for the construction of more than 130 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, mostly for girls, have set up some three dozen meetings between General McChrystal or his senior staff members and village elders across Afghanistan.

The collaboration, which grew in part out of the popularity of “Three Cups of Tea” among military wives who told their husbands to read it, extends to the office of Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last summer, Admiral Mullen attended the opening of one of Mr. Mortenson’s schools in Pushghar, a remote village in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains.

Cont:

Mr. Mortenson — who for a time lived out of his car in Berkeley, Calif. — has also spoken at dozens of military bases, seen his book go on required reading lists for senior American military commanders and had lunch with Gen. David H. Petraeus, General McChrystal’s replacement. On Friday he was in Tampa to meet with Adm. Eric T. Olson, the officer in charge of the United States Special Operations Command.

Mr. Mortenson, 52, thinks there is no military solution in Afghanistan — he says the education of girls is the real long-term fix — so he has been startled by the Defense Department’s embrace.

“I never, ever expected it,” Mr. Mortenson, a former Army medic, said in a telephone interview last week from Florida, where he had paused between military briefings, book talks for a sequel, “Stones into Schools,” and fund-raising appearances for his institute.

Mr. Mortenson, who said he had accepted no money from the military and had no contractual relationship with the Defense Department, was initially critical of the armed forces in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as “laptop warriors” who appeared, he said, indifferent to the civilian casualties inflicted by the American bombardment of Afghanistan.

In its early days “Three Cups of Tea,” the story of Mr. Mortenson’s efforts to build schools in Pakistan, was largely ignored by the military, and for that matter by most everyone else. Written with a journalist, David Oliver Relin, and published in hardcover by Viking in March 2006, the book had only modest sales. Most major newspapers, including this one, did not review it.

But the book’s message of the importance of girls’ education caught on when women’s book clubs, church groups and high schools began snapping up the less expensive paperback published in January 2007.

Sales to date are at four million copies in 41 countries, and the book’s yarn is well known: disoriented after a 1993 failed attempt on Pakistan’s K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, Mr. Mortenson took a wrong turn into the village of Korphe, was nursed back to health by the villagers and, in gratitude, vowed to build them a school.

He returned to Pakistan a year later with a $12,000 donation from a Silicon Valley benefactor and spent most of it on school construction materials in the city of Rawalpindi — only to be told he could not get his cargo to Korphe without first building a bridge.

The story of that bridge, Mr. Mortenson’s relationships with Pakistanis, and the schools that followed appealed so much to one military spouse that in the fall of 2007 she sent the book to her husband, Christopher D. Kolenda, at that time a lieutenant colonel commanding 700 American soldiers on the Pakistan border.

Colonel Kolenda knew well the instructions about building relationships with elders that were in the Army and Marine Corps’ new counterinsurgency manual, which had been released in late 2006. But “Three Cups of Tea” brought the lessons to life.

“It was practical, and it told real stories of real people,” said Colonel Kolenda, now a top adviser at the Kabul headquarters for the International Security Assistance Force, in an interview at the Pentagon last week.

Colonel Kolenda was among the first in the military to reach out to Mr. Mortenson, and by June 2008 the Central Asia Institute had built a school near Colonel Kolenda’s base. By the summer of 2009, Mr. Mortenson was in meetings in Kabul with Colonel Kolenda, village elders and at times President Obama’s new commander, General McChrystal. (By then at least two more military wives — Deborah Mullen and Holly Petraeus — had told their husbands to read “Three Cups of Tea.”)

As Colonel Kolenda tells it, Mr. Mortenson and his Afghan partner on the ground, Wakil Karimi, were the American high command’s primary conduits for reaching out to elders outside the “Kabul bubble.”

As Mr. Mortenson tells it, the Afghan elders were often blunt with General McChrystal, as in a meeting last October when one of them said that he had traveled all the way from his province because he needed weapons, not conversation.

“He said, ‘Are you going to give them to me or am I going to sit here and listen to you talk?’ ” Mr. Mortenson recalled. The high command replied, Mr. Mortenson said, that they were making an assessment of what he needed. “And he said, ‘Well, you’ve already been here eight years, ” Mr. Mortenson recalled.

Despite the rough edges, Colonel Kolenda said the meetings helped the American high command settle on central parts of its strategy — the imperative to avoid civilian casualties, in particular, which the elders consistently and angrily denounced during the sessions — and also smoothed relations between the elders and commanders.

For Mr. Mortenson’s part, his growing relationship with the military convinced him that it had learned the importance of understanding Afghan culture and of developing ties with elders across the country, and was willing to admit past mistakes.

At the end of this month, Mr. Mortenson, who lives in Bozeman, Mont., with his wife, Tara Bishop, and two children, is going back for the rest of the summer to Afghanistan, where to maintain credibility he now has to make it clear to Afghans and a number of aid organizations that he has no formal connection to the American military.

Mr. Mortenson acknowledges that his solution in Afghanistan, girls’ education, will take a generation and more. “But Al Qaeda and the Taliban are looking at it long range over generations,” he said. “And we’re looking at it in terms of annual fiscal cycles and presidential elections.”

To turn the US Army in a new direction after eight years is quite a feat, and here we learn it was achieved by the wives atop the Army power structure ie the spouses of Christopher D. Kolenda, then commanding 700 American soldiers on the Pakistan border, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen and General David H. Petraeus, now the Army commander in Afghanistan. Note that the actual first names of only the last two, Deborah and Holly, are mentioned by the Times female reporter, which seems odd.

Why doesn’t Mrs Kolenda deserve respect as the initiator of a vast expansion of US Army objectives in Afghanistan? Colonel Kolenda certainly took her point, judging from his piece in the Weekly Standard in October, 2008, How to Win in Afghanistan:It’s time to adjust the strategy.. At least, he included a reference to “Local governments desperately need to draw on the expertise of civilian partners from the international community to develop durable systems relevant to everyday life” amid his hard nosed assessment of spoiler factors in “winning” in Afghanistan including a dysfunctional timber trade and tax system.

The $200 billion pork barrel

How to win the war in Afghanistan is none of the business of this blog, of course, though we celebrate any advance in releasing the energies of the better half of the population of the world, which Greg Mortenson’s school building is part of.

But the influence of money on the behavior of large systems is our business, in that the influx of money into science from the post World War II federal funding of scientific research to the Wall Street exploitation of breakthroughs in biotechnology and medicine seem to us to account for much of the misbehavior we witness today in scientific leadership, since funding has become the first order of business in almost every field.

How does Afghanistan look from this point of view? A lost cause, we would say, unless things change. According to David Samuels in Harpers August issue, Barack and Hamid’s Excellent Adventure: Afghanistan’s president visits the White House , gigantic sums are being pocketed and dispensed as the powers involved cooperate in a clandestine game that has little to do with the headline stories we read in New York:

“Is your brother a CIA agent?”

The question refers to Hamid Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is regularly portrayed in the American press as a corrupt drug lord who charges huge fees for allowing trucks full of opium to cross the bridges over the Helmand River to Kandahar. Last fall, President Obama duly warned that he expected Karzai to establish tough new anti-corruption laws and remove his brother from the government of a country into which the United States would soon be sending 30,000 additional troops. Never mind that Afghanistan produces an estimated 90 percent of the world’s supply of opium; and that the Taliban pays Wali Karzai to ship opium through the territories he governs; and that the U.S. Army, under the ill-fated General Stanley McChrystal, relies on Wali Karzai for logistical support and subcontracts special tasks, which include killing people, to gunmen under his direct control; and that as a courtesy we no longer destroy the poppy crop; and that Wali Karzai happens to be the CIA’s landlord in Kandahar, renting them Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s old villa. After a few months of back-and-forth, the message got through, and on March 30 the New York Times reported that “Afghan and American officials have decided that the president’s brother will be allowed to stay in place,” quoting a senior NATO official as saying that Wali Karzai could be a big help to the ongoing American reconstruction effort. “One thing, he is a successful businessman,” the official said. “He can create jobs.”….

…an interview with former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, an arrogant creep who was forced out of his job as deputy U.N. envoy to Afghanistan and chose to express his unvarnished opinion of Karzai. “He can be very emotional, act impulsively,” said Galbraith, who repeated the word “emotional” three times in the course of the interview. In case viewers didn’t get the gossip-page code, Galbraith explained that “some of the palace insiders say that he has a certain fondness for some of Afghanistan’s most profitable exports,” leading a reporter to ask State Department spokesman Philip Crowley the next morning whether the United States had any reason to believe that Karzai was “like, hiding out in the basement of the palace doing bong hits, or something worse.” …

Eikenberry, a tall man in a good suit who used to be a lieutenant general, was opposed to the surge, because the Afghan government—whose ministers he knows better than any other American in the room does—was corrupt and unable to run the country effectively. Having spent more than twenty hours on a plane with Karzai and his ministers circumnavigating clouds of volcanic ash, Eikenberry is now even better equipped to evaluate the men in whose pockets much of America’s $276-billion investment in Afghanistan now resides. Appearing at a news conference in the White House briefing room on Monday, Eikenberry was asked whether his opinion of Karzai had changed. “President Karzai is the—he’s the elected president of Afghanistan,” Eikenberry said, falling back on the military man’s necessary obeisance to the idiocy of legal authority….
The fact that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate has been supplying the Taliban and even helping to plan attacks on Afghan and American forces is another inconvenient fact of the war that the leader of the free world would prefer not to deal with….

Yet there can be little doubt that a major source of money for the insurgency comes from payments made by elected Afghan officials and Wardak’s army, meaning that America is funding both sides in what is very clearly an Afghan civil war.

Cont. (much more)
A case in point is a recent scandal involving the defense minister’s own son, Hamed Wardak, a Rhodes scholar and class valedictorian at Georgetown University; his transportation company, NCL Holdings, won a $360-million Pentagon contract despite the fact that it wasn’t registered with the Afghan government and didn’t own any trucks. “Those accusations are without merit,” the defense minister responds, adding, correctly, that his son’s company has received the highest possible marks from the Pentagon.

I ask the minister about whether, in general terms, the logistics systems shared by the U.S. Army and the ANA might be susceptible to some form of graft. I note that Watan Risk Management and Compass Security, the two major companies that escort supply convoys across the country, are known to pay large bribes to the Taliban and even to stage attacks on convoys in order to raise their rates. Although the fee varies according to the number of trucks and what they are carrying, the average bribe required not to get shot at is reportedly somewhere around $800 per truck. Both companies are owned by relatives of President Karzai. A report published last year by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University estimated that the United States and its allies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on payments to private security and trucking companies.

“We have a very good logistics system,” Wardak answers. “It works exceptionally well. There is proper institutional control. Accusations to the contrary are without any merit.”

To make him feel better, I ask whether girls’ schools are still being burned down in Afghanistan. “That does happen very regularly,” he assures me. Over the past year, he says, there have been approximately 600 attacks on schools that have resulted in the partial or complete destruction of their facilities.

The interior minister, Haneef Atmar, a tall, ascetic-looking man who walks with a cane and is known as one of the few competent ministers in Karzai’s cabinet, tells me that although corruption is indeed a problem, he has instituted a “zero-tolerance” policy for payments from contractors to the Taliban. He gives me his email address so we can talk further and then introduces me to a no-nonsense-looking military type named Kevin. “Kevin is my adviser,” he says. It turns out that every member of the Afghan cabinet has a minder who “controls” that minister, a locution that the minders not only do not avoid but in fact seem eager to stress, as in, “I control the minister of mines.” I ask Atmar when this meeting was planned, and he tells me, “About three weeks ago,” confirming my impression that this visit was more or less arranged on the fly, after someone in the administration determined that Karzai had outfoxed them. As it turns out, Atmar’s announcement of a zero-tolerance policy on payments to the Taliban is premature: he will be unceremoniously fired by President Karzai shortly after the cabinet returns to Kabul.

The State Department desk man for Afghanistan informs me that if I want a meeting with the minister of mines, Wahidullah Shahrani, he will be appearing later at the Chamber of Commerce. Huge deposits of minerals including iron, copper, and lithium have been found in Afghanistan over the past few years. Last year, a contract for the Aynak copper deposit, thought to be worth some $88 billion, was awarded to a Chinese company in exchange for what American intelligence officials told the Washington Post was a $30-million bribe paid to Shahrani’s predecessor, Mohammed Ibrahim Adel, who was reported to be a close friend of Mohammed Karzai, one of the president’s brothers.

The problem with building anything in Afghanistan, the men tell me, is ensuring a consistent supply of fuel. There’s an eleven-inch pipeline that the Red Army built, and everything else needs to be trucked in, which means payoffs to the security companies and the local police, who are worse than the Taliban. I talk to a young American-born Afghan who grew up in Virginia and is now working in Afghanistan for an organization called SEIF, which was set up by CARE with funding from USAID. His job is to help small and mid-level entrepreneurs build packing plants in the countryside for dried fruit and nuts. I ask him how he thinks the war is going. “People in the rural areas are not happy with the last five or six years,” he explains. “They see billions of dollars being pledged for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. They don’t understand why they don’t see any of that money, why they don’t have roads, they don’t have schools, why they are still living in a mud hut.”…

I ask Ambassador Wayne how it is possible for the Chinese to pick up an $88-billion copper mine in the middle of a country in which America has spent more than $200 billion to no apparent purpose. “First is that the package that was put together was very massive,” he says, arching his eyebrows again. “Speaking frankly, there are all sorts of rumors about what else was happening.”

After the meeting, I ride with Minister Shahrani to the Willard Hotel, where we sit on pale yellow chintz-covered armchairs in a far corner of the lobby. In addition to the copper mine, he says, Afghanistan has the largest undeveloped iron-ore deposit in the world, for which bidding will soon ensue. “Everything will be done in the most transparent way possible,” he assures me. “We’re not Nigeria or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

I try to imagine how that conversation goes. “So, you have already stolen billions of dollars, and you’ve deposited it in Geneva,” I say out loud, playing the role of Shahrani. “Be content with what you’ve stolen already. Please don’t steal more or the international community will be mad at us.” Shahrani smiles. The State Department minder—who has been sitting three feet away while pretending not to listen to us—looks up, but the minister waves him off. “No, let him ask questions,” he says. “All contracts will be made perfectly transparent,” he repeats, before launching into a long disquisition on the procedures and the road show for the iron-ore contracts, which will happen sometime this fall. The total worth of the additional unexploited mineral resources in Afghanistan may be between $1 trillion and $5 trillion. Whatever the real number is, it will provide plenty of incentive to keep fighting.

Ann Gearan of the AP, who has covered the State Department for years in the old-fashioned way, stands up to ask the Afghan president a final question. Is it really appropriate for the United States to be launching a major operation in Kandahar when the president is unable to remove his brother from office? Karzai nods politely. “Fortunately, officials who are elected by the people cannot be removed by the president,” he explains. The issues raised by the American press have now been understood better, he concludes, before stating firmly, “the issue is resolved.” Hillary Clinton turns her face toward the bright, shining lights. “I have nothing to add,” she says. The vision is real and ineluctable. America will win the hearts of the Afghan people by defeating the Taliban and educating women to go to the moon, and our president will be reelected at a cost of $6 billion per month and tens of thousands more lives, Afghan and American.

Sobering stuff. Also, somewhat disillusioning to all those that wish Greg Mortenson and his girls schools well.

After all, he built no fewer than 130 schools over several years in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but the Taliban and other fighters have burnt down or crippled 600 in Afghanistan in the past year alone, so it would seem that the imagined transformation of Afghan society in support of the US Army might take a great deal longer than even a generation. Are the US Army prepared to stay the course? one might ask Colonel Kalenda.

Barack’s bedtime reading

So while we originally read the Times story as a heartening indication that perhaps our advice to the HIV/AIDS mythbusters to get to Michele somehow and let her insist that President Obama adjust US policy on AIDS in the right direction was not too wacky, we now realize that it may more difficult than it seems to actually change policy whatever success Michele has in getting Barack to make Peter Duesberg’s “Inventing the AIDS Virus” his bedtime reading.

After all, the amount invested so far in the totally spurious idea that HIV causes AIDS, a idea that is so scientifically silly it should be quickly rejected by any 14 year old who reads up on the topic, is calculated by some to exceed $400 billion, though the usual figure claimed in Vienna is half that.

UPDATE

WikiLeaks shoots heat seeking missile into Pentagon

Today (Jul 26 Mon) the Wikileaks release of 92,000 Army records, more than 200,000 pages of detailed description of battle events from January 2004 through December 2009, delivered a body blow to current Afghanistan war policy possibly equivalent to the Pentagon papers undermining of Vietnam, though the documents are not as secret. The texts make clear that the war has not been going even as well as claimed by the White House, and why after $300 billion spent by the US the Taliban are stronger than ever.

They confirm the corruption and incompetence of the Afghan government, its army and its police, probable Pakistani ISI (Interservices Intelligence) support for the Taliban, at least until recently, that insurgents of all kinds have continually multiplied beyond official estimates and are now apparently using heat seeking missiles (Manpads, not Stingers) successfully against US helicopters, as they did against the Soviets, police cruelty to civilians sometimes as sadistic as the Taliban, and Army disregard of the lives of civilians who may be in a target zone without any hope of fleeing.

At the time of writing the Pentagon is fuming that this must have been the work of Bradley Manning, the 22 year old intelligence analyst they have in custody for releasing the video of the helicopter attack in which the Reuters correspondent got shot (see previous post, Bullets vs books: Greg Mortenson and the un-infowars), but Wikipedia isn’t saying, of course.

The fundamental lesson for science here may be that what is needed for systematic scientific outrages such as the maintenance of the HIV/AIDS paradigm two decades after its expert debunking in top journals is a whistle blower who can expose internal memos and other correspondence which can give the game away to the public.

Unfortunately the only instance we know of where such a text was exposed was the incriminating memo written by some functionary at HHS asking why Peter Duesberg’s Cancer Research article in 1987, the one which first shot down the prima facie absurd HIV=AIDS claim, was not headed off at the pass ie not stopped before publication by intervention from the NIH or its agents.

Shortly after the Cancer Research paper appeared, a memo was sent from the office of the secretary of Health and Human Services, (HHS) with the words “MEDIA ALERT” that castigated the NIH for allowing the paper to have been published in the first place. “The article apparently went through the normal pre-publication process and should have been flagged at NIH,” it read. “This obviously has the potential to raise a lot of controversy…. I have already asked NIH public affairs to start digging into this.” The memo listed the few media outlets that had covered Duesberg’s review – primarily the New York Native, a gay weekly that has since gone out of business – and cited a few journalists by name it promised to check up on.

The notion that the NIH expects to vet every scientific paper in every cancer journal is surprising to people who think of science in the old fashioned, soft-fuzzy way. But to anybody who knows the system it is no surprise at all. The NIH exerts a militaristic control over the ideas that emanate from US government science, and the control extends to the media, who are rewarded and punished in accordance with their suspension of curiosity.
The NIH and all its branches are not only part of the “government,” they are part of the US military. Public Health has its roots in the military; the NIH began during World War I as an organization that solely focused on the health of soldiers. This remained its core mandate through World War II, after which it expanded to a more sweeping public health institution. Still, top NIH scientists hold military rank – the only openly stated one being the Surgeon General.
The NIH, UC Berkeley, the respectable science press, and needless to say the world’s many thousands of AIDS organizations choked on Duesberg like a bone lodged sideways in its throat. Ironically though, his achievements and reputation had lodged him deep in the system and it would take a while for them to expel him. (Celia Farber, The Passion of Peter Duesberg, at AIDS Wiki.)

Despite the fact that this notorious page has been displayed or at least quoted on the Web for years it seems to have made no difference at all to the success of HIV propagandists in selling the world on their lucrative idea, and that any challenge to it must be “dangerous” to the welfare of the public.

What is needed is 90,000 pages of such admissions but Alas there seems no chance of that. Although perhaps we should get in touch with Julian, just in case. He is reportedly miffed, however, that the copter killing video didn’t enough of a dent in the politics of Afghanistan’s civil war – for that is what it is now exposed to be – and that is why he released the current material, which is only part of the total, he states.

Meanwhile BradAss87 faces 52 years in prison.

From Huffington Post:

Jon Stewart Mocks Media for Wikileaks Reaction (Video) Watch for the final shot of Afghan soldiers smoking hits of opium before going on patrol with American soldiers one of whom complains it is impossible to get them to stop giggling.

From the Guardian:
Biting column by Simon Jenkins, A history of folly, from the Trojan horse to Afghanistan – By recording failure in meticulous detail, the leaked war logs bear devastating witness to our incompetence

HIV mythbusters precede Global AIDS Confab with truthseeking pow wow

Naive Obama is no help at all, and John P. Moore is still well funded

The world’s greatest HIV/AIDS gathering will cram Vienna next week, bonding over the latest ways attendees have worked out to milk the greatest funding cow any of them have ever encountered.

None other than Ambassador Eric Goosby, the US Global AIDS Coordinator, will lead the US delegation to the XVIII International AIDS Conference to join 25,000 other HIV/AIDS dogmatists “to discuss efforts to stop AIDS.”

From July 18 to 23, Ambassador Eric Goosby, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, will lead the U.S. delegation to the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Austria. The conference brings together an estimated 25,000 participants, including scientists, health care providers, political, community and business leaders, government, non-governmental and multilateral organization representatives, and people living with HIV/AIDS, to discuss efforts to stop HIV/AIDS. Reflecting America’s leadership in the fight against global AIDS through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the U.S. will use this opportunity to share data, best practices, and lessons learned from PEPFAR-supported programs with the global community of HIV/AIDS program implementers.

Truth on the sidelines

The only fly in the ointment will be the rather smaller, but more truthful AIDS Knowledge and Dogma – Discerning the Difference: Conditions for the Emergence and Decline of Scientific Theories, Congress, July 16/17 2010, Vienna, Austria running today (Jul 16 Fri) and tomorrow in the same city, announcing in innumerable ways that the whole basis for their work, the supposed science of HIV/AIDS, is hollow at the core, which is one reason why it has got nowhere in 26 years in explaining how AIDS works or curing it. (HIV/AIDS patients treated with the standard drugs in the US are dying at the same rate as ever, 20,000 a year, give or take three thousand (the CDC and the WHO estimates vary)).

Unlike the gargantuan main fair, the AIDS Knowledge and Dogma conference will be an excellent source of accurate information on HIV/AIDS. One might view it as nothing less than a celebration of truth and good science, as verified by the published record in the highest peer reviewed journals. Its basic theme – that HIV does not cause AIDS, and HIV/AIDS is not infectious – has been sounded since 1987 and 1989 in comprehensive reviews which have never been challenged in the same publications, Cancer Research and the Proceedings of the National Academy, let alone refuted there or anywhere else, contrary to the propaganda of all those living off the current dogma.

But will its message calling for a return to good science in AIDS penetrate the noisy ramparts of the celebration of the status quo? The sorry tale of how politics and propaganda have trumped the best published science over the last quarter century in HIV/AIDS bodes ill for the prospects of turning the direction in which the vast crowd of lemmings at the other gathering is running, which is over the cliff of destruction and into the sea of despair, albeit well funded despair.

Can truth prevail in the numbers game?

It really is quite extraordinary how successful the promoters of the established paradigm have been in protecting it from debunkers led by the best man in the field, which is what Peter Duesberg of Berkeley was and is, even now, despite the Nobels given to less deserving rivals which have been used to (a)ward off his critiques.

Remarkable, indeed, given that there are so many books out now, well over thirty at last count, describing this scandal in detail, books by very acute minds with a perfect understanding of the issue, such as Peter Duesberg himself (“Inventing the AIDS Virus, 1996″) the science editor Harvey Bialy (“Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg , 2004″), science critic Henry Bauer (“The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, 2007″ ) and the mathematician Rebecca Culshaw (“Science Sold Out, 2007″), two of whom (Duesberg and Bauer) will be speaking in Vienna.

Other distinguished speakers in the program include the worldly ex-Sunday Times investigative science and medicine journalist and author Neville Hodgkinson (AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science (Fourth Estate, 1996)), the sharp minded market researcher, author and drug critic John Lauritsen (Death Rush: Poppers and AIDS, “Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story (1990), and The AIDS War” and others), gynaecologist, obstetrician and AIDS in Africa expert Christian Fiala (author of “Do We Love Dangerously? – A Doctor in Search of the Facts and Background to AIDS”), the virus structure electron microscope researcher Etienne de Harven who has just published “Ten Lies About AIDS”, internal medicine specialist and co-author of “Virus Mania: How the Medical Industry Continually Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense” Claus Kohnlein (video in French), molecular biologist and radiologist Marco Ruggiero (video) (site), and award winning British science and medicine documentary maker (“AIDS—The Unheard Voices”) Joan Shenton, author of “Positively False: Exposing the myths around HIV and AIDS”. The excellent full length 2009 documentary expose of the rot at the core of the HIV paradigm, “House of Numbers” will be shown, along with a shorter German film from 1996, “AIDS – die grossen Zweifel (AIDS -the huge doubts)”.

But is anyone else listening?

All this material is quite enough to convince anybody listening there in Vienna (or who follows the links above, and reads the fine page of abstracts of the HIV truth conference) that HIV is the Worldcom of science, but the likelihood of it being heard by anyone from the main AIDS event seems remote. For twenty six years the response of everyone in the vast world of HIV/AIDS has been to turn a blind eye to anything which might threaten the central place of HIV in their scheme, and the funding that flows from that idea. As Upton Sinclair once remarked, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Though the ruling idea that HIV causes AIDS is as vulnerable to debunking as a sucked egg is to a sharp stick, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men of reason and disproof have so far failed to dislodge the Humpty Dumpty of HIV from atop his wall, because none of them can get anywhere near him. No one who matters in the system will discuss the topic.

Of course, the naivete of Presidents, officials, editors, charity celebrities, health workers and the general public when it comes to paradigm battles within science is not helpful. Or perhaps it is not naivete. After all, what recourse do people even in high position normally have to a second opinion in scientific matters, which are beyond their own understanding?

Like even scientists expert in other fields, they have to ask Joe, or Bill, or whomever they know or trust, in the established ranks, and this chain of collegial agreement extends outwards from a very small group of insiders in the know. The number of people in HIV/AIDS who are fully aware of its ramshackle, unbolted theoretical underpinnings can probably be numbered on both hands, and half of them probably refuse to admit even to themselves the weakness of believing that HIV causes AIDS. And as Peter Medawar observed in Advice to a Young Scientist, “a scientist who habitually deceives himself is well on the way toward deceiving others”.

Where is the candidate for change?

In such conditions it is probably unfair to blame even President Obama for going along with this appalling boondoggle, although a case could be made for expecting more from a sophisticated politician. After all, it was not beyond South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki to realize that if such highly qualified scientists still disagreed over the issue. something must be going on, and to demand open public discussion, if not reconciliation of views. Having examined the issue for himself, it seems clear that he concluded like every other intelligent and objective outsider who comes upon it that there is no reason to believe in the unique absurdities of HIV/AIDS, which are legion.

Not to mention the stark giveaway that in established circles reexamination of the HIV faith is verboten, which is why HIV mythbusters have to hold their conference separately in Vienna, in the Imperial court stables, or Hoffstallungen.

For as any child should be able to see, censoring disapproval of questioning of a belief in science is the mark of vested interests anxious lest the paradigm they are living off get toppled, and a signal of its weakness. The lethal degree of counterattack on anyone who raises doubts in HIV/AIDS is notorious, and the most obvious flag that a can of worms will be exposed if it is opened.

A world where no one reads the science

In a modern world where no one has time to read beyond the headlines of journal articles, and even expert reporters are not paid to do any investigation in scientific disputes, the general public rarely tries to read up on a scientific topic hiding behind mounds of jargon on all sides, and so we have a world where a scientific paradigm can be maintained forever floating on general opinion, maintained by censorship and propaganda and the enthusiastic fellow traveling of activists, and the enormous momentum of tens of thousands of organizations and their need for funding.

The Web, which was meant to save us from institutions and systems which might conceal the truth, has now been exposed as ineffective, despite the growing pile of video clips and now even films on You Tube. The number of attendees tells the story: 25,000 versus probably more than a hundred times less. The chance of change at the grass roots level now seems remoter than ever.

But then, truth is not a numbers game, and science is not a democracy. When will a truth seeking leader look into the matter, and rescue the situation?

Calling Mr Goosby

Will Mr Goosby pass by the Imperial Court Stables, where the AIDS-Knowledge and Dogma congress is being held, despite the not very promising name of this venue, and grasp the baton? Will he report back to President Obama that things may be amiss? Will Michele take an interest, and be put in charge of a new White House AIDS Investigative Unit?

Perhaps the current trend led by New York State surreptitiously to test everyone on the country for HIV will turn up a positive somewhere in the White House power structure, perhaps Mr Goosby himself. Certainly that would provide a personal motivation to reexamine HIV skepticism on his part, at least, if he has heard of it at all.

Certainly if he ever troubled to read Peter Duesberg’s book or site, or Rebecca Culshaw’s slim but powerful book, Goosby would be privately persuaded, we feel. But who in this Blackberry era has time to read any book? And who in a world of overwhelming consensus would think that contrarian views are worth reading, especially one atop the pyramid of power, privilege and pay generated by that consensus for 26 years? Probably not Mr Goosby, even if his alternative was the drug regime that increasingly is used to attack the health of blacks here and in Africa.

Moore pipes down

Meanwhile, we note that lately John P. Moore of Weill Medical College at Cornell, the lead propagandist in HIV/AIDS science notorious for attacking HIV skeptics as viciously as he possibly can (by his own account), has kept out of the limelight, so we doubt that he will be in Vienna hosting a panel on why the media should be censored of any mention of doubts about HIV, as he did in Toronto.

After all, the NIH listing of grants in 2009 in HIV/AIDS has him busy as the grantee of some eight projects amounting to $2,171,570 (click on PIName heading, then seek page 14).

All of them seem to be related to microbicides, where his last major result was that his microbicide actually assisted the passage of HIV, as we recall.

We doubt that the funding of the alternative AIDS – Knowledge and Dogma conference amounts to anywhere near this sum. Were we in charge at NIAID, however, we would allocate $2 million to it, and $20 million immediately to Duesberg, whose line of research in cancer seems more promising that the entire oncogene industry put together.

UPDATE: Russian English speaking TV has run segments featuring HIV Mythbusters during the week – see AIDS: questions remain unanswered – Jul 18 story with 8 video clips embedded. . (Thanks Carter and Questioning AIDS Forum where a couple more videos will be found of Neville Hodgkinson on YouTube from Russia Today and CrossTalk on the AIDS Industry – a TV news segment panel including Peter Duesberg.

Duesberg wins crossfire panel: The last one – Cross Talk – is a must see with Duesberg in a Crossfire type discussion where two stalwart defenders of the faith one from UNAIDS and one from the pharma side are pitted against Duesberg, who they try to repel as “dangerous” and a “murderer” 25 years out of date with his valid (they admit) complaints about AZT killing all the patients, but he is given adequate time to counter them by pointing out that his complaints are drawn from JAMA and the NEJ in the last few years where half (of the 17,000 (CDC) to 21,000 (UN) dying annually) AIDS victims in the US are now dying of symptoms not of AIDS but of drug toxicity, and is given the last victorious word on the topic with that unanswerable point.

A creditable performance by the news host, who did his research beforehand, it is clear, unlike almost all well paid interviewers and producers in the country which spawned this outrage to science, medicine and common sense.

Riveting documentary exposes official misbehavior in suppressing cancer pioneer

Patients sob at their lucky escape from the forces which hold back progress

The fine, illusion busting, investigative cancer documentary “Burzynski”, whose limited, one week Oscar-qualifying run just ended at New York’s Cinema Village and in LA, is a must see for any intelligent observer of the politics of medicine in the US.

Readers should by no means credit the irresponsible reviews it suffered at the New York Times from freelancer Jeannette Catsoulis, the familiar Times’ pit bull for movies on unorthodox medicine or science, tho’ here able to complain only of the “visual aridity” of the documents presented which “destroy the film” and “trample the eyes”, while acknowledging that “director Eric Merola, presents Dr. Burzynski as a stoic victim of patent fraud, government harassment and scientific sabotage. No one appears to contest the efficacy of his treatment; the problem, the film suggests, is a pharmaceutical industry with nothing to gain — and much to lose — from the introduction of a highly successful, nontoxic competitor to chemotherapy and radiation”, or the Village Voice where Ella Taylor, evidently a tyro fresh to the vicious politics faced by alternative medicine pioneers, which is the topic of the movie, is so inattentive, seeing “no credible proof of the drug’s success” in this “conspiratorial rubbish”, that she had to edit her piece after publication, and raised a serious question as to whether negative reviewers actually sit through much of the movie.

More attentive takes listed at Movie Review Intelligence include Kevin Thomas at the Los Angeles Times and Ronnie Scheib at Variety, though we would choose James Van Maanen’s review and interview at TrustMovies as the best and brightest so far.

Reflex repression

Such flat dismissals of “Burzynski” are specimens of the same uninformed and possibly venal teacher’s pet hostility to novelty from outsiders that forms roadblocks to progress in every field, but especially medicine, where the media has a very bad track record in unfairly damning news of progress outside the dominant institutions – for example, the powerful expose of shoddy and unproven AIDS science in House of Numbers.

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All the major elements of what is wrong with modern medicine are present – the overwhelming official prejudice against novelty from outside the system, the distrust of independent unorthodox practitioners and the heartfelt testimony of their patients, the devotion of power to the defense of current treatment even though it achieves little and imposes its own horrendous torment on patients, and the immense influence of pharma on regulating officials who tend to end up with jobs in industry after they serve in government.
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This kind of unthinking resistance and counterattack is the theme of “Burzynski”, which exposes the irrational antagonism of FDA officials towards a successful maverick who has at the very least found a frequent cure for hitherto uniformly and rapidly fatal brain cancers.

Too many documents? The well arranged document-ary lives up to its description and proves its shocking and exhilarating case with documents more than personal interviews, it is true, and leaves out “balance” ie the standard defensive sources at the NCI and elsewhere. But this is either because those who stood up for him in the past wouldn’t talk any more (Petronas) or because Merola was discreetly avoiding the kind of vicious counterattack suffered by its hero by not alerting the vast and powerful opposition before his film could be released.

For “Burzynski” tells the tale of one of the most distinguished and successful pioneers of alternative medicine in cancer treatment, Stanislaw Burzynski MD PhD, his clinic, and the trials and tribulations faced by this sturdy optimist in fighting the vindictive, reflex hostility of FDA officials, self serving “quackbusters” paid by the insurance companies and other mindless servants of the status quo for over three decades.

Burzynski’s bright idea

The Polish born, West Houston based Burzynski had a bright idea early in his career, when he noticed that certain harmless peptides are seen in the blood and urine of cancer patients at less than normal levels, and wondered whether they might be involved in the body’s natural defenses against cancer.

The result, as covered in his over 200 articles in predominantly peer reviewed journals, is that he has been treating cancer in patients since 1977 with a novel protocol based on boosting these constituents (now about twenty varieties of small peptides and amino acid derivatives, synthesized since the early eighties and called antineoplastons by Burzynski) with signal success, judging from his carefully kept records, voluminous publications on his lab work which shows they interfere with cancer cells, and the fervent testimony of his patients cured of different tumors, and their families.

As the film spends its first half hour demonstrating, his results are promising enough to deserve the opposite of the political and legal attacks that have dogged him every step of the way to the Phase III trials now finally in view. The egregious assaults on his work (and it seems clear, the lives of his patients) have included confiscation of his entire records for 14 years, costly prosecutions by local authorities with a view to jailing him for several lifetimes, luckily all in vain, and a blatant attempt on the part of NCI staff (including a woman who earlier served as his consultant) to rob him of his patents by supplanting them with their own.

Fair and lovely, and not dead

The grand claim made at the start, that this MD, PhD physician and biochemist has “discovered the genetic mechanism that can cure most cancers,” may be over reaching, but one thing is certain: Burzynski’s potions serve notoriously deadly and untreatable brain tumor patients better than the standard expensive and medieval regime of radiation, surgery and chemotherapy with its horrendous side effects which do little except delay death by a few months, if that. The horrors visited upon children with brain tumors without hope of real benefit by the orthodox priesthood in cancer are vividly described by parents who turned to Burzynski in the hope, quite often realized, that he could do better with his non toxic remedies.

Some of the examples of his success are startling, with those diagnosed with fatal disease but lucky enough to come under the kind doctor’s care telling of their escape from the tortures of the damned years later, having won total remission and now flourishing in youth and beauty. When the current image of one condemned boy, now a handsome 18 year old, reached the screen the audience at the crowded penultimate showing at the Cinema Village burst out in applause.

The humorous twinkle in the stoic Burzynski’s eyes as he recounts the irrational but costly attacks of his enemies must reflect his utter certainty that he is on the right track, a confidence presumably bolstered when the official at NCI in charge of Phase II trials of his discovery, who went to the FDA (Michael Friedman), together with a consultant Burzynski once hired (Dvorit Samid) and a drug company which had offered to partner him (Elan Pharmaceuticals), paid him the compliment of trying to supplant his patents. Dvorit Samid was a believer in the promise of Burzynski’s method, but was banned by the NCI from mentioning Burzynski in her publications on the breakthrough, even as a reference.

An approach which makes sense

However unorthodox it may sound to the naive (and extracting useful products from urine is not as unusual as Ella Taylor the Voice reviewer seems to think – women all over have taken Premarin, an extract from horse urine, for years, for relief from symptoms of menopause) his protocol is officially recognized as promising both in these NCI patent applications and in the establishment of FDA approved Phase II and now soon (when the requisite millions are raised) Phase III trials.

The principle is prima facie sensible and the proposed mechanism makes sense, and the results seem now well established. According to his careful records of FDA licensed patient treatment and outcome, it typically results in permanent remission in about a quarter of his cases compared with zero remission for orthodox treatment, if separate studies on the outcome of each approach are compared. The urgent public need, clearly, is for Phase III trials to be done as soon as possible.

Exactly how his urine extracts (can you say “antineoplastons”? its last syllable should be short, though in the film it is emphasized in the French manner) work their wonders is not fully detailed, but is generally supposed to be action against cancer gene expression. What is made crystal clear is the mechanism by which progress in medical science is stultified. Unless you have the ideal lawyer as Burzynski does in Richard Jaffe, who has a degree from Stanford in the Philosophy of Science, and whose Congressional testimony is featured on camera, you will be shot down by the FDA and put out of business.

If you are outside the great institutions it is almost impossible anyway to get the entrenched old guard to look open mindedly at your novelty in medicine, however good your results. In fact, they will naturally treat it as a threat to their present style of life, and counter attack (the HIV/AIDS establishment is a perfect example of this attitude, even though after 25 years there is no mechanism for the reigning and unproven claim). The FDA acts as the palace guard keeping newcomers outside, the media act as their barking dogs, and all the while Big Pharma bankrolls the status quo.

Dining on the public grave

In carefully exploring how Burzynski himself is mistreated, the well developed expose takes the lid off what is nothing more than a disgusting can of political and mercenary worms dining off the corpse of the public interest in cancer.

All the major elements of what is wrong with modern medicine are present – the overwhelming official prejudice against novelty from outside the system, the distrust of independent unorthodox practitioners and the heartfelt testimony of their patients, the devotion of power to the defense of current treatment even though it achieves little and imposes its own horrendous torment on patients, and the immense influence of pharma on regulating officials who tend to end up with jobs in industry after they serve in government.

Such complaints have been widespread for many years but this film’s account is exceptional in its clear exposition of just how unjustified and automated are the official attacks on independents such as Burzynski. He is five times taken before grand juries even though they not only refuse to indict but jury members join in demonstrating with protesters in subsequent cases.

Abuse of power

The Texas authorities go after him at the bidding of the national office of FDA even though no law forbids his treatments locally (until 1995, when they changed the law), and eventually after losses in court the FDA begins to approve his work. Even so, his records remain confiscated for twelve years, preventing him from easily treating patients without laboriously Xeroxing his own records at the offices where they are held, which on the basis of past experience costs some patients their lives. A useless NCI trial conducted by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center uses its own protocol, diluting the medication 170 times and evidently costing the nine patients their lives, according to Burzynski’s ignored protests. And why did it use patients who were so far advanced in their deterioration, that Burzinski’s medicine was unlikely to do much good? Was the renowned Mayo Clinic trying to sabotage his work?

All along the legal complaints do not suggest that his treatments are anything but harmless and beneficial (”the efficacy of antineoplastons in the treatment of human cancers is not of issue in these proceedings” – Texas State Board of Medical Examiners). In fact, by 1995 it is quite apparent and acknowledged by an expert at the Cleveland Clinic in the movie and other other establishment reviewers that the Burzynski treatment is both safe and evidently often stunningly beneficial, and will produce complete remissions in many more patients if they are not irradiated and drugged under the standard regimen beforehand, a regimen whose awful effects in at least one case produce a death even after Burzynski had erased the tumor completely.

Trail of stunning documents

A documentary maker cannot shoot film inside the minds of the actors in his drama, of course, but New York filmmaker Eric Merola powerfully suggests that money is at the root of all this evil as he takes filmgoers on a tour of the documents that expose all these horrid truths , bolstered with interviews mainly with Burzynski and Julian Whitaker MD, of the Whitaker Wellness Institute in Newport Beach, California. Nicholas Patronas MD who was chief of neuroradiology at the NCI is featured not on camera but in Congressional testimony being highly supportive, as well as in a report on Burzynski’s cases.

Only the most cynical will find the journey dull. It is high drama, with lives at stake. Merola uses an effective technique to clarify and dramatize written material which is usually safely fenced off from prying public eyes by medical and official jargon. He reads judiciously selected phrases out loud as the camera jumps from one to the next, leaving out the obfuscating Latin, but ensuring the audience gets it from the horse’s mouth, not from a voiceover summary.

The real criminality

The bottom line is that the film portrays an endemic vice of the current medical culture, the unthinking, lethal prejudice against potential cures which are Not Invented Here which motivates attempts to kill the messenger at the same time as appropriating the gifts he bears. Burzynski seems a sterling character who can see the absurdity of the criminally irresponsible tactics of his opponents even as he points out that his own experience indicates they are costing patients their lives.

But for public servants to admit on the one hand that his ministrations are effective against deadly cancers immune to current regimens, and on the other try to railroad him into jail and take him out as a leading competitor in the medical Olympics of curing cancer, as the film documents, is self evidently crooked.

At least one lawyer is telling the filmmaker that the miscreants in his case deserve jail, and has offered to put them there (see James van Maanen’s excellent review and interview at TrustMovies: Seek out BURZYNSKI (maybe its doctor, too) in Eric Merola’s new documentary; Interview with the filmmaker

In summary, no one who is touched by cancer should fail to look into Burzynski for themselves, and obtain the DVD immediately from Eric Merola’s movie website, Burzynski the movie, which also features upcoming showings, such as the ones in Asbury Park, New Jersey, June 23-26, where Merola will appear for a post film panel discussion and a current breast cancer patient of Burzynski’s.

Best good news in cancer for years

For the first time for many people, they will see that alternative medicine has been offering better treatments for cancer as in other diseases for thirty years, unremarked in the media except for special mention usually accompanied by disparagement, and enthusiastically repressed by the saviors of the status quo. In this case, however, Burzynski and his workers have overcome the counter army and achieved buildings that cover two city blocks, FDA permission to proceed with Phase III trials, and a growing population of sick made well from the deadliest of tumors.

Let’s hope that this thorough expose of both the bad news and the best good news in cancer in years is on its way to an Oscar, since its story should be disseminated as widely as possible.