Evidence and Interpretation

The virtues and failings of science and scholarship

Long ago, I wrote an essay on orthodoxy versus alternatives and the layman’s quandary.  Science is a systematic investigation of our reality.  Scientists pursue how the universe works.  The scientific method is considered part of the scholarly method.  The historical method is another subcategory.  Scholars outside of the physical and biological sciences pursue similar questions, but usually more about human affairs, on what happened and why.  Those disciplines have ideals and best practices. 

Those disciplines also have inherent limitations, which circumscribe what they can confidently investigate and assert.  While the triumphs of science are in great measure responsible for our industrialized societies, as I have often written, in a world of scarcity and fear, everything eventually gets corrupted.  Conflicts of interest comprise the greatest corrupting influence of science and scholarship, and I provided some examples. 

I recently wrote about an anti-fluoridation victory in the courtroom, and about worthless medical interventions in general.  I just spent a few hours surfing around the Internet, reading fluoridation articles.  Here is one by a professor and historian of medicine.  There is not one word about the flagrant conflicts of interest that all of the big names of fluoridation had.  I wrote about the case that resulted in the compulsory fluoridation of Ireland, and I just read a retrospective from 50 years later, which showed how rigged the trial was. 

Time and again in my fluoridation studies, Harold Hodge was the chief villain.  Hodge led plutonium experiments on unwitting people that calls to mind the death-camp Nazis.  At the university where those experiments happened, there is not one word about them in this hagiography of Hodge and his crew.  Phyllis Mullenix became a casualty when her research showed that fluoride damaged rat brains.  Here is an interview right after her career was ruined.  Democracy Now! gets some credit as a lefty show that interviewed Christopher Bryson when he published his masterpiece.  The American mainstream media has never fairly dealt with these issues, and neither has the USA’s health establishment, which is riddled with conflicts of interest at all levels.  But they are in very good company.

I am the only accountant on Earth that I know of that has called out the fatal conflict interest in the financial auditing field, which rendered my former profession worthless.  The only other time that I ever saw it called out was by Ed Herman, who specialized in corporate conflicts of interest in his career, and his Propaganda Model of how the media works is a conflict-of-interest model.  When there are such conflicts of interest, the output of such scientists and scholars is worthless, as are analyses that ignore such conflicts. 

Science ideally has theories and evidence to test them.  That is the essence of science, at least in theory, and scholarship is supposed to be similar.  Evidence and interpretation ideally are unrelated, but those providing the evidence are often the interpreters.  Ideally, there should be a division of labor in the scientific and scholarly pursuits.  An example of the difference between them and how that distinction is violated is this commentary on the chapter of Gary Wean’s book that deals with the JFK assassination.  Gary’s testimony of the John Tower conversation and his encounters with Jack Ruby are evidence, not interpretation.  Gary was a policeman and investigator, so he tried his hand at solving the crime, but that is an act of interpretation.  The author of those negative comments on Gary’s chapter conflated Gary’s testimony with Gary’s interpretation, to decide that the combination was unworkable, so he discarded Gary’s testimony.  That is irrational, to put it kindly, and is not what scientists and scholars ideally do.

As I have written, the ideal of science has never been achieved, just like the ideals of democracy, a free press, free markets, and an objective history have never been achieved.  These shortcomings are partly why free energy technology is older than I am but is sequestered from public awareness and use for reasons of earthly power, and the subject is a forbidden topic among scientists, politicians, “philanthropists,” the media, and society in general. 

It is important, even existential, to not get hoodwinked by such deceptions of commission and omission, but it takes hard work and keen discernment, as the lies come from every direction.