Edumystification

Nothing you know is necessarily so.

The story so far: I’ve re-launched this Substack after a contretemps at the Jobcentre, the upshot of which is an agreement that I may count the hours invested in developing it against the 35 per week I am obliged to spend seeking gainful employment.

I am writing articles, publishing them on this platform and promoting them so that I may build an audience of readers, some of whom may come to value my writing sufficiently to pay for it, thereby enabling me to sign off Universal Credit after all these years and raise a hearty cheer in the bowels of the DWP.

Thanks in advance, reader, for sustaining the lifestyle to which I aspire. However, I should make a few things clear from the outset. Without wishing to alienate any portion of my prospective subscriber base, I hereby declare that: I don't believe in man made global warming; I despise the pharmaceutical industry and fervently believe that cannabis should be legal; and 9/11 was an inside job.

Launching into 2025, a transformational year in which this Substack column is bound to become my material salvation, I intend to post, as the astrology permits, tightly-written pieces of around 3,500-5,000 words, with judiciously chosen hyperlinks.

The plan is to build an audience, obvs, before asking readers to take up paid subscriptions. But if you're all in on AGW, vaXXed, and never heard of Building 7, it's prolly not for you.

Mass Formation is a term used by Mattias Desmet, a professor of psychology at the University of Ghent, who became the first academic in Belgium to speak out publicly against the absurdities of COVID-19. He was seated next to David Martin when he delivered his devastating critique of Big Pharma & the WHO to the European Parliament.

You'll remember COVID, try as you might to forget: the counter-productive masks; the arbitrary distancing; the increasingly stern lock down restrictions. Most of all, the pressure to get oneself injected with an unproven concoction that's not really a vaccine.

VaXX My Bitch Up became my unbidden ear worm, to the tune of The Prodigy. My outrage that people were dutifully queuing to be vaXXed like lambs to the slaughter led me to post on Substack for the first time three years ago. Now those pigeons are coming home to roost and in light of accumulating clinical evidence of the damage done by the mHRA vaXXes, no doubt that is a subject to which I shall return.

While Mattias Desmet was working toward his PhD, the so-called ‘replication crisis' blew up, which revealed that the findings of a huge proportion of published academic papers cannot be reproduced, meaning that they are worthless from a scientific point of view. Most research, in psychology for instance, but also in medical sciences and in the social sciences such as economics, could never lead to reliable results. This prompted Desmett, "to be fascinated by that question, how it was possible that highly intelligent people could buy into all kinds of research methods, research narratives which were utterly absurd?"

Which brings me to Anthropogenic - the posh word for 'made-made' - Global Warming. AGW is a theory that has been thoroughly discredited over time as its prognostications have consistently failed to eventuate, to the extent that the only people who continue to believe in it are those with a vested interest and those who have have abdicated their intellectual authority on this topic to perceived experts, who have a vested interest.

Unfortunately, that includes most people. At any rate, it's most people who went to school and, as Mattias Desmet discovered, the more school they went to, the more susceptible they became.

It is rational of educated folks to appreciate that climate science is complicated and best left to the experts, who have spent a life time learning all about their specialist subject. However, one does not become qualified by contradicting one's teachers. Au contraire, one passes exams by regurgitating the information delivered unto one by the duly licensed examining authority. The way one builds a reputation as a scientist is by publishing 'peer reviewed' papers in academic journals. In Climatology, the 'peers' are a cabal numbering about forty proponents of AGW.

Peer Review Capture is well-explained by Mark Steyn in this piece from five years ago, marking the tenth anniversary of what Steyn's fellow sceptic and admirer, James Delingpole called, 'Climategate'. The article refers to long-running legals with Michael Mann, a climatologist who is notorious for waging lawfare to defend his reputation. It remains relevant because those proceedings came to an ugly head in a Washington courtroom last year when, in a shocking travesty of justice, Steyn was ordered to pay Mann a million bucks!

In calling him out over his fraudulent climate-change 'hockey-stick' graph, Steyn wittily called Mann, 'the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus'. This was almost as punny as when Tim Ball, a retired geography professor turned climate sceptic, quipped that Michael Mann, of Pennsylvania State University, "should be in the state pen, not Penn State". Mann responded by suing Ball, darkening his retirement for eight years until a Canadian judge dismissed the case in 2019, three years before Tim Ball died. Mark Steyn, whose health has not been good, was not so fortunate, but he's not dead yet and has recently scored A Small Victory as the legal battle carries on.

Peer review capture within Climatology has given rise to a situation that, as Thomas Khun explained sixty years ago in his masterwork, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), is antithetical to how science progresses, which is never by consensus, but only iconoclasm. A research scientist must be prepared to kick over the statues, think outside of the box and rigorously interrogate anomalies in the data, wherever they may lead.

Climatology is a young science that draws upon various disciplines. Michael Mann, is a mathematician who became known for his 'hockey stock' graph that played a starring role in Al Gore's notorious film, An Inconvenient Truth. You may recall the temperature graph showed a long slow decline over centuries, the shaft of the hockey stick, until the industrial revolution, which caused an uptick so large that, theatrically, Gore had to mount a cherry picker to reach up to it. However, the planet had not been constantly cooling. There was a Medieval Warm Period that Mann had eradicated by manipulating the data in a clever mathematical trick.

I recall seeing, An Inconvenient Truth at the cinema in 2006 and not being entirely convinced by it, chiefly because it was presented by a palpably insincere American politician. By the time of Climategate in 2009-10, I was well sceptical. Pushing fifty, I'd seen a lot of dire predictions about the climate fail to come true. I had also undergone a mid life re-education and still occasionally worked as a labourer for an eccentric, Jack-of-all-trades builder. What can I tell you, some gurus assume unlikely guises. I recall a conversation with my guru about Climategate: "It's all bollocks", he summarised succinctly.

Climatology is all a load of gowns and mortar boards and research grants and international conferences, my guru told me. But, if you ask one of those clever dicks to explain how a minor increase of one hundred parts per million in a trace gas breaks the climate - especially when that supposedly dangerous gas happens to be the one that plants need to grow and to sustain life on Earth - they can't tell you. They cannot explain, that is, without referring to their models. He spat out the word, "models", with particular disdain for reasons that became a lot clearer years later, during the COVID crisis.

I've tested this hypothesis repeatedly and found it to be true enough. The CMIP models are deficient, but it all comes back to the data. I've argued with people who fiercely defend the integrity of their mates who work with numbers. There may be nothing wrong with their maths, but they don't collect their own data. It is routinely supplied via the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, ground zero of Climategate. Phil Jones, the now-retired head of the CRU, devised a dataset of ground temperatures to replace the satellite data collated by UAH, the University of Alabama at Huntsville, which inconveniently showed that global warming peaked in 1998.

Why the globe stopped warming in 1998, like most things on Earth, will eventually be understood as being determined by solar cycles. Atmospheric CO2 has continued to increase since the world stopped warming because that phenomenon is the consequence of increased temperatures, not its cause. This is a good thing because the more CO2 there is in our atmosphere, the greener our planet grows. It's good news for everybody whose professional reputation, income and lifestyle doesn't depend upon AGW being real.

As Mattias Demett emphasised, there is a profound difference between intelligence and education. We tend to assume the most highly qualified people to be most intelligent, but such is not necessarily so. Maybe they are just cunning? Pondering the big question of how we came to be, an uneducated person, who cannot imagine that an invisible gas can be refractive, might wonder how evolution, or The Creator, devised such a fragile system? "It doesn't make any sense", as my guru was given to expostulate.

A decade after the globe stopped warming, it could no longer be ignored that the satellite data did not support the AGW theory, which was hugely inconvenient for the likes of Al Gore, for whom carbon offset trading presented a lucrative business opportunity. Sooner than ditch the theory in the manner prescribed by Thomas Khun - who is credited with coining the tern, 'paradigm shift' - better data was found in the form of ground temperatures taken from a network of weather stations.

The problem with this dataset is that it's frequently distorted by urban heat islands. Piers Corbyn, Jeremy's eccentric older brother, is a prominent critic of AGW. An astrophysicist who makes his living as a long range weather forecaster using a technique that involves comparing current solar activity with historical records, Piers accuses his opponents of cherry-picking their data. Recently, the Daily Sceptic reported another scandal in which the Met Office was caught actually making it up.

The development of climatology is linked to aviation and, typically, weather stations were established at airfields when they were literally fields where propeller-driven aeroplanes took off and landed. Now, they are busy airports covered in concrete with jet engines constantly roaring. Hence the hottest temperature recorded in the UK was 40.3°C at Coningsby, Lincolnshire on 28.07.22.

You may notice that, amid its talk of 'a rigorous process of analysis and quality control' the Met Office press release fails to mention that Royal Air Force Conningsby is a Main Operating Base of the RAF and home to three Eurofighter squadrons. Typhoon jet planes had likely been running their engines, manoeuvring on the tarmac only yards way from where the record-breaking air temperature was recorded on a hot day in late July.

Phil Jones and Mike Mann, the two culprits at the heart of Climategate, were also the only two climatologists to appear on a BBC documentary ten years later, 'Climategate: Science of a Scandal', which told the tale exclusively from their point of view. This is acceptable according to guidelines on how to report climate change issued by the BBC’s director of news and current affairs in September 2018 following a protracted campaign against a perceived 'false balance' in the way the BBC had represented the issue.

Anticipating the Climate Emergency that was declared in the British Parliament the following May - ironically introduced by Piers Corbyn's naive kid brother, under the influence of Greta Thunberg - the BBC decreed that its duty of impartiality no longer extended to the climate issue, which it believes to be ‘settled science’. Current affairs programme producers were no longer required to wheel out some right wing naysayer to cast aspersions and encourage complacency as the finale to a piece about the looming climate catastrophe

We’re at solar max until late Summer.

Climategate proved to be a game-changer. It had a truly seminal effect on the emerging alternative media. James Corbett, my favourite conspiracy theorist, got started with a site called, 'Climategate TV'. He talks about how, having awoken to the climate scam, he gibbered about it for weeks. I had a similar, delayed reaction to Climategate, over a year later, after I had been through a major initiation and had time for contemplation, when the enormity of what's now referred to on TwitteX as #ClimateScam sank in.

The idea that human activity has broken the climate and we're all going to go to burn in hell unless we change our evil ways is objectively nonsensical, but it’s taken as a gospel truth that dictates governmental policy, globally. I use the tern, 'gospel' advisedly. AGW has its priesthood, the Climatologists, who are governed by a synod, the IPCC, which issues theological edicts in the form of Reports. Heretical climate scientists like Judith Curry are excommunicated.

AGW is predicated upon a belief in a form of original sin, that mankind is vile and has violated mother nature. He has ignorantly defiled his environment for the fleeting pleasure of sensory gratification, but may be redeemed by self-denial if only he would cease guzzling.

The analogy with religion may have become hackneyed, but it remains apposite. Never more so then when one witnesses acts of supplication such as when two puritanical women with short grey hair, wire-framed specs and Just Stop Oil t.shirts vandalised the grave of the secular saint, Charles Darwin, in Westminster Abbey. Plus, I am amused by it. I relish the time when I explained it to a believer and he said, irritably, "very clever, but what you call our theology is real".

I found out how this state of affairs has arisen; about Maurice Strong and the Rio Climate Conference and the Club of Rome. With David Icke's guidance - this Substack will have more to say about Icke - I developed a working understanding of how this bogus issue is being used to advance an agenda of global control. But I've not brought anyone along with me. I don't think I have ever persuaded anyone that AGW is not real, although I've noticed a couple of acquaintances change their stance without my input. Clearly, one cannot change another's mind for them.

I used to recommend interested parties watch a SuspiciousObservers video called something like, 'Top Six Problems With Climate Science' but when I searched for it on YouTube, the top result was by a beardy geezer, Professor Dave, denouncing Suspicious0bservers as a ‘Pseudoscientific Doomsday Cult'. Ben Davidson is an autodidact - his degree is in Law - who was alerted by Climategate and became an expert on heliocentric theories of climatology, which he explains in The Weatherman's Guide to the Sun.

It's true that Ben has moved on from Space Weather to Catastrophism. Since coming out from behind the camera, he looks increasingly like a wild-eyed prepper. In the extended remix of his Climate Science Destroyed in Eight Minutes video, addressed to Michael Mann, Ben comes over as confrontational.

As this Substack gathers steam, I shall return to Ben Davidson's notion of the Catastrophe Cycle: just because the globe isn't really warming doesn't mean we aren't doomed! In fact, if AGW were real and all we had to do to save the planet is de-industrialise, like in La Belle Verte, life could be sweet.

Another good place to start questioning what you’ve been taught about AGW might be with James Corbett's 2015 classic, Climate Change is Unfalsifiable Woo-Woo Pseudoscience, a proposition with which Potholer54 - Peter Hadfield, whose YouTube channel aims to 'correct false scientific information on the internet' - profoundly disagees.

In choosing which side is touting pseudoscience, I recommend this interview with István Markó that was published posthumously in 2017. A chemistry professor who was an outspoken critic of what he called the religion of Climatism, speaking out at the 'Counter-COP21' climate summit in Paris in late 2015, Markó died unexpectedly in July 2017 of complications arising from routine surgery. I do not suggest a connection.

Markó blamed his fellow chemist, Margaret Thatcher, for having politicised the issue of climate change, weaponising toxic industrial emissions in her fight against the National Union of Mineworkers. Having lost their epic confrontation with the government forty years ago, mining practically ceased in the UK with huge reserves of coal still left in the ground.

As István Markó pointed out, burning coal doesn't just release CO2; it is an undeniably dirty fuel that blackened our Victorian cities. However, with modern industrial chimneys that capture all those noxious emissions, coal-fired power stations need not pollute the environment at all. In fact, as Piers Corbyn argues, coal is the greenest option to fuel British power stations because we've got loads of it, right under our feet. Instead, Drax in North Yorks - the last coal-fired power station to be opened in England, in 1986 - now burns wood pellets expensively imported from North America.

The story may be apocryphal, but when Thatcher was asked what she considered her greatest political achievement, she declared it to be Tony Blair. Not that she created the New Labour leader in a laboratory - although that is not beyond the bounds of credulity -but that she had shifted the Overton Window so far to the right that Bliar needed to renew Labour, dispensing with Socialism, in order to be elected. Tory B. Liar took power in 1997 with the slogan, 'Education, education, education'. He proceeded to debase tertiary education and charge tuition fees, so graduates now leave college with useless degrees and a big pile of debt to keep 'em docile.

Roger Hallam, the founder of Extinction Rebellion, may be the ultimate example of a mass formation leading its most hardcore adherents to take extreme measures. A political idealist, educated far beyond his intelligence, Roger was doing a PhD in Dissent at King's College, where he worked out a formula for revolution, to be tested out by XR, whose co-founder, Gail Bradbrook, has a PhD in molecular biophysics and believes that we are on the eve of destruction. Roger is like Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet of doom. Indeed, he is a martyr, metaphorically, having been banged up at His Majesty's pleasure for bringing the M25 to a standstill in November 2022.

XR arose out of burnt out activists' frustration and growing alarm at what they believe is a rapidly-escalating environmental calamity. After decades on the front line, Roger Hallam believed that small scale, single issue campaigns, even when effective, had a negligible effect on the Big Beast of Capitalism. But, after a couple of years in King's College library, he came up with a crafty plan to decapitate the snake!

His grandiosity is my biggest problem with Mr Hallam, who has diverted activists' energy into futile and counter-productive campaigns, which led to a legal clampdown. Ironically, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022 is the law under which Hallam rogered himself. Conducting his own defence, he introduced himself to the jury as "the most influential environmentalist in the country, apart from Sir David Attenborough". He proceeded to lecture them for three hours on his interpretation of the law - as opposed to the Judge's - citing inadmissible evidence that had been ruled irrelevant to the case. It was a bravura performance that won him a five year sentence for conspiring to cause a public nuisance, the heaviest penalty ever meted out in the UK for non-violent protest.

In my opinion, Roger Hallam is wrong, not just about AGW, but about the power of principled action when focused upon achievable objectives that have popular support: hold water companies to account; combat environmental pollution; re-nationalise the railways. Don't throw tomato soup over famous paintings, because that just pisses people off.

Like Frakenstein, Roger Hallam could not control the monster he created. In political circles, you're never too far from a Zionist and they are very touchy around the issue of genocide, which Roger said in an interview with the German press in November 2019 is "like a regular event". He downplayed the Nazi Holocaust as, "just another fuckery in human history", comparing it to the atrocities committed by Belgians in the Congo in the late 19th century. His remarks seemed totally fair enough at the time and now - in the wake of the live-streamed genocide in Gaza - inarguable. But they got him dismissed from XR and made him move on to do Just Stop Oil, which is the same cult wearing a different t.shirt (cool graphics, BTW).

A belief in one mass formation may lead one more easily to succumb to another. Like AGW, the manufactured COVID crisis was predicated upon false data fed into dodgy models given spurious weight by expert advisors and inept politicians, amplified by uncritical mainstream media. 'Believe the science' became the unscientific mantra. Question the efficacy of arbitrary quarantine measures and one was denounced as socially irresponsible.

Selfish idiots such as myself conformed with the 'new normal' only to spare friends and neighbours from getting their knickers in more of a twist. Regular readers (hello!) may recall my old mate who lives in a council flat in the clouds where he reads The Guardian and has Radio 4 constantly on in the background. The COVID kerfuffle persuaded me finally to visit the whammer jammer, once it was allowed. At his front door, he expressed alarm that I wore no surgical mask, but nonetheless welcomed me over his threshold, saying he had one I could use. He had a box of 'em.

Being British, we renewed our acquaintance over cups of tea. I pulled the mask below my chin to sip and replaced it to speak. As I have only one hand, you may imagine the physical comedy of the situation. The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 had just passed and I mentioned an exchange I'd had with a close relative who had never heard of Building 7.

"Neither have I", he said. "What on earth are you talking about?"

"Three buildings collapsed on 9/11", I told him. "The two towers, plus building number seven in the World Trade Center complex, which wasn't hit by an aeroplane but anyway collapsed neatly into its own footprint as if it had been professionally demolished."

My friend snorted, derisively. "So why have I never heard of it?" he scoffed.

"Because it was ignored by the official report of the 9-11 Commission and a big fuss had to be made to get them to acknowledge it", I said, wearily.

"Is this something you've read on the internet?" asked my old-fashioned, media literate friend.

Well, actually no. It was something I witnessed in real time, as it happened, from Devonport in New Zealand, where I watched the BBC TV World News announce that the Salomon Bros. building had collapsed and then cut to a reporter standing in front of it. I recognised Building 7 because my checkered past includes a spell as a Noo Yawk bike messenger - 'GoodRush634' - and I delivered to an office in that building. So I witnessed a glitch in the matrix right there.

It is glaringly obvious that we have been lied to about what happened on 9/11, but it's not much discussed in the pages of The Guardian, or on Radio 4, except with a sneer against conspiracy theorists. Still, Architects & Engineers For 9/11 Truth know the official conspiracy theory is as flimsy as a matchstick model.

"You need to get out more", advised my friend, who, need I say, is vaXXED to the max. His brow was creased with concern for my mental health. "Get a grip", he gently suggested.