Ian Fantom — April 11, 2020

Academia is in trouble. Whether it’s the Holocaust, Climate Change, 9/11 or the current CoronaVirus pandemic, academics, like politicians, can be in trouble for merely raising questions. Now at least twenty medical experts have spoken out questioning the medical evidence behind the current pandemic. The evidence is accumulating that the martial law, which now covers half the world, is based on fake science.

Symposium on Fake Science

Five years ago a warning came from the editor of The Lancet, the main medical journal in the English-speaking world. In an editorial of 11 April, 2015, he wrote:

“A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially remain unquoted, since the forthcoming UK election meant they were living in “purdah”—a chilling state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech are placed on anyone on the government’s payroll.

He was referring to a symposium held on 1-2 April, 2015, by the The Academy of Medical Sciences, jointly with the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Wellcome Trust, under the title ‘Reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research’.

The following October they published a report on the symposium. Their introduction began:

Reproducible and reliable studies are crucial for all scientific endeavours. There has been a growing unease about the reproducibility of much biomedical research, with failures to replicate findings noted in high-profile scientific journals, as well as in the general and scientific media. Lack of reproducibility hinders scientific progress and translation, and threatens the reputation of biomedical science.

Indeed, judging by their report their primary concern seems to be their own reputation. After all, these funding bodies must surely bear a large part of the responsibility in the problem arising in the first place. Essentially, their report concentrates on what scientists should be doing in order to distinguish between good and bad science – things that I had assumed every research scientist would have already been well aware of. When I started my physics MSc research project on superfluid helium in 1968 I felt embarrassed that my tutor even felt the need to explain to me that a negative result would be as good as a positive result; what mattered was the quality of research. Yet now I read in that report, “ ‘Positive results’ that tell a story are more likely to be published than negative, null or inconclusive results (and there are relevant pressures on both journals and researchers)”. Where do those pressures come from if not from the funding authorities, such as the ones who had called the symposium? In my youth I used to say that anyone engaged in sociological research should start off by getting a degree in Physics, because there was so much wrong with virtually every report of sociological research I was hearing about through the mass media. About a decade ago I came to the idea that my assertion may actually literally be true, because the situation turned out to be so dire. This applied not only to Sociology, but in my experience, Psychology, too. In many cases one is judged on whether or not the results are approved by the howling mobs of groups like Hope not Hate, who have been systematically closing down lectures and other meetings, including some of my own group, Keep Talking, which brings together people who have a wide range of experiences, irrespective of their political or religious affiliations.

They did, however, bring in comments by a particle physicist at the symposium, who talked about the significance levels in his field of research. “The significance thresholds and confidence intervals used in biomedical sciences are substantially less stringent than those used in particle physics research.”, the report commented.

They are dismissive of the idea that misconduct could be a significant factor. “Authors who discover honest mistakes in their work and move to correct them should not suffer reputational damage”. That is a valid statement, but authors who knowingly fail to follow due procedure, even if they believe their results to be valid, should indeed suffer reputational damage.

It should be blatantly obvious that right at the heart of the problem must lie the pre-publication review process. An author’s credibility in the mass media and the public at large, lies to a large extent on the peer review process. A paper by a university professor in a peer-reviewed scientific journal has a lot more credence than just an article in some science magazine. So why are so many bad science papers getting through the peer review process? Yet this 80-page report dedicates just one paragraph to the issue of pre-publication peer review:

The conventional form of peer review, where manuscripts are sent out to expert reviewers for their views on the experimental results and validity of the conclusions before publication, was discussed in a break-out group. Those involved felt that tools such as proformas and checklists could help improve the quality of reviews. The system might be improved through careful training and guidance for editors and reviewers to ensure that they are properly enacting the policies of the associated funding bodies and journals. Specialist categories of peer reviewers would be helpful for identifying whether all the relevant aspects of a study have been appropriately reviewed (for example statistics, methodologies, and so on)”.

That’s all – and the contribution is attributed to a mere ‘break-out’ group. “In academia, published methods do not always provide enough detail for replication. Tools do exist that allow computational analyses to be stored and shared, but these are not standardised across different fields”, the report states. So why don’t the reviewers reject such papers?

Political Medicine

The Wall Street Journal at the beginning of April 2020 published an article ‘Coronavirus Lessons From the Asteroid That Didn’t Hit Earth’. It was subtitled ‘Scary projections based on faulty data can put policy makers under pressure to adopt draconian measures’. The text began:

London: The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically demonstrated the limits of scientific modeling to predict the future. The most consequential coronavirus model, produced by a team at Imperial College London, tipped the British government, which had until then pursued a cautious strategy, into precipitate action, culminating in the lockdown under which we are all currently laboring.

The article outlines the scary predictions made by this model, and contrasts that to the “much less frightening future and a speedy end to the current nightmare” arising from an alternative model from a team at Oxford University the previous week, suggesting “a much less frightening future and a speedy end to the current nightmare”. “How should the government know who is right?”, the article asks.

“Several researchers have apparently asked to see Imperial’s calculations, but Prof. Neil Ferguson, the man leading the team, has said that the computer code is 13 years old and thousands of lines of it ‘undocumented,’ making it hard for anyone to work with, let alone take it apart to identify potential errors.”, the article continues. I asked him on 6 April whether he had yet published the code. I look forward to his reply.

A mathematician. Nicholas Lewis, has written a short review of the report as a blog. He states:

A study published two weeks ago by the COVID-19 Response Team from Imperial College … appears to be largely responsible for driving UK government policy actions. The study is not peer reviewed; indeed, it seems not to have been externally reviewed at all. Moreover, the computer code used to produce the estimates in the study – which on Ferguson’s own admission is old, unverified and documented inadequately, if at all – has still not been published. That, in my view, shows a worrying approach to a matter of vital public concern.

He asserts that even in the absence of computer code it should be possible to check some of the key estimates, and that since there is no evidence that anyone in government has performed such a verification exercise, he decided to do so. He concludes that until and unless the Imperial College team account for apparent discrepancies that he highlights, “all the results of their study must be treated with care, as they could potentially be significantly in error, even if the assumptions are valid”.

Another mathematician, Andrew Mather, shows that the crisis was over before lockdown in the UK began, and he explains it on video. So how could the government have taken such draconian action based on one unverified source? Andrew Mather blames the government, but, as I wrote in my article ‘The Crown’s Viral Power Grab’, this issue is “Bigger than Boris”. Both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump show signs of trying to resist the pressures for a total lockdown, but unable to do so. And as I point out in my sequel to that article, ‘Colonial Pandemonium’, you won’t get very far in British politics unless you’re a lyer, because the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a Crown colony, and the Prime Minister is primarily responsible not to the House of Commons, but to ‘The Crown’, meaning the City of London.

A review of the Imperial College report by the New England Complex Systems Institute draws attention to some epidemialogical factors that the model ignores, and concludes: “While the efforts to model social response are important, leaving out critical aspects of the response yields incorrect answers”.

On the other hand, the Oxford University team’s report specifically stated that it had not been peer reviewed, and they state explicitly in their report: “Disclaimer: (a) This material is not final and is subject to be updated any time. (b) Code used will be made available as soon as possible”. Perhaps if such caveats had been included in the Imperial College research, we would not now all be in lock-down. In ‘Colonial Pandemonium’ I quoted one of the authors of that report, Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, as saying, “I’m surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial [College] model”. I find that interesting in view of the fact that the Chairman of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group is also at Oxford University, where he is Professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases and Global Health, and Director of the Epidemic diseases Research Group.

I see that The Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London is a key partner in the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium, together with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and ‘Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance’. The latter two organisations are labelled as ‘Funders’. When the Consortium was set up in November 2016 they allocated funding to Imperial College. I’m not sure whether that funding was just for the Secretariat, or whether it extended to the research team, but since three members of the research team are also part of the Secretariat, including their leader, Professor Ferguson, this sounds to me a bit like revolving doors, especially considering the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s involvement in other aspects of the CoronaVirus crisis, as I described in ‘Colonial Pandemonium’.

Amongst the attendees of the 2015 symposium was Professor John Ioannidis, who was one of those raising questions about the need for the current lockdown. I see that he had already published a paper in 2005 titled ‘Why most published research findings are false’, which is described in the symposium report as “a seminal paper”. Indeed, according to a 2010 article in The Atlantic, this PLoS Medicine paper is the most downloaded in the journal’s history. This article provides a more readable account of Professor Ioannidis work than the original paper. They explain: “In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time. Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right”.

Although this article attracted attention in the medical field, I see very little in the mainstream media. According to The Atlantic article, he is concerned that “while his fellow researchers seem to be getting the message, he hasn’t necessarily forced anyone to do a better job. He fears he won’t in the end have done much to improve anyone’s health. ‘There may not be fierce objections to what I’m saying,’ he explains. ‘But it’s difficult to change the way that everyday doctors, patients, and healthy people think and behave.’ ”.

Political Physics

Perhaps even more worrying is a statement in The Atlantic that medical research is not especially plagued with wrongness. “Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics …”, they say. I find the case of physics especially worrying, not only because that degrades the value of my degrees, but also because I cannot understand why anyone would want to study physics if they are not driven by an insatiable curiosity on how the universe actually works. The authors of the Wall Street Journal article are Benny Peiser and Andrew Montford, director and deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Forum. “There is growing concern about the integrity of climate scientists and the maltreatment of sceptical researchers. The Forum will be campaigning for more balanced and more transparent assessments of climate science and policy research”, their mission statement says. They also say:

Climate alarmism suffers from a manifest lack of scientific scrutiny. Instead of carefully assessing the quality and reliability of climate data, many climate scientists cherry-pick numbers and interpretations that seem to confirm their alarmist conviction. Reliable and trustworthy science requires a sober and detached consideration of all relevant evidence.

This sounds much like the situation in the field of medicine. Indeed, when Nick Kollerstrom showed a graph of the rise in numbers of CoronaVirus cases at our Keep Talking meeting of 5 March, my immediate comment was that it looks like the ‘hockey stick’ graph on global warming. He has just produced an update, showing that for mid-January onwards all lung-related deaths were seventeen percent less than a five-year average for the same week.

Political Mechanics – and a Twitterstorm

In February this year a paper was published in the peer reviewed journal ‘Alternatives: Global, Local, Political’. It was headed ‘9/11 Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline’, and it was by David Hughes, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Lincoln in England. The abstract reads:

International Relations (IR) scholars uncritically accept the official narrative regarding the events of 9/11 and refuse to examine the massive body of evidence generated by the 9/11 truth movement. Nevertheless, as calls for a new inquiry into the events of 9/11 continue to mount, with the International 9/11 Consensus Panel and World Trade Centre Building 7 Evaluation inquiries having recently published their findings, and with a U.S. Federal Grand Jury on 9/11 having been announced, now would be an opportune moment for IR scholars to start taking the claims of 9/11 truth seriously. A survey of the 9/11 truth literature reveals that the official 9/11 narrative cannot be supported at multiple levels. Two planes did not bring down three towers in New York. There is no hard evidence that Muslims were responsible for 9/11 other than in a patsy capacity. Various U.S. government agencies appear to have had foreknowledge of the events and to have covered up evidence. Important questions regarding the hijacked planes need answering, as do questions about the complicity of the mainstream media in 9/11. IR scholars avoid looking at evidence regarding the events of 9/11 for several reasons. They may be taken in by the weaponized term, “conspiracy theory.” A taboo on questioning the ruling structures of society means that individuals do not wish to fall outside the spectrum of acceptable opinion. Entertaining the possibility that 9/11 was a false flag requires Westerners to reject fundamental assumptions that they have been socialized to accept since birth. The “War on Terror” has created a neo-McCarthyite environment in which freedom to speak out has been stifled. Yet, if IR scholars are serious about truth, the first place they need to start is 9/11 truth.

The fact is that that paper was peer reviewed, and if it is to be challenged it should be challenged on the basis of its content, and for no other reason. Yet the publication of this paper was followed by a twitterstorm of academics calling for the paper to be recalled. This was highlighted by Professor Tim Hayward, professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh, Wikipedia states:

With Piers Robinson, he is a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media.[2] In April 2018, The Times reported that the group was spreading “disinformation” favouring the line of the government of Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian Civil War and conspiracy theories promoted by Russia. Professor Hayward responded: “I do not accept that I am spreading ‘disinformation’.”

Professor Hayward heads his blog ‘Peer Review Vs Trial By Twitter’, and he describes the twitterstorm as “a storm of haughty criticism being whipped up” in response to David Hughes’s publication. He says he knows first hand what it feels like to be publicly smeared for touching on inconvenient questions, and he links to a previous blog of his, containing a copy of the Times article, in which his group was accused of “spreading pro-Assad disinformation”. Their only publication so far had expressed doubts about Novichoks. He felt impelled to speak out against what he calls “this intimidatory conduct”. I myself was drawn into researching 9/11 and related issues by similar intimidatory conduct, initially by a magazine editor, but followed up by a university professor, whom I had regarded as a friend and colleague for all my adult life. My case was in a small national association, and there was no-one to speak out for me. A 90-year-old told me, “I voted for you because you were in a minority of one, and in my experience – in the trade union movement – the one who is in a minority of one is usually right”. Since then I made it my business to support friends and colleagues who were subjected to such intimidatary conduct, whether or not I agreed with their ideas. That is how my current group, Keep Talking, came into being. One thing I learned from such experiences was to judge the importance of a cause by the conduct of the opposition more than that of the supporters.

In his blog, Tim Hayward reports on tweets coming from six academics. I thought I’d find out just who these people are.

The first intervention came from Dr Nicholas Kitchen, Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Surrey, England. Perhaps more telling is that he is Co-Director at the Centre for International Intervention. He has written on such issues as ‘Understanding American Power’, ‘Ending ‘Permanent War’, and ‘Western interventionism and the Iraq War’. He, surely, must have been following the 9/11 issue closely if he is to be able to claim expertise in his field of study, since 9/11 has a significant bearing on all of these topics. Yet in a tweet on David Hughes’s paper he revealed that he had declined to peer review the paper, and that he thought that the paper should never have gone out for peer review. I am led to wonder whether the purpose of the Centre for International Intervention is to study international intervention, or whether it is exactly as it describes itself, as being ‘for international intervention’. Why else would their co-director refuse to examine the massive body of evidence generated by the 9/11 truth movement?

The editor of Alternatives later the same day confirmed that the paper had undergone the review process, and that Nicholas Kitchen had declined to review it, adding “I assume that he read the article before suggesting an IR scholar as a reviewer”, to which Nicholas Kitchen replied that you only get the abstract to base the decision to review upon. I think the implication here is that he would need to have read the article before making such damning criticism of it. The editor summarises the article, stating: “As mentioned in the article, while terrorism has generated massive amounts of literature, the dominant 9/11 narrative has remained largely unquestioned in the IR discipline. The article sheds light into why academics have remained silent towards the dominant narrative, citing the possibility of being branded as conspiracy theorists, the power of taboo, and the suppression of academic freedom as reasons”. I think Dr Kitchen has confirmed those points.

Two days later came a tweet from Professor Brendan Nyhan saying “Everyone involved should be ashamed that this was printed in a peer-reviewed journal (a good reminder that peer review alone is no panacea)”. I find that Brendan Nyhan is a professor of Government at Dartmouth College, which according to Wikipedia is the smallest university in the Ivy League, ostensibly founded as a school to educate Native Americans in Christian theology and the English way of life.

He describes his work as focusing on “misperceptions about politics and health care”. In 2019, at the University of Michegan, he was awarded a Belfer Fellowship by the Anti-Defamation League for a project which would focus on whether YouTube algorithms are contributing to radicalisation of viewers. The Belfer Fellowship program advances ADL’s work by promoting cyberhate awareness and digital citizenship, as well as implementing these projects for the wider social good”, the ADL say. This sounds to me a bit like Hope not Hate. He was a founder and editor of Spinsanity, which he describes as “a non-partisan watchdog of political spin”, and which declares itself as “Countering Rhetoric with Reason”.

He also contributed to a book ‘All the President‘s Spin: George W. Bush, the Media and the Truth’, which Spinsanity says “unmasks the tactics of deception and media manipulation that George W. Bush has used to sell his agenda to the American people. “From his campaigns for tax cuts to the debate over war in Iraq, President Bush has employed an unprecedented onslaught of half-truths and strategically ambiguous language to twist and distort the facts. Fritz, Keefer, and Nyhan’s powerful critique of Bush’s record of policy deception explains why the media has failed to hold him accountable and demonstrates the threat these tactics pose to honest political debate”, they say.

So how can it be that he such a guy can denounce a paper calling for a proper investigation into an event that formed the basis of all the subsequent spin on the need for more and more wars?

Then came Dr Emmett Macfarlane, associate professor in Political Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada. His six areas of specialisation include ‘The Supreme Court of Canada, The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Constitutional Law’. He is not a lawyer, but “has provided non-partisan policy advice to the Government of Canada on the Senate appointments process and the Supreme Court appointments process, to the Senate on Senate reform, and appeared as an expert witness before the parliamentary committee on electoral reform”. He is therefore in an influential position in Canada, apart from his many papers and his articles in the media. He writes a lot about human rights, and this includes an article titled ‘Politicians and Media Boycotts’ in which he wrote: “We should want, indeed demand, that our elected leaders face the most challenging, even the most adversarial, line of questions. Answering to a free press is a fundamental feature of basic democracy”. It appears that that doesn’t apply to questions arising from 9/11.

In another publication he “concludes that norms of consensus and collegiality infuse judicial role perceptions at the Supreme Court and drive the process and outcome of decision-making”. It occurs to me that he himself is using the ‘norms of consensus and collegiality’ to infuse the judicial role of the editor and peer reviewers to ‘drive the process and outcome of decision-making’.

So how can anyone with such views possibly tweet: “The publication of a 9/11 truther article by the journal journal Alternatives is considerably worse than the infamous defence of colonialism published by Third World Quarterly a couple of years back. The latter was a (terrible) normative argument, relying on weak evidence. By contrast, the 9/11 piece is the publication of disinformation. It is a complete failure by the editor and the peer review process. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of the journal’s editorial and advisory board repudiate it or resign. I can’t believe anyone would willingly continue to associate themselves with the journal so long as that piece goes unretracted”?

He is also the author of ‘Failing to Walk the Rights Talk? Post-9/11 Security Policy and the Supreme Court of Canada’. Is he himself walking the talk?

This was followed up with some abusive language by Dr Jennifer Mustapha, an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Huron University College, in Canada. She tweeted: “It is a steaming pile of hot garbage and I’m pretty f****g mad about it. Can assure you that basically all the critical IR peeps I know are as flabbergasted as me and you. It is a disgrace and not at all representative of so much of the good critical IR work out there”.

Amazingly, she writes on her university web page: “My main task as a Liberal Arts professor is to help students build the tools they need to go out into the world as principled and thoughtful people. It all comes down to whether or not they have the critical thinking skills to question not only the world around them, but also to question themselves”. In 2018 she ran a course on ‘The War on Terror and the Politics of Fear’. In the course overview she wrote:

What role does fear and threat play in contemporary politics? And what do the politics of fear and threat make possible within the context of the War on Terror? This course examines these questions through a critical assessment of issues and topics pertaining to the politics of fear, and foregrounds the importance of discourse and narratives in the constructions of the social and political “truths” that are increasingly taken for granted in a post-9/11 context.

But are those “’truths’ that are increasingly taken for granted” actually true? It seems that that question is taboo. She refers from time to time to Foucault’s ‘regimes of truth’ in her PhD thesis, submitted to McMaster University in 2013. It was titled ‘Writing Southeast Asian Security. The “War On Terror” As A Hegemonic Security Narrative And Its Effects In Southeast Asia: A (Critical) Security Analysis’.

She describes the War on Terror as “a political narrative”, and “specifically a security narrative”. It can be seen as a hegemonic security narrative, she says, because it achieved domination, in the sense that it is a narrative where its ‘regimes of truth’ were taken for granted as the foundation for policy and public debate. In other words, a narrative was built up to drive the propaganda machine.

She says that an academic cottage industry has emerged since September 11th 2001, whereby much has been written on topics relating to the events of that day and to the ensuing WOT [War on Terror]. Much of this work has occurred in the so-called ‘mainstream’ of political science and IR, she says, arguing that “the WOT is inextricably linked to the ways in which ‘security’ and ‘international relations’ are explained and understood. Indeed, academics go along with the official narrative.

She continues:

There is, however, a growing body of literature that utilizes distinctly critical approaches to the study of security and more specifically, to the study of security in the context of terrorism/counter-terrorism as it relates to September 11th 2001. This critical literature is diverse, and it is inter-disciplinary, but most notable about it is a shift in emphasis away from a focus solely on the existential threat of terrorism to the state. Instead, critical security approaches delve into deeper ontological questions about the nature of security/insecurity itself.

Yes. That’s the real cottage industry. Many workers in that cottage industry give their time for free, and look into deeper oncological questions such as: ‘What actually happened in 9/11’, and ‘Is the official “regime of truth” possible?’. Whilst it must be admitted that few of these researchers are qualified in political science, and that there is the occasional wrecker amongst them seem who seems adept at fake science, many more of these researchers are qualified in real science.

She asks: “What then, is the contribution that I can make to the critical scholarship relating to security narratives and practices informed by 9/11 and the WOT? What new questions can be explored in order to examine the many implications of such a prevailing hegemonic security narrative: one that was/is so predominant and that serves powerful descriptive, constitutive and performative functions?”. She formulates that question as: “what can a critical security analysis tell us about the WOT and about security/insecurity? Put another way, what does a critical security analysis ‘see,’ that a mainstream security analysis does not?”. Interestingly, David Hughes paper is proposing that that question be examined, focusing on the central terror event behind the official “regime of truth” narrative.

Yet that question is not addressed in her thesis. Instead, she assumes the official “regime of truth” narrative, without actually saying so. It is encumbant on the writer of a scientific text to state and explain the basic assumptions at the beginning. With such an obvious omission of the central event behind her thesis, that doctoral dissertation becomes a mere steaming pile of hot epistomological garbage.

Tim Hayward replied respectfully to her tweet, and she replied by blocking him. He also commented on a quip by Alex J. Bellamy, Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, at The University of Queensland, Australia, in which he states that the quality of 9/11 research varies from “nonsense on stilts to complete gibberish”. That’s what I think of peace studies, because I haven’t seen anything on peace studies that deals with the causes of war since a contribution by peace activist L L Zamenhof in 1911 at the Universal Congress of Races in London, when he spoke a little truth to power at the heart of the British Empire. Professor Bellamy wrote a book ‘World peace: and how we can achieve it’ The abstract states:

Most cultural and legal codes agree that the intentional killing of civilians, whether in peacetime or war, is prohibited. This is the norm of civilian immunity, widely considered to be a fundamental moral and legal principle. Yet despite this fact, the deliberate killing of large numbers of civilians remains a persistent feature of global political life. What is more, the perpetrators have often avoided criticism and punishment. This book attempts to explain the paradox by examining dozens of episodes of genocide and mass killing since the French Revolution, including those associated with colonialism, totalitarianism, the Second World War, and the Cold War as well as more recent episodes in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

So did he himself study 9/11? If not, why not? Surely that must be one of the most significant mass killings in the period studied. So does the decription “nonsense on stilts to complete gibberish” apply to his work, too? Does it not occur to him that the reason that “the perpetrators have often avoided criticism and punishment” may be that the perpetrators may themselves be in a position of power, and that he himself is acting in such a way as to avoid “criticism and punishment”, by denouncing David Hughes’s call for a proper investigation? Why isn’t he supporting David Hughes in getting some good academic work done on investigating 9/11, the enabling event for all subsequent major wars? I’d be interested, too, in his views on the recent study of the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Centre, carried out by the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

WTC 7 Not Destroyed by Fire, Concludes Final University of Alaska Fairbanks Report

“On March 25, 2020, researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks issued the final report of a four-year computer modeling study on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7”, reports Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, who funded the University of Fairbanks Alaska in carrying out the project. They state: “The 47-story WTC 7 was the third skyscraper to be completely destroyed on September 11, 2001, collapsing rapidly and symmetrically into its footprint at 5:20 PM. Seven years later, investigators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concluded that WTC 7 was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely as a result of normal office fires. Contrary to the conclusions of NIST, the UAF research team finds that the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11 was not caused by fires but instead was caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building”.

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth is a not-for-profit organisation consisting of more than 3 000 architects and engineers who have signed the organisation’s petition calling for a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11. Richard Gage, president and founder of AE911Truth, stated: “It is now incumbent upon the building community, the media, and government officials to reckon with the implications of these findings and launch a new full-scale investigation.”

The full report may be downloaded from the website of the Institute of Northern Engineering, University of Alaska Fairbanks, where the history of the project is also given. The report states: “Following the disaster, many in the engineering community hypothesized that the collapse of WTC 7 was caused by some combination of debris impact damage from the collapse of WTC 1 and the fires that subsequently burned in WTC 7 until its collapse. Different variations of this hypothesis were advanced by two federal investigations: the first by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which issued its final report in May 2002, and the second by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which issued its final report in November 2008. NIST ultimately concluded that the collapse of WTC 7 was the first known instance of the total collapse of a tall building primarily due to fires”.

Many independent researchers, they state, have also studied the collapse of WTC 7 and assembled a body of evidence that raises questions about the validity of NIST’s conclusions. “These anomalies combined with the fact that there is no prior instance of a tall building undergoing total collapse due to fire led us to reevaluate the hypothesis of fire-induced failure for the collapse of WTC 7”, the report states.

And what do you have to say to this, Professor Bailey?

Of particular interest to Keep Talking has been the case involving Ove Arup & Partners, because that case was presented by Professor Colin Bailey in his Inaugural Lecture of 2018 as Principal of Queen Mary University of London, giving his expert opinion that Building 7 of the World Trade Centre collapsed due to office fires, and as such that collapse was unique in the history of high-rise buildings. Some of our Keep Talking people were there, as well as some others who had been following the 9/11 issue. They were amazed when Professor Bailey seemed to know nothing of the Hulsey study of Building 7. Colin Bailey, as one of the leading experts in the collapse of Building 7, or so he was claiming, must surely have not only have heard of the Hulsey study, but must surely have had an interest in contributing to it during the consultation period. One lady, Lucy Morgan Edwards, whom we did not know at the time, challenged Colin Bailey for avoiding answering questions. Indeed, we would have welcomed Colin Bailey at our next meeting of Keep Talking of 5 March 2018 in Conway Hall, owned by the Conway Hall Ethical Society, of which I was a member at the time. Whether or not he accepted we were going to discuss the contents of that lecture, and various of our people were working on their analyses. However, the day before the meeting was due I received a phone call from Conway Hall Ethical Society saying that they would have to close the meeting down following a phone call from Hope not Hate. I told the manager of our experiences with Hope not Hate, and of the experiences of others. However, the Ethical Society’s board was unanimous in cancelling all future bookings. I submitted an article to their magazine, which they ignored, despite my several requests for information on its progress. I eventually left the Ethical Society, concluding that the society should change its name.

The student magazine of Queen Mary University, The Print, later interviewed Colin Bailey. Their report illustrates how they twist things, reverse the truth, and talk in generalities without ever coming to the point at hand. The intimidation coming from ‘Hope not Hate’ immensely weakens Professor Colin Bailey’s case, and it undermines the reputation of both Queen Mary University of London and the Conway Hall Ethical Centre.

The Hulsey Report states: “Separate from the NIST investigation, two studies of WTC 7’s collapse were commissioned by opposing sides in the lawsuit ‘Aegis Insurance Services, Inc. v. 7 World Trade Center Company, L.P.’ Experts working in connection with engineering firms Ove Arup & Partners (Arup) and Guy Nordenson and Associates (Nordenson) were retained by the plaintiffs. The engineering firm Weidlinger Associates Inc. (Weidlinger) was retained by the defendants”.

The case presented by Professor Bailey postulated that a girder from Floor 13 came off its seat, resulting in the collapse of Floor 12. The Hulsey report states: “… the northeast corner of Floor 12 would not have collapsed if a girder from Floor 13 came off its seat at Column 79 and fell onto it. As a result, the Nordenson portion of the Arup analysis does not demonstrate that propagation could occur after the supposed initiating failure, even if the girder were to fall off its seat at Column 79. This is a fatal flaw in the Arup and Nordenson analysis”.

I’d like to invite Professor Bailey to talk to our Keep Talking group about the criticisms of his theory in Professor Hulsey’s report. However, since freedom of association has been abolished, that would be a futile gesture. Perhaps others might like to ask for an explanation in their own ways. His contact details are given on his university’s web page. I think students at the university might be interested, too. They seem not to have expertise on structural engineering in their School of Engineering and Materials Science, but the standard of research and lecturing by their Principal should surely be of interest to all of them. Perhaps their student magazine, The Print, might just be interested, too.

A network of political academics

I have to liken the ways in which academic investigation is being thwarted by such intimidatory conduct with the way meetings are being closed down in London and elsewhere by groups such as Hope not Hate, as has happened three times to our Keep Talking group. Two days after our meeting to discuss Professor Colin Bailey’s Inaugural Lecture was closed down by Hope not Hate the Daily Express reported “THE VIOLENT protest at King’s College staged by masked thugs from Antifa shows there is a growing culture of intolerance towards free speech on the UK’s university campuses, according to the Henry Jackson Society”. The first of Keep Talking’s meetings to be closed down involved a vicious-looking demonstration outside the venue by Hope not Hate, Antifa, Black Block and the GMB Union. A 74-year-old colleague of mine was thrown to the ground as he attempted to reach the meeting. Whether it’s in our cherrished academic institutions or on the streets of London, what we are witnessing is intimidation and bullying on a significant scale.

When academics resort to ad hominem attacks rather than analyse according to academic criteria, then we have to worry not only about them, but also about quality control in their institutions. A professor’s entire output is in words, and if those words cannot be relied on at least in their purpose, then the professor has no value as an academic. If I had thought my Physics professors were charlatans during my own studies, I would have regarded my degree as worthless – if I had gained it, but more likely I would have left the course. What is the point of Physics? Remember Galileo?

The title of Professor bestows an authority on the holder. I began this piece of research by asking within our Keep Talking group what quality control takes place in universities. I had my suspicions from our experiences in Keep Talking, mainly regarding 9/11. Do universities rely entirely on peer reviewed journals for their quality control? Is it the case that once a person has the title of Professor bestowed upon him, then he can denigrate whomever he wishes with impunity? That was certainly my experience when I was set upon by the leadership of Esperanto Association of Britain in 2006. I had begun my research into the decline of that association following the unprofessorial behaviour of my supposed friend, the professor. One of the first things I did in that research was to construct a social network, much as I have been doing here, except that I had personal knowledge of most of the players, and so I could link them not only by who communicates with whom, but also by the manner of that communication. Very quickly I had built up a accurate network of the main players before I had begun to research them. In 2007 I could extend my network by just one link, and then realised that that was to a friend of George Soros and his family. George Soros was in The London Esperanto Club about 15 years before I was. I was able to extend the network in other directions, too, and right back to the nineteenth century. I think that if the Esperantists and the academics had followed through on their investigations, and eliminated such charlatanry, then Esperanto would have become mainstream in the world’s language teaching curriculum many decades ago.

What I am suggesting here is that a similar approach be followed regarding obstructive academics whenever such intimidatory conduct is observed. Interests of their co-workers and co-authors should be followed up, with a view to constructing a similar network, or networks. The alternative is for universities to lose their status and to sink into decline. After all, if half of medical papers are wrong, then presumably half of the staff in medical research centres could be declared redundant with no loss to science. Now that’s a thought that should be focusing the minds of some of the top brass in our universities today. It’s difficult for any group to turn to investigating itself, whether that’s Esperantists, Socialists, medics or academics. Most of them just want to hush things up in the hope that the problem will go away.

But it never does.