Saturday, November 4, 2023

Experts, Lockdowns and the Rise of the “Predictive Modelling” Mafia

The name of the platform, Unlimited Hangout is a contradistinction to the "limited hangout":

A limited hangout or partial hangout is a tactic used in media relations, perception management, politics, and information management. The tactic originated as a technique in the espionage trade. Wikipedia

The concept came into the public's consciousness when the Nixon tapes disclosed John Ehrlichman proposing a "modified limited hangout" in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal.—WikiSpooks

From Unlimited Hangout, November 21, 2022

While many are now familiar with the manipulation of predictive modelling during the COVID-19 crisis, a network of powerful Malthusians have used the same tactics for the better part of the last century in order to sell and impose their agenda.  

While much propaganda has gone into convincing the world that eugenics disappeared with the defeat of Hitler in 1945, the reality, as I discussed in my previous article The Revenge of the Malthusians and the Science of Limits, is far removed from this popular fantasy.

In that piece, I reviewed the origins of cybernetics as a new “science of control” created during World War II by a nest of followers of Lord Bertrand Russell who had one mission in mind. This mission was to shape the thinking of both the public as well as a new managerial elite class who would serve as instruments for a power they were incapable of understanding. 1

We also explored the science of limits that was infused into the scientific community at the turn of the 20th century with the imposition of the assumption that humanity, the biosphere, and even the universe itself were closed systems, defined by the second law of thermodynamics (aka: entropy) and thus governed by the tendency towards decay, heat death and ever-decreasing potential for creative change. The field of cybernetics would also become the instrument used to advance a new global eugenics movement that later gave rise to transhumanism, an ideology which today sits at the heart of the 4thindustrial revolution as well as the “Great Reset.”

In this article, we will evaluate how this sleight of hand occurred and how the minds of the population and governing class alike have been induced to participate in our own annihilation. Hopefully, in the course of this exercise, we will better appreciate what modes of thinking can still be revived in order to ensure a better future more becoming of a species of dignity.

Neil Ferguson’s Sleight of Hand

In May 2020, Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson was forced to resign from his post as the head of the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). The public reason given was Neil’s sexual escapades with a married woman during a draconian lockdown in the UK at the height of the first wave of hysterics. Neil should have also been removed from all his positions at the UN, WHO and Imperial College (most of which he continues to hold) and probably jailed for his role in knowingly committing fraud for two decades. 

After all, Neil was not only personally responsible for the lockdowns that were imposed onto the people of the UK, Canada, much of Europe and the USA2, but as the world’s most celebrated mathematical modeller, he had been the innovator of models used to justify crisis management and pandemic forecasting since at least December 2000. 

It was at this time that Neil joined Imperial College after spending years at Oxford. He soon found himself advising the UK government on the new “foot and mouth” outbreak of 2001.

Neil went to work producing statistical models extrapolating linear trend lines into the future and came to the conclusion that over 150,000 people would be dead by the disease unless 11 million sheep and cattle were killed. Farms were promptly decimated by government decree and Neil was awarded an Order of the British Empire for his service to the cause by creating scarcity through a manufactured health crisis.

In 2002, Neil used his mathematical models to predict that 50,000 people would die of Mad Cow Disease which ended up seeing a total of only 177 deaths.

In 2005, Neil again aimed for the sky and predicted 150 million people would die of Bird Flu. His computer models missed the mark by 149,999,718 deaths when only 282 people died of the disease between 2003-2008.

In 2009, Neil’s models were used again by the UK government to predict 65,000 deaths due to Swine flu, which ended up killing about 457 people.

Despite his track record of embarrassing failures, Neil continued to find his star rising ever further into the stratosphere of science stardom. He soon became the Vice Dean of Imperial College’s Faculty of Medicine and a global expert of infectious diseases. 

In 2019, he was assigned to head the World Health Organization’s Collaboration Center for Infectious Disease Modelling, a position he continues to hold to this day. It was at this time that his outdated models were used to “predict” 500,000 COVID deaths in the UK and two million deaths in the USA unless total lockdowns were imposed in short order. Under the thin veneer of “science”, his word became law and much of the world fell into lockstep chanting “two weeks to flatten the curve.”



Predictive model taken from the March 16 paper authored by Imperial College London’s COVID-19 Response Team, led by Neil M. Ferguson,
“Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand”

When Neil was pressed to make the code used to generate his models available to the public for scrutiny in late 2020 (after it was discovered that the code was over 13 years old), he refused to budge, eventually releasing a heavily redacted version which was all but useless for analysis.

A Google software engineer with 30 years experience writing (under a pseudonym) for The Daily Skeptic analyzed the redacted code and had this to say:

It isn’t the code Ferguson ran to produce his famous Report 9. What’s been released on GitHub is a heavily modified derivative of it, after having been upgraded for over a month by a team from Microsoft and others. This revised codebase is split into multiple files for legibility and written in C++, whereas the original program was “a single 15,000 line file that had been worked on for a decade” (this is considered extremely poor practice). A request for the original code was made 8 days ago but ignored, and it will probably take some kind of legal compulsion to make them release it. Clearly, Imperial are too embarrassed by the state of it ever to release it of their own free will, which is unacceptable given that it was paid for by the taxpayer and belongs to them.”

Besides tax-payers, the author should have also included Bill Gates, as his foundation donated millions of dollars to Imperial College and Neil directly over the course of two decades, but we’ll forgive her for leaving that one out.

Monte Carlo Methods: How the Universe Became a Casino...

....MUCH MORE

Very early on  in the Covid madness (May 8, 2020) a heavyweight statistician called-out Ferguson and his so-called science:

In All Fairness: Professor Gellman Looks At Imperial College Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson And His Covid-19 Model
Over the years we've visited Columbia Uni's Prof. Gellman a few times. You may remember him from such hits as:

Andrew Gelman on the Economics Profession.
Taking on the Nobel Prize Winner: An Update On That "Middle Class White Guys Are Dying" Report
"Big Oregano Strikes Again"
Elon Musk Frenemy Peter Thiel is writing another book!

And the headline story from Columbia's  director of the Applied Statistics Center via his personal blog, Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, May 8, 2020:

“So the real scandal is: Why did anyone ever listen to this guy?”....