scientific freedom – Lifeboat News: The Blog https://lifeboat.com/blog Safeguarding Humanity Mon, 08 May 2023 01:15:56 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 Common Sense by Thomas Paine, with Life Extension Correlations https://lifeboat.com/blog/2020/07/declaration-of-independence-from-death https://lifeboat.com/blog/2020/07/declaration-of-independence-from-death#comments Sun, 05 Jul 2020 02:52:30 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=108052 Before the Revolutionary war in North America, a movement in favor of establishing independence paved the way. Common Sense, written by the political activist and philosopher Thomas Paine, became a central part of it. In this paper I go over some of its points while making correlations with the movement for indefinite life extension.

The people of America’s 13 colonies weren’t in agreement on how to move forward with their disputes with Great Britain. Like Thomas Paine wrote, “The mind of the multitude is left at random, and seeing no fixed object before them, they pursue such as fancy or opinion starts.” Common Sense fixed the object of independence, rather than reconciliation with tyranny, in enough minds to help make it happen.

True freedom is about much more than things like the ability to sail the open seas or be independent from the authority of kings – it is about access to all constructive opportunities, of which there may be an infinite number, and to which there are still innumerable barriers. Every day asks us whether we want to put in work to break more of the barriers around us, and every day we either reconcile with the conventions of laissezfaire or continue the struggle for freedom.

Movements have broken many bonds over the decades and centuries. What was once a world overrun with crushing suppressions is now manageable and improving in many countries on numerous fronts. We need that “fixed object” that Paine was talking about so we can open the frontiers of industrialized peoples next most pressing freedom. That object is time, the walls of defined lifespans must come down. Nothing is more absolutely enslaving than <125 year death sentences for all, and the times are ripe and ready to take it on. The world works with and engineers biology in many ways now and gets better at it faster as the toolbox of biotechnology continues to deepen. Biological mastery is in the cards if we play them.

Paine wrote, ”O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her—Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.” In that style I would write, “O ye that love life! Ye that dare oppose, not only the symptoms of mortal afflictions, but the roots, stand forth! Every spot of the world is overrun with death. Life hath been hunted round the globe. Tradition and religion have long expelled her—politics regards her like a stranger, and trend setters have given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for this survivors blood that fights on through us.”

How many injustices should we accept? How much lack of freedom should we endure? ”There are injuries which nature cannot forgive; she would cease to be nature if she did. […] The robber, and the murderer, would often escape unpunished, did not the injuries which our tempers sustain, provoke us into justice.” I often say that anger for death is there for the same reason that pain is there when touching a hot stove — it is your body prompting you to take corrective measures to end the pain. We ought endure such misfortunes when we must and take action against them when we can.

The time for life extension is now because the tools and insights are here, and also because as Paine says, “When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember, that virtue is not hereditary.” You know that the people in your life deserve to live, you understand the importance of working to get this done now, but our grandchildren might not. Humanity cannot afford to pass the buck off into the darkness. I may believe that posterity will be roughly as virtuous as us, but I’m not a prophet. Dark times tend to sweep in on their own schedules.

It is our duty to get this job done. “[N]othing can settle our affairs so expeditiously as an open and determined declaration for independance.” The Declaration of Independence was written after Common Sense, mainly by Thomas Jefferson. A life extension version of it might look something like this:


Declaration of Independence from Death

We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by life with certain unalienable rights, that chief among them is life itself, that is, freedom from incurring the injustice of a defined lifespan. To secure this right, science is practiced among people, deriving its just power from the purest form of the pursuit for answers, for the lifting of the veils of ignorance that hold us back from true freedom. Whenever anything becomes destructive of this end, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new practices, laying its foundation on principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their survival. The history of death is a history of repeated horrors and atrocities. Let the facts be submitted to a candid world.

Every person who dies misses out on what very well may be an infinity of incredible wonders and opportunities. This is stiflingly enormous opportunity cost. People lose their freedom, memories, goals, thoughts, themselves; others lose them; all of humanity and the universe loses them, and nothing in the universe compares to a human. The all-around suffering that death causes to the individuals it kills and the people around them is staggering and endlessly traumatic, causing stress and damage on countless levels of every part of life and society. The death process is degrading and undignified, humiliating people for decades as it reduces them to feebleness, senility and dust. Death deprives people of the ability to know what is going on in this mysterious dimension we all find ourselves in here, what we ultimately are and why we are here. It steals away our chance to know what marvels and wonders exist in the expanses of the great unknown, our ability to experience pleasures we haven’t yet, our ability to know what it’s like to experience the fulfillment of all of our goals, and the chance to work for and live in an existence of negligible or perhaps even non-existent fallacy.

We, the freedom loving members of humanity, from all around the globe, of all cultures and creeds, solemnly declare, that we are, and of right ought to be free from death in the form of defined lifespans. To this end we mutually pledge to each other our fortunes and our sacred honor.



The customs of conventions, our current mainstream traditions, are against us, and will be so, until, by a thorough awakening for independence from death, our oldest and most sacred right, takes its rightful and long overdue place among the ranks of other indispensable rights. “The custom of all courts is against us, and will be so, until, by an independance, we take rank with other nations.”

“Wherefore, if they have not virtue enough to be Whigs, they ought to have prudence enough to wish for Independance.” People do not need to want to live for thousands of years in order to want independence from death, they need only want their own freedom to choose what course they may, and the same for their friends and families. Some people don’t want to be forced to live for thousands of years, and some people don’t want to be forced to die before the age of 125. Currently, however, only the people who might choose to die at the age of 50 have the freedom to make that choice. With unlimited lifespans, we can all be free. This is about eradicating deaths tyranny, not death, in the same way that the American revolutionaries worked to break the stranglehold of tyranny that Great Britain held over them, not stop every slight and fight they might have post-independence.

“We fight neither for revenge nor conquest; […] we are not insulting the world with our fleets and armies, nor ravaging the globe for plunder.” Our war is even more dignified. It is removal of a tyranny and the installation of one of the greatest freedoms of all, all without a shedding of blood.

“[L]et a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” The ‘law as King’ is superior to ‘humans as Kings’ because people collectively form laws with some amount of oversight of each other’s input. “Law” as the foundation, however, can still tend to be quite arbitrary. Life is what rules us, living, the chance to do people things in a universe of endless opportunities. Let life wear the crown and guide us along our path to true freedom. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” The cause of expanding our frontiers and abilities, of expanding life, is in great measure the greatest cause of them all.

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Why it is dangerous to build ever larger big bang machines https://lifeboat.com/blog/2019/01/why-it-is-dangerous-to-build-ever-larger-big-bang-machines https://lifeboat.com/blog/2019/01/why-it-is-dangerous-to-build-ever-larger-big-bang-machines#comments Sat, 19 Jan 2019 16:08:11 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=86796 CERN has revealed plans for a gigantic successor of the giant atom smasher LHC, the biggest machine ever built. Particle physicists will never stop to ask for ever larger big bang machines. But where are the limits for the ordinary society concerning costs and existential risks?

CERN boffins are already conducting a mega experiment at the LHC, a 27km circular particle collider, at the cost of several billion Euros to study conditions of matter as it existed fractions of a second after the big bang and to find the smallest particle possible – but the question is how could they ever know? Now, they pretend to be a little bit upset because they could not find any particles beyond the standard model, which means something they would not expect. To achieve that, particle physicists would like to build an even larger “Future Circular Collider” (FCC) near Geneva, where CERN enjoys extraterritorial status, with a ring of 100km – for about 24 billion Euros.

Experts point out that this research could be as limitless as the universe itself. The UK’s former Chief Scientific Advisor, Prof Sir David King told BBC: “We have to draw a line somewhere otherwise we end up with a collider that is so large that it goes around the equator. And if it doesn’t end there perhaps there will be a request for one that goes to the Moon and back.”

“There is always going to be more deep physics to be conducted with larger and larger colliders. My question is to what extent will the knowledge that we already have be extended to benefit humanity?”

There have been broad discussions about whether high energy nuclear experiments could pose an existential risk sooner or later, for example by producing micro black holes (mBH) or strange matter (strangelets) that could convert ordinary matter into strange matter and that eventually could start an infinite chain reaction from the moment it was stable – theoretically at a mass of around 1000 protons.

CERN has argued that micro black holes eventually could be produced, but they would not be stable and evaporate immediately due to „Hawking radiation“, a theoretical process that has never been observed.

Furthermore, CERN argues that similar high energy particle collisions occur naturally in the universe and in the Earth’s atmosphere, so they could not be dangerous. However, such natural high energy collisions are seldom and they have only been measured rather indirectly. Basically, nature does not set up LHC experiments: For example, the density of such artificial particle collisions never occurs in Earth’s atmosphere. Even if the cosmic ray argument was legitimate: CERN produces as many high energy collisions in an artificial narrow space as occur naturally in more than hundred thousand years in the atmosphere. Physicists look quite puzzled when they recalculate it.

Others argue that a particle collider ring would have to be bigger than the Earth to be dangerous.

A study on “Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes” was provided by Lifeboat member Prof Raffaela Hillerbrand et al. Prof Eric Johnson submitted a paper discussing juridical difficulties (lawsuits were not successful or were not accepted respectively) but also the problem of groupthink within scientific communities. More of important contributions to the existential risk debate came from risk assessment experts Wolfgang Kromp and Mark Leggett, from R. Plaga, Eric Penrose, Walter Wagner, Otto Roessler, James Blodgett, Tom Kerwick and many more.

Since these discussions can become very sophisticated, there is also a more general approach (see video): According to present research, there are around 10 billion Earth-like planets alone in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Intelligent life might send radio waves, because they are extremely long lasting, though we have not received any (“Fermi paradox”). Theory postulates that there could be a ”great filter“, something that wipes out intelligent civilizations at a rather early state of their technical development. Let that sink in.

All technical civilizations would start to build particle smashers to find out how the universe works, to get as close as possible to the big bang and to hunt for the smallest particle at bigger and bigger machines. But maybe there is a very unexpected effect lurking at a certain threshold that nobody would ever think of and that theory does not provide. Indeed, this could be a logical candidate for the “great filter”, an explanation for the Fermi paradox. If it was, a disastrous big bang machine eventually is not that big at all. Because if civilizations were to construct a collider of epic dimensions, a lack of resources would have stopped them in most cases.

Finally, the CERN member states will have to decide on the budget and the future course.

The political question behind is: How far are the ordinary citizens paying for that willing to go?

LHC-Critique / LHC-Kritik

Network to discuss the risks at experimental subnuclear particle accelerators

www.lhc-concern.info

LHC-Critique[at]gmx.com

Particle collider safety newsgroup at Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/particle.collider/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/LHC.Critique/

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3 Reasons You Are Living in the Matrix / How to Make a Red Pill https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/07/3-reasons-you-are-living-in-the-matrix-how-to-make-a-red-pill https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/07/3-reasons-you-are-living-in-the-matrix-how-to-make-a-red-pill#comments Mon, 11 Jul 2016 22:23:29 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=27681 Appearances have always played a much more important part than reality in history, where the unreal is always of greater moment than the real.“
–Gustav LeBon, The Crowd (1895)

I’ve gotten no substantive response to my last post on vaccine safety– neither in the comments, nor the TruthSift diagram, nor anywhere else, nor have the papers I submitted to two medical journals… but I have gotten emails telling me I’m delusional and suggesting I seek psychiatric attention. And this of course is integral to the explanation of how such delusions as vaccine safety persist so widely when it is so demonstrably a delusion: the majority who believe the majority must be right because its the majority are emotionally unwilling to confront the evidence. They assume the experts have done that, and they rely on the experts. But the experts assume other experts have been there. Ask your Pediatrician if he’s personally read Bishop et al and formulated an opinion on vaccine aluminum. Neither has the National Academy, except perhaps their members have and decided, perhaps tacitly, not to review the subject. Their decision not to review the animal literature was not tacit, they said they explicitly decided to omit it, although elsewhere they say they couldn’t find human evidence that addressed the issues. So everybody is trusting somebody else, and nobody has picked up the ball. And can you blame them? Because when I pick up the ball, what I receive in return is hate mail and people’s scorn. The emotional response cuts off any possible inspection of the logic.

On most questions where a majority with authority is facing a minority of dissenters or skeptics, the majority is delusional.
In other words, you are living in the matrix; much of what you and people believe is fundamentlaly wrong.

Reason 1, as above, is that the majority forms its view by circular reasoning, and rejects any attempt at logical discussion without considering it seriously, so it is prone to delusion.
Once the crowd concluded vaccines are safe and effective, for example, the question of whether the aluminum is damaging can apparently no longer be raised (even as more gets added to vaccines). And when I or others try to raise it, we are scorned and hated, and ineffectual in changing the opinion supported by circular reasoning. When new research papers appear that call it into question, they are ignored, neither cited in the safety surveys nor influencing medical practice in any way. This paragraph is all simple reporting of what has repeatedly happened.

Reason 2 is a minority wouldn’t be holding out without a good reason, because they are punished for their opposition with scorn and hatred at least. Except perhaps for explicitly religious issues, the usual reason they are so stubborn is they are defending rational truth.

Reason 3 is there’s often big money to be made or political power to be gained by influencing the majority opinion, and experts given good budgets appear to be pretty good at influencing majority opinion, especially with the aid of mass media, covertly staged stunts, and in many areas time enough to have long ago started from kids and education. On the other hand, rationality and reality don’t usually have press agents or forward looking media strategies, and there’s little or no money in swaying the minority position.

Show me a question with a majority with authority facing a minority where the majority isn’t delusional, and I’ll show you a minority that’s being paid under the table or planted to discredit rationalists in other controversial areas. At least I’ll suggest you strongly consider that as an alternative theory of what you see. The only one I can think of off hand are flat-earthers.

Mass Delusions were famously studied in 19th century first by Charles Mackay in
Popular Mass Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
(1852) but more interestingly IMO in Gustave Le Bon, (1895) The Crowd. This latter was arguably the single book that had the most influence on the shape of the twentieth century. By their own accounts “The Crowd” was on Theodore Roosevelt’s bedside table, and dogeared by Mussolini. Lenin and Stalin took from it, and “Hitler’s indebtedness to Le Bon bordered on plagiarism” in the words of historian and Hitler-biographer Robert G. L. Waite. Sigmund Freud wrote a book discussing Le Bon, and Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, acknowledged his deep debt, as Goebbels did of Bernays’ reflected insights.

Bernays equally isn’t as widely known as he should be. He invented the field of public relations, the “panel of doctors”, the slogan “making the world safe for democracy”, the diamond engagement ring, broke the taboo on women’s smoking and practically doubled sales by recruiting protesters smoking “torches of freedom”, bacon and eggs, and flouridated water, among many other things. There weren’t any decent safety studies on fluoridated water, and some modern studies say its taking multiple IQ points off the population, and nations and regions that don’t fluoridate have just as good teeth today as nations and regions that do, and putting fluoride in mouthwash and toothpaste rather than the drinking water would plainly have made a lot more sense from the point of view of public safety and health, but one thing you can count on: once he put it in the water supply and convinced everybody it was a health measure, you couldn’t sue for damage from fluoride runoff any more, and potentially multi-asbestos scale class action suits against the Government and aluminum manufacturers disappeared. Since Bernays got done, just raising the issue of fluoride gets you branded fruitcake and shunned to this day.

They are also still “making the world safe for democracy”, which he coined for WW1. But is this what they are doing, or is that another widely held delusion?
Bernays also wrote the book Propaganda which begins: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

I’ve quoted from and summarized and discussed Le Bon extensively before so I will give only a brief flavor here.
“It is not necessary that a crowd should be numerous for the faculty of seeing what is taking place before its eyes to be destroyed and for the real facts to be replaced with hallucinations unrelated to them….

“To return to the faculty of observation possessed by crowds, our conclusion is that their collective observations are as erroneous as possible, and that most often they merely represent the illusion of an individual who, by a process of contagion, has suggestioned his fellows.”

“The events with regard to which there exists the most doubt are certainly those which have been observed by the greatest number of persons. To say that a fact has been simultaneously verified by thousands of witnesses is to say, as a rule, that the real fact is very different from the accepted account of it.”…

“By the mere fact that an individual forms part of a crowd, his intellectual standard is immediately and considerably lowered….

“The inferior reasoning of crowds is based, just as is the reasoning of a high order, on the association of ideas, but between the ideas associated by crowds there are only apparent bonds of analogy or succession. The mode of reasoning of crowds resembles that of the Esquimaux who, knowing from experience that ice, a transparent body, melts in the mouth, concludes that glass, also a transparent body, should also melt in the mouth…
The characteristics of the reasoning of crowds are the association of dissimilar things possessing a merely apparent connection between each other, and the immediate generalization of particular cases. It is arguments of this kind that are always presented to crowds by those who know how to manage them. They are the only arguments by which crowds are to be influenced. A chain of logical argumentation is totally incomprehensible to crowds…”

“When these convictions [of crowds] are closely examined,…, it is apparent that they always assume a particular form which I can not better define than giving it the name of a religious sentiment…
Intolerance and fanatacism are the necessary accompaniments of the religious sentiment. They are inevitably displayed by those who believe themselves in the possession of the secret of earthly or eternal happiness. These two characteristics are to be found in all men grouped together when they are inspired by a conviction of any kind. The Jacobins of the Reign of Terror were at bottom as religious as the Catholics of the Inquisition, and their cruel ardour proceeded from the same source. The convictions of crowds assume those characteristics of blind submission, fierce intolerance, and the need of violent propaganda which are inherent in the religious sentiment, and it is for this reason that it may be said that all their beliefs have a religous form.

Whether the feelings exhibited by a crowd be good or bad, they present the double character of being very simple and very exaggerated… a throng knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.”

The Red pill

So, now what’s in the red pill? Why, its a placebo. You can use any old red jelly bean. But if you swallow it and believe that the majority may be totally delusional about anything, and start looking into practically any subject with dissenters with an open mind, then I predict if you are skilled at critical thinking, you will shortways find the majority is in fact delusional, that is, you are indeed living in the matrix.

Much more widely than you are likely to imagine. For example, the news is basically propaganda, in lockstep among all the mainstream media, who accept whatever the government and political correctness tells them to believe uncritically. Was the passenger plane over Ukraine brought down by missile or strafing? Did the CDC conspire to hide a vaccine autism connection? Is the congress being run behind the scenes by a uniparty? You won’t find any of those subjects discussed unless to whitewash in the US mainstream media. What you want in a media system is ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity. –Joseph Goebbels The history books are no better, as Le Bon observed. The banking system is all based on smoke and mirrors and a healthy skim. Etc.

I don’t expect TruthSift.com to convince the masses they are delusional, because Le Bon assures me logic will never sway a crowd, but I offer it as a tool to shortcut a lot of work for those who swallow the red pill. Rather than having to study a field in detail for years as I have with vaccines and needing to be able to supply PhD level understanding of what you are reading and needing the confidence of your convictions against the many, you can much more rapidly peruse a diagram and find what the real situation is, assuming the diagram has been created and debated.
So I beg readers here to create such diagrams on TruthSift for any topic you are interested in.
Of course, they are fun and interesting too.

I also commend TruthSift to corporations and others wanting to escape the kind of crowd think delusions so well characterized by Le Bon, and achieve actual rationality in your decisions. Use it on Private Diagrams. Everybody in your organization will be able to contribute to the document, if you invite them, exactly where its pertinent. It will naturally divide and conquer your problems in ways where different people can address different problems, achieving true collaboration. Nobody will be able to get confused or pursue some other agenda without being transparently refereed. The answer will be far more rationally derived and argued for than what you are doing now. You can allow people to contribute under pseudonyms if you want. http://TruthSift.com

Find my first blog post describing TruthSift here.

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The Top Ten Reasons I Believe Vaccine Safety Is an Epic Mass Delusion https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/06/the-top-ten-reasons-i-believe-vaccine-safety-is-an-epic-mass-delusion https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/06/the-top-ten-reasons-i-believe-vaccine-safety-is-an-epic-mass-delusion#comments Tue, 28 Jun 2016 21:30:42 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=27228 Its painful to bear views that make many think I’m an imbicile and dislike me. So please, if anybody has a rational argument why any of this is wrong, I beg to be enlightened. I’ve set up a diagram for the purpose that will support you to add your criticism exactly where it is pertinent. https://tssciencecollaboration.com/graphtree/Are%20Vaccines%20Safe/406/4083

(1) The National Academy’s Reviews Of Vaccine Safety
The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies has provided several multi-hundred page surveys studying the safety of vaccines, but rather than reassuring, these itemize some iatrogenic conditions being caused, and pronounce the scientific literature inadequate to say whether most others are. The 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) Review[1] looked at 146 vaccine-condition pairs for causality, reporting:

  • 14 for which the evidence is said to convincingly support causality, the vaccine is causing the condition.
  • 4 where the evidence is said to favor acceptance.
  • 5 where the evidence is said to favor rejection, including MMR causing autism.
  • 123 where the evidence is said insufficient to evaluate.

The 2003 IOM Review on multiple vaccines said[2]:
“The committee was unable to address the concern that repeated exposure of a susceptible child to multiple immunizations over the developmental period may also produce atypical or non-specific immune or nervous system injury that could lead to severe disability or death (Fisher, 2001). There are no epidemiological studies that address this.”
and:
“the committee concludes that the epidemiological and clinical evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between multiple immunization and an increased risk of allergic disease, particularly asthma.”

  • None of the IOM Safety Reviews[1][2][3][4] addressed the aluminum (for example whether the aluminum is causing autism), or mentioned contaminants, or discussed animal models although they had concluded as just quoted there is generally no epidemiological or clinical data worth preferring.

(2) The Aluminum.
Alum was added to vaccines back in the 1920’s, with no test of parenteral toxicity until recently[5], because it prods the immature immune system out of its normal operating range.[6] Maybe they figured aluminum is common in the environment, but injection bypasses half a dozen evolved sequential filters that normally keep it out of circulatory flow during development. Vaccines put hundreds of times as much aluminum into infants’ blood as they would otherwise get, and in an unnatural form that is hard for the body to remove.[7][8 (cfsec 4.2)][9]. The published empirical results indicate its highly toxic.

  • Bishop et al in NEJM 97 reported a Randomized Placebo Controlled(RPC) test on preemies.[10][11] Scaling the toxicity they measured to the 4000 mcg in the first six months projects the vaccine series’ aluminum as costing each recipient maybe 15 IQ points and bone density.[12]
  • Animal RPC experiments also show highly toxic[13][14][15][16]
  • The applicable epidemiology suggests its highly toxic.[8][18][19][20][21][22] Discussed more in point 8 below, basically every study that compares more to less finds less much better.
  • Numerous clinical publications, whole special issues, on ASIA (Autoimmune Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants)[23][24][25]
  • Any “placebo” controlled test I’ve ever found of an adjuvanted vaccine, the “placebo” contained an adjuvant.
  • Safety reviews ignore the issue. Search the pdfs. [1][2][3][4]
  • The FDA[26] cites a theory paper[27] that compares a published MRL based on dietary experiments in weaned rodents (thus completely uninformed about toxicity in early development) to a theoretical model of blood aluminum levels from the vaccines, and disdains all the above cited empirical evidence.

(3) The Safety Studies Ignore Confounding Patient Behavior
Since there are no Randomized Placebo Controlled (RPC) trials supporting vaccines, virtually all studies report on the association (or lack thereof) between vaccines and some iatrogenic condition. But parents who believe vaccines made their kids sick, stop vaccinating them, which systematically moves sick or vaccine damaged kids in the studies into the “low vaccine”, “low thimerisol”, or etc. bin. This invalidates most studies supporting safety (and the few remaining ones suck for other reasons). Numerous studies report incredible preventative effects for vaccines, presumably because of this corruption, like having more thimerisol or more MMR’s is strongly preventative of autism and other mental development issues[28][29][30], or like having more vaccines was strongly preventative of atopy, apparently even years before patients got the vaccines[31]. The fact this confounding factor is overlooked demonstrates extreme confirmation bias and is the defining factor of Cargo Cult Science according to R.P. Feynman.[32]

(4) The Animal Models
Animal models reliably and repeatably show in RPC tests (a) that vaccines at the wrong time in development damage the adult brain or behavior [33][34] and (b) that multiple vaccines cause autoimmune disease even in animals bred to be non-autoimmune[35][36]. The effects are said to be robust, and as we’ve already seen there isn’t good human data rebutting them.

(5) The Contaminants
Studies have repeatedly found contaminants such as viruses, retroviruses, circoviruses, and human DNA in vaccines seemingly whenever tested,
and I’ve found no reason to believe off the shelf vaccines are free[37][38][39][40][41]. Reported contaminants have included SV-40 in polio vaccines which were administered even though scientists knew the vaccines were contaminated and already had hunches and experiments indicating SV-40 causes cancer[41][42]. Chimpanzee Coryza Virus became known in humans as RSV and has killed many millions of infants and hospitalizes 100,000/yr in America today[43]. Contaminated polio vaccine is plausibly also the origin of HIV[44][41]. There are discovered viral contaminants in vaccines today[38][39], with unknown long term effects, as well as I expect many undiscovered contaminants.

(6) Studies Ask Whether Some One Vaccine Damages, and Thus Miss That Many Do.
Virtually every study not reporting damage compares kids who got numerous vaccines to kids who got numerous vaccines. Such studies wouldn’t show statistically significant results no matter how much damage the vaccines are doing, unless one vaccine or vector by itself is doing comparable or more damage than the rest put together. The studies more or less test the hypothesis one vaccine is invisibly damaging, the rest are fine, and the studies are all obscured in the presence of multiple problems, much less the kind of timing and interaction effects observed in animal models. The one study[45] often touted as proving “The Risk of Autism is Not Increased by ‘Too Many Vaccines Too Soon’”[46] in fact compares patients based on antigens, and since DTP had more than 3000 antigens and no other vaccine common among the study patients had more than a handful, effectively compared patients who’d had DTP and dozens of vaccines to patients who did not have DTP (many had DTaP instead) and dozens of vaccines. The only counterexamples to this I’ve found are contrived in bizarre ways to avoid reality, such as the study that withheld the 2 month vaccines till 3 months from a group of kids, and asked the mothers, who were terrified enough a bunch insisted on changing back to the early vaccination group, to record symptoms with no doctor even consulted, identifying the placebo effect as vaccine prevention of diseases. The authors wrote it would have been unethical to give a placebo at 2 months to the kids getting the vaccine at 3 months, in order to do the experiment blind, but apparently consider it ethical to inject dozens of vaccines into your kids with zero placebo controlled testing.[47] [48]

(7) The Extensive Evidence Indicating Flu Vaccines Damage Immune Systems, Particularly in Children.

  • RPC test reported child flu vaccine recipients getting 4 times the respiratory illnesses of placebo recipients[49]
  • Children seen at the Mayo Clinic 1996–2006 were 3 times as likely to be hospitalized if they had had a flu vaccine[50]
  • Prior receipt of 2008-09 TIV was associated with increased risk of medically attended pH1N1 illness during the spring–summer 2009 in Canada[51]
  • Multiple papers report flu vaccines damage CD8+ T Cells in both children and animal models[52][53][54]
  • Flu vaccine recipients’ blood produced less IFN-gamma in response to new flu than people not previously vaccinated[55].
  • The equation they use for flu vaccine “effectiveness” counts making recipients sick as effectiveness. Mathematically, if vaccine recipients get twice as many respiratory illnesses that counts the same as if they get half as many flu illnesses.[56][57] The published evidence of “effectiveness” is published evidence of collateral damage.

(8) The Epidemiological Studies That Aren’t Blatantly Confounded
All the credible ecological or epidemiological studies comparing people who got more vaccines to less indicate damage. For example,

  • a 1/1000 increase in Infant Mortality is associated with each 7 additional vaccines in a national series regressed over the developed nations [18].
  • An extra 680 ASD or Language impaired are associated with every 1% increase in compliance regressed over the 50 US states [19].
  • High correlation between and within nations of vaccine aluminum to autism.[8]
  • Two studies in Guinea-Bisseau that showed recipients of DTP died far more frequently than non-recipients, even though the recipients were from far more fortunate backgrounds[20][21].
  • Vaccine adverse event reports are far more likely to be fatal if they follow multiple vaccinations than two[58].
  • 1 in 10 girls is reported to make an ED visit within 42 days of receiving HPV vaccine[59][60].

Every empirical study I’ve read with a methodology that’s not clearly confounded consistently indicates vaccine damage.

(9) The Consistent Anecdotal and Informal Reports
Anecdotal and informal reports actually compare vaccinated and unvaccinated, unlike the contrived and confounded studies offered to support safety.

  • Virtually all the Amish who are autistic turn out to have been vaccinated, the large numbers of unvaccinated in certain communities having no ASD whatsoever.[61]
  • The Homestead Medical Practice in Chicago’s Dr. Mayer Eisenstein reports: ““My partners and I have over 35,000 patients who have never been vaccinated. You know how many cases of autism we have seen? ZERO, ZERO.” Also he reports virtually zero asthma.[61]
  • Southern religious homeschoolers were anecdotally reported to have very low vaccination rates, and similarly virtually no autism.[61]
  • An online survey of 13000 fully unvaccinated shows them to have less than a third of the prevalence of numerous conditions from allergies to skoliosis.[62](Figure 1.)
  • More than a thousand parents, some of them Doctors, have posted Youtube reports describing why they are confident they saw their child given autism by vaccines.[63]
    Figure 1: Online survey of 13,000 unvaccinated compared to peer-reviewed survey data of the German vaccinated population[62]. The peer-reviewed data shows the vaccinated population averaging better than one chronic ailment per person, the unvaccinated report less than a third of that. The unvaccinated survey is online, selection biased, and self-reported, but there is no trustworthy data rebutting it, and 10 reasons are given in the text to believe the unvaccinated may be much healthier.
    Figure 1: Online survey of 13,000 unvaccinated compared to peer-reviewed survey data of the German vaccinated population[62]. The peer-reviewed data shows the vaccinated population averaging better than one chronic ailment per person, the unvaccinated report less than a third of that. The unvaccinated survey is online, selection biased, and self-reported, but there is no trustworthy data rebutting it.

(10) The Authorities, Big Pharma, and Media Are Demonstrably Not Trustworthy.

  • All the above 9 points and more are readily observable, but you wouldn’t learn that from the media or in med school.
  • A Senior PhD CDC whistleblower has provided numerous documents and testified to congress about an explicit cover-up within CDC of a vaccine-autism connection,[64][65] and media whitewashed it.
  • The vaccine manufacturers are exempt from any liability for vaccine damage.
  • The same companies repeatedly plead guilty to marketing and safety violations and pay billions in fines.[66]
  • They pay vast sums to media and fund the medical schools and research and give boondoggles and perks and contracts to doctors and revolving door government officials.[67][68]
  • The authorities and big pharma never publicly commented while contaminated vaccines scientists expected to cause cancer and other dire problems were administered[41][42][43].
  • The way the authorities have averted their eyes from contrary results is again the defining factor of Cargo Cult Science[32].

To summarize 10 points in two: (A) the safety literature, wherever it doesn’t outright show vaccine damage, demonstrably is bollixed to where it doesn’t show much of anything. (B) Lots of peer reviewed publications cogently report lots of consistent damage that no published evidence rationally opposes, but are ignored by authorities and media.

The vaccine safety literature is laid out in considerable detail on this TruthSift diagram https://tssciencecollaboration.com/graphtree/Are%20Vaccines%20Safe/406/4083 where readers are invited to add more pertinent citations or arguments. Anybody who thinks I am confused on any point is invited to challenge any claim above and explain why[69]. Please feel free to ask your Pediatrician or other authority, and let me know what they say. I’ve submitted to 2 medical journals so far, but been unable to obtain a substantive review, a review citing any papers or making a case I’m wrong. As I receive no substantive rebuttal, it reaffirms what I have already concluded from extensive research, none exists.

If you’ve read the above, and are thinking: “you were right, I was deluded,” the next step is to ask yourself what else you may be deluded about, and what you can do about it.  https://truthsift.com was designed to answer those questions.
If you think this post contains information that should be more widely known please share it.

References
[1] Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality, Kathleen Stratton, Andrew Ford, Erin Rusch, and Ellen Wright Clayton, Editors; Committee to Review Adverse Effects of Vaccines; Institute of Medicine, The National Academies press 2011. 862pp.http://www.commed.vcu.edu/IntroPH/Communicable_Disease/2012/…ccines.pdf
[2] Immunization Safety Review: Multiple Immunizations and Immune Dysfunction Kathleen Stratton, Christopher B. Wilson and Marie C. McCormick, Editors, Immunization Safety Review Committee, Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10306.html ISBN: 0–309-50866–5, 152 pages, 6 × 9, (2002) Institute of Medicine.
[3] Immunization Safety Review: Vaccines and Autism, Immunization Safety Review Committee, Institute of Medicine of the National Academies ISBN: 0–309-53275–2, 214 pages, 6 × 9, (2004) http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10997.html
[4] The Childhood Immunization Schedule and Safety: Stakeholder Concerns, Scientific Evidence, and Future Studies, Committee on the Assessment of Studies of Health Outcomes Related to the Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule; Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice; Institute of Medicine ISBN 978–0-309–26702-1 230 pages (2013) http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/~/media/files/report%20…ety_rb.pdf
[5] Conference report Workshop summary Aluminum in vaccines Vaccine 20 (2002) S1–S4 http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&a…v.62922401
[6] Neonatal and early life vaccinology. Siegrist CA. Vaccine. 2001 May 14;19(25–26):3331–46. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11348697
[7] Infants’ exposure to aluminum from vaccines and breast milk during the first 6 months, Dórea JG, Marques RC, Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology Volume 20, Issue 7, November 2010, Pages 598–601 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20010978
[8] Do aluminum vaccine adjuvants contribute to the rising prevalence of autism? Tomljenovic L, Shaw CA. J Inorg Biochem. 2011 Nov;105(11):1489–99 http://omsj.org/reports/tomljenovic%202011.pdf
[9] http://truthsift.com/search_view?topic=Are-Vaccines-Safe-?&a…p;nid=4083 See statement views for discussion and further citations
[10] Aluminum Neurotoxicity in Preterm Infants Receiving Intravenous-Feeding Solutions, Nicholas J. Bishop, M.D., Ruth Morley, M.B., B.Chir., J. Philip Day, Ph.D., and Alan Lucas, M.D. N Engl J Med 1997; 336:1557-1562May 29, 1997DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199705293362203 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199705293362203#t=articleResults
[11] Aluminum exposure from parenteral nutrition in preterm infants: bone health at 15-year follow-up. Fewtrell MS, Bishop NJ, Edmonds CJ, Isaacs EB, Lucas A. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19858156 Pediatrics. 2009 Nov;124(5):1372–9. doi: 10.1542/peds.2009–0783. Epub 2009 Oct 26. Erratum in Pediatrics. 2009 Dec;124(6):1709.
[12] http://truthsift.com/search_view?statement=Animal-Studies-re…p;nid=4133 See statement views for discussion and further citations
[13] Administration of aluminum to neonatal mice in vaccine-relevant amounts is associated with adverse long term neurological outcomes, C.A. Shaw, Y. Li , L. Tomljenovic, Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, V 128, November 2013, Pages 237–244 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0162013413001773
[14] Slow CCL2-dependent translocation of biopersistent particles from muscle to brain, Zakir Khan, Christophe Combadière, François-Jérôme Authier, Valérie Itier, François Lux, Christopher Exley, Meriem Mahrouf-Yorgov, Xavier Decrouy, Philippe Moretto, Olivier Tillement, Romain K Gherardi BMC Medicine 201311:99 DOI: 10.1186/1741–7015-11–99 http://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741&#…;11-99
[15] http://truthsift.com/search_view?topic=Are-Vaccines-Safe-?&id=406 For discussion of other confirmatory citations
[16] Examination of the safety of pediatric vaccine schedules in a non-human primate model: assessments of neurodevelopment, learning, and social behavior. Curtis B, Liberato N, Rulien M, et al. 2015. Environ Health Perspect 123:579–589; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4455585/
[18] Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity? Miller NZ, Goldman GS, Hum Exp Toxicol. 2011 Sep;30(9):1420–8. doi: 10.1177/0960327111407644. Pub 2011 May 4. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170075/
[19] A positive association found between autism prevalence and childhood vaccination uptake across the U.S. population. Delong G. J Toxicol Environ Health A. 2011;74(14):903–16. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21623535
[20] Routine vaccinations and child survival: follow up study in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa Commentary: an unexpected finding that needs confirmation or rejection, Ines Kristensen, Peter Aaby, Henrik Jensen, BMJ 2000; 321 dos: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.321.7274.1435
[21] Oral polio vaccination and low case fatality at the paediatric ward in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. Aaby P, Rodrigues A, Biai S, et al ‚Vaccine. 2004 Aug 13;22(23–24):3014–7. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15297050
[22] http://truthsift.com/search_view?id=406&nid=4144 See for further discussion and citations
[23] Special Issue ASIA – Autoimmune Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants, Lupus February 2012; 21 (2) http://lup.sagepub.com/content/21/2.toc
[24] Biopersistence and brain translocation of aluminum adjuvants of vaccines Front. Neurol., 05 February 2015 |http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2015.00004
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fneur.2015.00004/full
[25] Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia following immunization with the hepatitis B vaccine: another angle of the ‘autoimmune (auto-inflammatory) syndrome induced by adjuvants’ (ASIA). Agmon-Levin N1, Zafrir Y, Kivity S, Balofsky A, Amital H, Shoenfeld Y. Immunol Res. 2014 Dec;60(2–3):376–83. doi: 10.1007/s12026-014‑8604-2.
[26] Study Reports Aluminum in Vaccines Poses Extremely Low Risk to Infants (2015–2016) http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/ScienceResearch/ucm284520.htm
[27] Updated aluminum pharmacokinetics following infant exposures through diet and vaccination, Mitkus RJ, King DB, Hess MA, Forshee RA, Walderhaug MO., Vaccine 29(51) 9538–43 2011. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22001122
[28] Thimerosal Exposure in Infants and Developmental Disorders: A Retrospective Cohort Study in the United Kingdom Does Not Support a Causal Association, Nick Andrews; Elizabeth Miller; Andrew Grant et al, Pediatrics September 2004, VOLUME 114 / ISSUE 3 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/114/3/584.full-text.pdf
[29] Prenatal and Infant Exposure to Thimerosal From Vaccines and Immunoglobulins and Risk of Autism, Cristofer S. Price, William W. Thompson, Barbara Goodson,et al, Pediatrics October 2010, VOLUME 126 / ISSUE 4 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/126/4/656
[30] Autism Occurrence by MMR Vaccine Status Among US Children With Older Siblings With and Without Autism, Anjali Jain; Jaclyn Marshall; Ami Buikema; et al. JAMA. 2015;313(15):1534–1540. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.3077. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2275444
[31] Transient suppression of atopy in early childhood is associated with high vaccination coverage, Gruber, C., S. Illi, S. Lau, R. Nickel, J. Forster, W. Kamin, C.P. Bauer, V. Wahn, U. Wahn, and the MAS-90 Study Group. 2003. . Pediatrics 111(3):e282-e288. http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/111/3/e282
[32] CARGO CULT SCIENCE (adapted from Caltech Commencement Address 1974), Richard P Feynman https://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
[33] Peripheral immune challenge with viral mimic during early postnatal period robustly enhances anxiety-like behavior in young adult rats.
Konat GW, Lally BE, Toth AA, Salm AK.Metab Brain Dis. 2011 Sep;26(3):237–40. doi: 10.1007/s11011-011‑9244-z http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21643765
[34] Postnatal Inflammation Increases Seizure Susceptibility in Adult Rats, Michael A. Galic, Kiarash Riazi, James G. Heida, et al, The Journal of Neuroscience, 2 July 2008, 28(27): 6904–6913; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1901–08.2008 http://www.jneurosci.org/content/28/27/6904.full
[35] Vaccine model of antiphospholipid syndrome induced by tetanus vaccine, L Dimitrijevi, I ivkovi, M Stojanovi, V Petrui, S ivanevi-Simonovi dos: 10.1177/0961203311429816 Lupus February 2012 vol. 21 no. 2 195–202 http://lup.sagepub.com/content/21/2/195.abstract
[36] Self-Organized Criticality Theory of Autoimmunity, Ken Tsumiyama, Yumi Miyazaki, Shunichi Shiozawa 2009 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0008382
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0008382
[37] Some oral poliovirus vaccines were contaminated with infectious SV40 after 1961. Cutrone R, Lednicky J, Dunn G, et al. Cancer Res. 2005 Nov
15;65(22):10273–9. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16288015
[38] Viral Nucleic Acids in Live-Attenuated Vaccines: Detection of Minority Variants and an Adventitious Virus, J. G. Victoria, C. Wang, M. S. Jones,et al. J. Virol. June 2010 vol. 84 no. 12 6033–6040 http://jvi.asm.org/content/84/12/6033
[39] Viruses and Virus Nucleic Acid Contaminate Many Vaccines: Risks of cancer and creation of new pathogens should not be underplayed by regulators Prof. Joe Cummins http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Viruses_and_Virus_Nucleic_Acid_Contaminate_Vaccines.php
[40] Impact of environmental factors on the prevalence of autistic disorder after 1979, Theresa A. Deisher, Ngoc V. Doan, Angelica Omaiye, et al. Journal of Public Health and Epidemiology Vol. 6(9), pp. 271–284, 2014 DOI: 10.5897/JPHE2014.0649 http://soundchoice.org/scpiJournalPubHealthEpidem092014.pdf
[41] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13QiSV_lrDQ Dr. Maurice Hillman, The Merck Chief Scientist, discusses how the polio vaccine was administered although they knew it was contaminated with SV-40, which they strongly believed caused cancer. According to the tape, the monkeys from which the vaccine was being grown, were being kept in epidemic conditions crowded into cages, so they were all sick with a variety of viruses which then contaminated the vaccine stock. As Hillman discusses, SIV could very well have entered the human population this way as well.
[42] Association between simian virus 40 and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Vilchez RA, Madden CR, Kozinetz CA, et al. Lancet. 2002 Mar 9;359(9309):817–23. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11897278
[43] Polio eradication: a complex end game, Viera Scheibner, BMJ 2012;344:e2398 http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e2398/rapid-responses
[44] Polio vaccines and the origin of AIDS: some key writings, http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/dissent/documents/AIDS/
[45] Increasing Exposure to Antibody-Stimulating Proteins and Polysaccharides in Vaccines Is Not Associated with Risk of Autism, Frank DeStefano, MD,MPH, Cristofer S. Price, ScM, Eric S. Weintraub, MPH DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2013.02.001
[46] The Risk of Autism is Not Increased by “Too Many Vaccines Too Soon”, Editorial of The Journal of Pediatrics http://www.jpeds.com/content/JPEDSDeStefano
[47] General Non-specific Morbidity is Reduced After Vaccination Within the Third Month of Life – the Greifswald Study, S. Otto, B. Mahner, I. Kadow, J. F. Beck, S. K.W. Wiersbitzky and R. Bruns, Journal of Infection (2000) 41, 172–175 doi: 10.1053/jinf.2000.0718, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com
[48] http://truthsift.com/node_info?nid=5340&superNode=No&amp…;rating=TE
[49] Increased risk of noninfluenza respiratory virus infections associated with receipt of inactivated influenza vaccine. Cowling BJ, Fang VJ, Nishiura H, Chan KH, Ng S, Ip DK, Chiu SS, Leung GM, Peiris JS. Clin Infect Dis. 2012 Jun;54(12):1778–83. doi: 10.1093/cid/cis307. Epub 2012 Mar 15. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22423139
[50] Effectiveness of trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine in influenza-related hospitalization in children: a case-control study. Joshi AY, Iyer VN, Hartz MF, Patel AM, Li JT. Allergy Asthma Proc. 2012 Mar-Apr;33(2):e23-7. doi: 10.2500/aap.2012.33.3513. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22525386
[51] Association between the 2008-09 Seasonal Influenza Vaccine and Pandemic H1N1 Illness during Spring–Summer 2009: Four Observational Studies from Canada, Danuta M. Skowronski , Gaston De Serres, Natasha S. Crowcroft, et al.PLOS(2010), http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000258
[52] Vaccination with whole inactivated virus vaccine affects the induction of heterosubtypic immunity against influenza virus A/H5N1 and immunodominance of virus-specific CD8+ T-cell responses in mice. Bodewes R, Kreijtz JH, Hillaire ML, Geelhoed-Mieras MM, Fouchier RA, Osterhaus AD, Rimmelzwaan GF. , J Gen Virol. 2010 Jul;91(Pt 7):1743–53. doi: 10.1099/vir.0.020784–0. Epub 2010 Mar 24. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20335492
[53] Vaccination against human influenza A/H3N2 virus prevents the induction of heterosubtypic immunity against lethal infection with avian influenza A/H5N1 virus. Bodewes R, Kreijtz JH, Baas C, Geelhoed-Mieras MM, de Mutsert G, van Amerongen G, van den Brand JM, Fouchier RA, Osterhaus AD, Rimmelzwaan GF. PLoS One. 2009;4(5):e5538. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005538. Epub 2009 May14. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19440239
[54] Annual vaccination against influenza virus hampers development of virus-specific CD8+ T cell immunity in children. Bodewes R, Fraaij PL, Geelhoed-Mieras MM, van Baalen CA, Tiddens HA, van Rossum AM, van der Klis FR, Fouchier RA, Osterhaus AD, Rimmelzwaan GF., J Virol. 2011 Nov;85(22):11995–2000. doi: 10.1128/JVI.05213–11.Epub 2011 Aug 31. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21880755
[55] Difference in immune response in vaccinated and unvaccinated Swedish individuals after the 2009 influenza pandemic, Isabelle Magalhaes Mikael Eriksson, Charlotte Linde, Rashid Muhammad, Lalit Rane, Aditya Ambati, Rebecca Axelsson-Robertson, Bahareh Khalaj, Nancy Alvarez-Corrales, Giulia Lapini, Emanuele Montomoli, Annika Linde, Nancy L Pedersen,3 and Markus Maeurer BMC Infect Dis. 2014; 14: 319.Published online 2014 Jun 11. doi: 10.1186/1471–2334-14–319 PMCID: PMC4067073 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4067073/
[56] “Vaccine effectiveness was estimated as 100% x (1 — odds ratio [ratio of odds of being vaccinated among outpatients with influenza-positive test results to the odds of being vaccinated among outpatients with influenza-negative test results])”, Center for Disease Control, Early Estimates of Seasonal Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness — United States, January 2015 Weekly January 16, 2015 / 64(01);10–15 http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6401a4.htm
[57] http://truthsift.com/node_info?nid=2823&superNode=No&amp…;rating=TE for more discussion
[58] Combining Childhood Vaccines at One Visit Is Not Safe, Neil Z. Miller, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Volume 21 Number 2 Summer 2016 http://www.jpands.org/vol21no2/miller.pdf
[59] Adverse events following HPV vaccination, Alberta 2006–2014, Xianfang C. Liu, , Christopher A. Bell, , Kimberley A. Simmonds, , Lawrence W. Svensona, Margaret L. Russell, Vaccine Volume 34, Issue 15, 4 April 2016, Pages 1800–1805 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X16002036
[60] For further data analysis and discussion see http://truthsift.com/node_info?nid=5196&superNode=No&amp…;rating=TE
[61] http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2009/05/22/a-pretty-big-secret/
[62] http://www.vaccineinjury.info/survey/results-unvaccinated/results-illnesses.html
[63] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%23hearthiswell
[64] http://www.morganverkamp.com/august-27-2014-press-releas…nd-autism/
[65] https://sharylattkisson.com/cdc-scientist-we-scheduled-meeti…documents/
[66] http://projects.propublica.org/graphics/bigpharma
[67] http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/06/editors-in-chief-of-w…-poss.html
[68] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/01/15/drug-companies-do…orruption/
[69] http://truthsift.com/search_view?topic=Are-Vaccines-Safe-?&id=406

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https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/06/the-top-ten-reasons-i-believe-vaccine-safety-is-an-epic-mass-delusion/feed 5
TruthSift: A Platform for Collective Rationality https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/05/truthsift-a-platform-for-collective-rationality https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/05/truthsift-a-platform-for-collective-rationality#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2016 00:32:57 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=26277 “So there came a time in which the ideas, although accumulated very slowly, were all accumulations not only of practical and useful things, but great accumulations of all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs.
Then a way of avoiding the disease was discovered. This is to doubt that what is being passed from the past is in fact true, and to try to find out ab initio again from experience what the situation is, rather than trusting the experience of the past in the form in which it is passed down. And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the [human] race[’s] experience from the past. I see it that way. That is my best definition…Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.“
–Richard P Feynman, What is Science? (1968)[1]

TruthSift.com is a platform designed to support and guide individuals or crowds to rationality, and make them smarter collectively than any unaided individual or group. (Free) Members use TruthSift to establish what can be established, refute what can’t be, and to transparently publish the demonstrations. Anyone can browse the demonstrations and learn what is actually known and how it was established. If they have a rational objection, they can post it and have it answered.

Whether in scientific fields such as climate change or medical practice, or within the corporate world or political or government debate, or on day to day factual questions, humanity hasn’t had a good method for establishing rational truth. You can see this from consequences we often fail to perceive:
Peer reviewed surveys agree: A landslide majority of medical practice is *not* supported by science [2,3,4]. Scientists are often confused about the established facts in their own field [5]. Within fields like climate science and vaccines, that badly desire consensus, no true consensus can be reached because skeptics raise issues that the majority brush aside without an established answer (exactly what Le Bon warned of more than 100 years ago[6]). Widely consulted sources like Wikipedia are reported to be largely paid propaganda on many important subjects [7], or the most popular answer rather than an established one [8]. Quora shows you the most popular individual answer, generated with little or no collaboration, and often there is little documentation of why you should believe it. Existing systems for crowd sourced wisdom largely compound group think, rather than addressing it. Existing websites for fact checking give you someone’s point of view.

Corporate or government planning is no better. Within large organizations, where there is inevitably systemic motivation to not pass bad news up, leadership needs active measures to avoid becoming clueless as to the real problems [9]. Corporate or government plans are subject to group think, or takeover by employee or other interests competing with the mission. Individuals who perceive mistakes have no recourse capable of rationally pursuading the majority, and may anyway be discouraged from speaking up by various consequences[6].

TruthSift is designed to solve all these problems. TruthSift realizes in your browser the Platonic ideal of the scientific literature, but TruthSift applies it to everything, and makes it tangible and lightweight, extended to a much lower hurdle for publishing. On a public TruthSift diagram, members (or on a Private diagram, members you have invited), who believe they can prove or refute a statement, can post their proof or refutation exactly where it is relevant. TruthSift logically propagates the consequences of each contribution, graphically displaying how it impacts the establishment status of all the others, drawing statements established by the combined efforts in thick borders, and statements refuted in thin. Statements are considered established only when they have an established demonstration, one with every posted challenge refuted.

An example topic. The topic statement n0 is currently refuted, because its only proof is refuted. The statement menu is shown open in position to add a proof to this proof. The topic statement is gold, pro statements are blue, con statements are red. Proof connectors are black, challenges red, remarks purple, assumptions (not shown)  blue. Statements show the title, to see the body select “View Statement” or hover mouse.


Fig 1: An example topic. The topic statement n0 is currently refuted, because its only proof
is refuted. The statement menu is shown open in position to add a proof to this proof.
The topic statement is gold, pro statements are blue, con statements are red. Proof
connectors are black, challenges red, remarks purple, assumptions (not shown) blue.
Statements show the title. On the actual Topic the body can be seen by selecting
the statement and “View Statement” or hovering the mouse.


What is a proof? According to the first definition at Dictionary.com a proof is: “evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true, or to produce belief in its truth.” In mathematics, a proof is equivalent to a proof tree that starts at axioms, or previously established results, which the participants agree to stipulate, and proceeds by a series of steps that are individually unchallengeable. Each such step logically combines several conclusions previously established and/or axioms. The proof tree proceeds in this way until it establishes the stated proved conclusion. Mathematicians often raise objections to steps of the proof, but if it is subsequently established that all such objections are invalid, or if a workaround is found around the problem, the proof is accepted.

The Scientific literature works very similarly. Each paper adds some novel argument or evidence that previous work is true or is not true or extends it to establish new results. When people run out of valid, novel reasons why something is proved or is not proved, what remains is an established theory, or a refutation of it or of all its offered proofs.

The view focused on the topic statement of a Topic diagramming the discussion in Galileos: Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Views. The black triangle indicates other incoming edges not shown. For complex diagrams, it is often best to walk around in focused view centered on each statement in turn.


Fig 2: The view focused on the topic statement of a Topic diagramming the discussion in:
Galileo’s: Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Views.
The black triangle indicates other incoming edges not shown. For complex diagrams,
it is often best to walk around in focused view centered on each statement in turn.

TruthSift is a platform for diagramming this process and applying it to any statements members care to propose to establish or refute. One may state a topic and add a proof tree for it, which is drawn as a diagram with every step and connection explicit. Members may state a demonstration of some conclusion they want to prove, building from some statements they assert are self-evident or that reference some authority they think trustworthy, and then building useful intermediate results that rationally follow from the assumptions, and building on until reaching the stated conclusion. If somebody thinks they find a hole in a proof at any step, or thinks one of the original assumptions need further proof, they can challenge it, explaining the problem they see. Then the writer of the proof (or others if its in collaboration mode) may edit the proof to fix the problem, or make clearer the explanation if they feel the challenger was simply mistaken, and may counter-challenge the challenge explaining that it had been resolved or mistaken. This can go on recursively, with someone pointing out a hole in the proof used by the counter-challenger that the challenge was invalid. On TruthSift the whole argument is laid out graphically and essentially block-chained, which should prevent the kind of edit-wars that happen for controversial topics on Wikipedia. Each challenge or post should state a novel reason, and when the rational arguments are exhausted, as in mathematics, what remains is either a proof of the conclusion or a refutation of it or all of its proofs.

As statements are added to a diagram, TruthSift keeps track of what is established and what refuted, drawing established statements’ borders and their outgoing connectors thick, and refuted statements’ borders and their outgoing connectors thin so viewers can instantly tell what is currently established and what refuted. TruthSift computes this by a simple algorithm that starts at statements with no incoming assumptions, challenges, or proofs, which are thus unchallenged as assertions that prove themselves, are self evident, or appeal to an authority everybody trusts. These are considered established. Then it walks up the diagram rating statements after all their parents have been rated. A statement will be established if all its assumptions are, none of its challenges are, and if it has proofs, at least one is established. (We support challenges requesting a proof be added to a statement which neither has one added nor adequately proves itself.) Otherwise, that is if a statement has an established challenge, or has refuted assumptions, or all of its proofs are refuted, it is refuted.

To understand why a statement is established or refuted, center focus on it, so that you see it and its parents in the diagram. If it is refuted, either there is an established challenge of it, or one of its assumptions is refuted, or all of its proofs are. If it is not refuted, it is established. Work your way backward up the diagram, centering on each statement in turn, and examine the reasons why it is established or refuted.

Fig 3: An example topic.


Fig 3: An example topic.

Effective contribution to TruthSift diagrams involves mental effort. This is both a hurdle and a feature. TruthSift teaches Critical Thinking. First you think about your Topic Statement. How actually should you specify Vaccine Safety or Climate Change, so it covers what you want to establish or refute, and so it is amenable to rational discussion? There is no place you could go to see that well specified now, and can you properly assure it without properly specifying it? Next you think about the arguments for your topic statement, and those against it, and those against the arguments for, and those for the arguments for, and the arguments against the arguments against, and so on until everybody runs out of arguments, when what is left is a concise rational analysis of what is established and why. The debate is settled point by point. The process naturally subdivides the field into sub-topics where different expertise’s come into play, promoting true collective wisdom and understanding.

For TruthSift to work properly, posters will have to respect the guidelines and post only proof or challenge statements that they believe rationally prove or refute their target and are novel to the diagram (or also novel additional evidence as assumptions or remarks or tests, which are alternative connector types). Posts violating the guidelines may be flagged and removed, and consistent violators as well. Posts don’t have to be correct, that’s what challenges are for, but they have to be honest attempts, not spam or ad hominem attacks. Don’t get hung up on whether a statement should be added as a proof or an assumption of another. Frequently you want to assemble arguments for a proposition stating something like “the preponderance of the evidence indicates X”, and these arguments are not individually necessary for X, nor are they individually proofs of X. It is safe to simply add them as proofs. They are not necessary assumptions, and if not enough of them are established, the target may be challenged on that basis. The goal is a diagram that transparently explains a proof and what is wrong with all the objections people have found plausible.

For cases where members disagree on underlying assumptions or basic principles, stipulation is available. If one or more statements are stipulated, statements are shown as conditionally true if established based on the stipulations and as conditionally false if refuted based on the stipulations. The challenges to the stipulation are also shown. TruthSift supports reasoning from different fundamental assumptions, but requires being explicit about it when challenged.
Probability mode supports the intuitive construction of probabilistic models, and evaluates the probability of each statement in the topic marginalizing over all the parameters in the topic. With a little practice these allow folding in various connections and evidence. These could be used for collaborative, verified, risk models; to support proofs with additional confidence tests; to reason about hidden causes; or many other novel applications

Fig 4: Detail from a topic showing an established conclusion some may find surprising. Rebut it if you can.

Fig 4: Detail from a topic showing an established conclusion some may find surprising. Please
Rebut it if you can. Dashed edges represent citation into the literature. Title is shown for each
statement, on actual topic select “View Statement” to see body.

Basic Membership is free. In addition to public diagrams, debating the big public issues, private diagrams are available for personal or organizational planning or to exclude noise from your debate. Private diagrams have editing and/or viewing by invitation only. Come try it. http://TruthSift.com

TruthSift’s mission is to enable publication of a transparent exposition of human knowledge, so that anyone may readily determine what is truth and what fiction, what can be established by valid Demonstration and what can’t, and so that anyone can read and understand that Demonstration.
We intend the process of creating this exposition to lead to vastly increased understanding and improved critical thinking skills amongst our members and beyond. We hope to support collaborative human intelligences greater than any intelligence previously achieved on the planet, both in the public domain and for members’ private use.

And please, I’d love feedback or questions. [email protected]

1. Richard P Feynman, What is Science? (1968) http://www-oc.chemie.uni-regensburg.de/diaz/img_diaz/feynman…nce_68.pdf
2. Assessing the Efficacy and Safety of Medical Technologies, Office of Technology Assessment, Congress of the United States (1978)
http://www.fas.org/ota/reports/7805.pdf
3. Jeannette Ezzo, Barker Bausell, Daniel E. Moerman, Brian Berman and Victoria Hadhazy (2001). REVIEWING THE REVIEWS . International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, 17, pp 457–466. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag…aid=101041
4. John S Garrow BMJ. 2007 Nov 10; 335(7627): 951.doi:10.1136/bmj.39388.393970.1F PMCID: PMC2071976
What to do about CAM?: How much of orthodox medicine is evidence based?
http://www.dcscience.net/garrow-evidence-bmj.pdf
5. S. A. Greenberg, “How citation distortions create unfounded authority: analysis of a citation network”, BMJ 2009;339:b2680
http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b2680
6. Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd, (1895), (1995) Transaction Publishers New Edition Edition
7. S Attkisson, “Astroturf and manipulation of media messages”, TEDx University of Nevada, (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU
8. Adam M. Wilson , Gene E. Likens, Content Volatility of Scientific Topics in Wikipedia: A Cautionary Tale 2015 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134454 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134454
9. Kiira Siitari, Jim Martin & William W. Taylor (2014) Information Flow in Fisheries Management: Systemic Distortion within Agency Hierarchies, Fisheries, 39:6, 246–250, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03632415.2014.915814

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“Liberation technologies” and the ones who will gain https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/05/liberation-technologies-and-the-ones-who-will-gain Thu, 05 May 2016 14:23:26 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=25372

Watch this video on YouTube.

How could global economic inequality survive the onslaught of synthetic organisms, micromanufacturing devices, additive manufacturing machines, nano-factories?
(http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/2016/04/obsessed-…L36KMDo.99)

Narrated by Harry J. Bentham, author of Catalyst: A Techno-Liberation Thesis (2013), using the introduction from that book as a taster of the audio version of the book in production. (http://www.clubof.info/2016/04/liberation-technologies-to-come.html)

Paperback: http://www.amazon.com/Catalyst-Techno-Liberation-Harry-J-Ben…atfound-20

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Catalyst-Techno-Liberation-Harry-J-Ben…atfound-20

Audio: coming soon!

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Death Reversal — The Reanima Project — Research Whose Time Has Come https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/03/death-reversal-the-reanima-project-research-whose-time-has-come https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/03/death-reversal-the-reanima-project-research-whose-time-has-come#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2016 08:49:23 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=23275 I have spent the last 30 years in various aspects of the biopharmaceutical industry, which for the most part has been a very rewarding experience.

However, during this time period, having been immersed many different components of therapeutic development and commercialization, one thing has always bothered me: a wide array of promising research never makes it off the bench to see the translational light of day, and gets lost in the historical scientific archives.

bqiinclab

I always believed that scientific progress happened in a very linear narrative, with each new discovery supporting the next, resulting ultimately in an eventual stairway of scientific enlightenment.

What the reality turned out to be was much more of a fragmented, research “evolutionary tree”, with dozens of potential pathways, only very few branches of which ever resulted in scientific maturity, and not always the most fruitful ones by any means.

The premature extinction of these promising discovery pathways were the result of a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, funding priorities, competing industrial interests, “out of vogue” concepts, lack of intellectual properties, non-existent regulatory models, conflicted legislative initiatives, and even religious implications.

In 2016, as in previous years, we continue to see these “valleys of death” swallow up pathways of scientific possibility, with few popular segments attracting the majority of attention and support.

gene sequencing

The preponderance of resources focused on the somatic mutation model of carcinogenesis, despite an endless range of research highlighting that the disease is extremely heterogenic and rarely ever follows such a clonal model, is one example that continues to be inappropriately manifested in the oncology system, decades into the “war on cancer”.

On a similar plane, the jettisoning of most studies of the biophysical aspects of human genetics, despite the gross incompleteness offered by the central dogma to explain higher biological form and function, is another example that has become all too pervasive in the research community.

And then there are the areas of human consciousness, memory, and information processing / storage, where in many ways we are still operating in the dark ages, with materialists and dualists battling it out for centuries.

One topic that I have written quite a bit about is that of death, specifically that of the death of the human brain — http://www.singularityweblog.com/is-death-reversible/

brainimage

While I am a staunch supporter and advocate of the life-extension / anti-aging movement, I am equally vocal about our need to develop technologies, products, and services that can actually reverse our ultimate transition between the living and dead states, a transition that occurs annually for 60 million humans around the globe.

Death, however, is unfortunately seen by many as a natural, biological progression for human beings, and in many circles, deemed an unnecessary area of scientific research and exploration.

I beg to differ.

Far too often, death arrives too early and too unexpectedly for many of us and our loved ones. And the best modern medicine has to offer today is “Sorry. There is nothing else we can do.”

But what if there was?

There are a variety of species across the natural world that are capable of regenerating and repairing themselves from forms of severe CNS damage that bring them to the transitional grey zone between life and death. Along the evolutionary timeline however, this ability gradually disappeared hundreds of millions of years ago and does not manifest in higher species.

lizard and lady

Now, in the 21st century, with the convergence of the disciplines of regenerative biology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical resuscitation, we may finally be poised to take back these capabilities for humans.

Over the years, clinical science has focused heavily on preventing such life and death transitions and made some initial progress with suspended animation technologies, such as therapeutic hypothermia. But once we transition through the brain death window, currently defined by the medical establishment as “irreversible” (per the 1968 Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School definition), we are technically no longer alive.

surgeons

To add insult to injury, a human can be declared dead, even while our bodies can still circulate blood, digest food, excrete waste, balance hormones, grow, sexually mature, heal wounds, spike a fever, and gestate and deliver a baby. It is even acknowledged by thought leaders that recently brain dead humans still may have residual blood flow and electrical nests of activity in their brains, just not enough to allow for an integrated functioning of the organism as a whole.

Several prominent cases in the media over the past few years have further served to highlight the current situation, as well as the substantial anatomical and functional differences between the state known as brain death, and other severe disorders of consciousness, such as coma, and the vegetative and minimally conscious states.

It is now time to take the necessary steps to provide new possibilities of hope, in order to counter the pain, sorrow, and grief that is all too pervasive in the world when we experience a loved one’s unexpected or untimely death, due to lesions which might be potentially reversible with the application of promising neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation technologies and therapies.

bqaproduction

It is time to undertake the required research, based on 2016 technological knowledge, in order to bring about such transformational change.

My name is Ira S. Pastor and I am the CEO of the biotechnology company Bioquark Inc.

Welcome to the unveiling of the Reanima project.

Reanima Video

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Howard Hughes Medical Institute Selects 2015 Investigators https://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/05/howard-hughes-medical-institute-selects-2015-investigators Tue, 26 May 2015 14:58:55 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=14391 HHMI2015

“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced today that 26 of the nation’s top biomedical researchers will become HHMI investigators and will receive the flexible support necessary to move their research in creative new directions. The initiative represents an investment in basic biomedical research of $153 million over the next five years.”

Read more

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The Blockchain is the New Database, Get Ready to Rewrite Everything https://lifeboat.com/blog/2014/12/the-blockchain-is-the-new-database-get-ready-to-rewrite-everything Tue, 30 Dec 2014 22:32:24 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=13171 Quoted: “If you understand the core innovations around the blockchain idea, you’ll realize that the technology concept behind it is similar to that of a database, except that the way you interact with that database is very different.

The blockchain concept represents a paradigm shift in how software engineers will write software applications in the future, and it is one of the key concepts behind the Bitcoin revolution that need to be well understood. In this post, I’d like to explain 5 of these concepts, and how they interrelate to one another in the context of this new computing paradigm that is unravelling in front of us. They are: the blockchain, decentralized consensus, trusted computing, smart contracts and proof of work / stake. This computing paradigm is important, because it is a catalyst for the creation of decentralized applications, a next-step evolution from distributed computing architectural constructs.

Screen Shot 2014-12-23 at 10.30.59 PM

Read the article here > http://startupmanagement.org/2014/12/27/the-blockchain-is-th…verything/

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BitCoin, Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain Technology — The Ethereum Primer https://lifeboat.com/blog/2014/11/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-and-blockchain-technology-the-ethereum-primer Sun, 23 Nov 2014 21:57:32 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=12925 Quoted: “Ethereum will also be a decentralised exchange system, but with one big distinction. While Bitcoin allows transactions, Ethereum aims to offer a system by which arbitrary messages can be passed to the blockchain. More to the point, these messages can contain code, written in a Turing-complete scripting language native to Ethereum. In simple terms, Ethereum claims to allow users to write entire programs and have the blockchain execute them on the creator’s behalf. Crucially, Turing-completeness means that in theory any program that could be made to run on a computer should run in Ethereum.” And, quoted: “As a more concrete use-case, Ethereum could be utilised to create smart contracts, pieces of code that once deployed become autonomous agents in their own right, executing pre-programmed instructions. An example could be escrow services, which automatically release funds to a seller once a buyer verifies that they have received the agreed products.”

Read Part One of this Series here » Ethereum — Bitcoin 2.0? And, What Is Ethereum.

Read Part Two of this Series here » Ethereum — Opportunities and Challenges.

Read Part Three of this Series here » Ethereum — A Summary.

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