There is an unavoidable tension between the motto and the phrase.

The joint nation needs laws, rules, and regulations, and those need to be written as all-encompassing, or with exceptions defined with unambiguous clarity. Nevertheless, it will happen almost inevitably that one or more individuals will have their freedom infringed at some point in ways that many of us would regard as unnecessary, because the law or rule or regulation cannot distinguish degrees of necessity of enforcement.

Recall, for example, situations in which someone is legally obliged to perform an act that transgresses what their religious belief holds to be improper. If this is a refusal to creatively bake something for a gay marriage, a reasonable resolution might be to locate another convenient bakery; or if it is a municipal employee refusing to issue the form for a marriage license, someone else might be found to do so. Whatever the actual situation, individual judgments and resolutions might find appropriately satisfactory actions short of punishing a letter-of-the-law Infringement.

The point is that freedom and justice for all must be interpreted as applying to individuals. The basic flaw in DEI was attempting to achieve fairness in terms of race-group classifications, thereby implicitly treating every member of such a group as a clone or stereotype rather than as the unique individual that everyone is [1].

Since it is impossible to consider every possible individual characteristic when laws and rules and regulations are formulated, the most desirable protocol would be for those charged with enforcement to be also empowered to use common-sense human judgment to make exceptions when the infringement of an individual’s rights, or freedom of action, seems less important in the light of the spirit of the law, rule, or regulation rather than according to the letter of the law.

We are very far indeed from any such ideal circumstances, of course. But I think the inevitability of the clash between the needs of organized societal activities and the desire for maximum individual freedoms to act and innovate and create is worth keeping somewhere near the forefront of our considerations at a time when the over-hyped, supposedly marvelous possibilities of AI are being almost universally welcomed.

AI can never substitute for insightful judgments made by intelligent and well-intentioned human beings. AI should not be misleadingly thought of as artificial intelligence when it is actually nothing but the accumulation of enormous amounts of some sort of data together with algorithms for searching and using the data in various ways. Data, moreover, accumulated without human or other control for quality and accuracy. AI should have the same axiomatic characteristic that we learned at the dawn of today’s computer age: GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out.

What the world really needs is more human intelligence.

*********************************************************************************************************

[1] “DIVERSITY AND IDENTITY”, Keynote Address by Henry H. Bauer,49^th Annual Meeting of the American Conference of Academic Deans, Seattle (WA), January 1993; printed in Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the American Conference of Academic Deans, 1993, 27-35, and in Virginia Scholar #9 (September 1996) 18-22, (https://web.archive.org/web/20131030115950/http://fbox.vt.edu/faculty/aaup/index4.html);
Also reprinted more recently: Martin Harlaar (ed.), Ben ik wel woke genoeg? Een ontdekkingstocht door het land der Social Justice Warriors, Gompel & Svacina, 2022, pp. 182-189.

The deceitfulness and incompetence displayed by Newton/Kalichman is described in “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll-Kalichman and Mr Hyde-Newton” [4]. So when I learned that he was republishing Denying AIDS, I felt duty-bound to look at it, the more so because Rebecca Culshaw Smith’s Substack, “The Real AIDS Epidemic”, had invited readers[1] to submit reviews of the book.

I found the new edition wearisomely difficult to read because it is, like the original edition, so badly written, as well as full of errors and, perhaps above all, completely without any points of substantive interest. Having reached page 23 (of 352 total pages), I realized that I really did not need to persist further. There are misleading statements or downright errors on almost every page. There are generalizations about denialists everywhere without a single supporting actual example; and the criticisms leveled here against denialists can be much more legitimately directed at Kalichman himself, and his ilk: Those who have nothing to say about the substantive scientific issues but concentrate on criticizing the heretics [1a]; for example, dismissing what Peter Duesberg, highly distinguished professor of molecular biology, writes about viruses because he has never worked directly with HIV — whereas Kalichman describes himself as an AIDS scientist [!] (p. xvi) without having worked on any of the actual science at all.

Kalichman does admit (p. xxv) that his book-title was and remains misleading, that we should be called HIV denialists rather than AIDS denialists, but he regards the distinction as “unimportant” [!].

The book suffers not only from the deficiencies of its author but also from the lack of competent copy-editing: in only the first few dozen pages I read, there were several typos as well as errors in syntax or grammar.

So eventually I recalled the wise words of the maverick genius physicist, Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel Prize), about assertions or publications so utterly without interest from any point of view that they are “not even wrong“ [5].

After all, a wrong result or wrong claim can be useful, even valuable, if there is so much substance to it that attempts to correct it and to theorize about it leads to genuine correct advances. But there is absolutely nothing in Denying AIDS that has even the slightest relevance to such substantive issues as what really caused AIDS, and precisely how Gallo went wrong — moreover dishonestly [6-8].

Kalichman and his ilk can perhaps be of interest to psychologists, but certainly not to those engaged in the study of viruses and viral diseases and epidemics and public health. For my part, as a perfectly amateur psychologist, I do recognize how appealing it is to be on the right side of some significant issue; and that tempts us to become followers of apparently powerful and important causes or people, helping us to feel (albeit delusionally) powerful and important ourselves through disseminating and amplifying the received doctrines. That has been commonly enough understood regarding politics and governance, and certainly religions. Now that “science” is regarded as so important and authoritative, some individuals apparently derive their sense of useful activity from disseminating and amplifying some scientific/medical issues, including helping to suppress dissidents and heretics.

Overall critiquing of any scientific unorthodoxy is practiced by self-styled “Skeptics”, properly debunked by Marcello Truzzi as pseudo-skeptics [9]. HIV/AIDS “denialists” have been attacked by innumerable individuals as well as such groups as AIDSTruth [10].

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[1a] Denialism: Today’s word for “heresy”;
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/denialism-todays-word-for-heresy

[1] Rebecca Culshaw Smith, I have a request; Jul 17, 2026;

[2] Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007

[3] https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com

[4] Henry H. Bauer, “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll-Kalichman and Mr Hyde-Newton”;
https://mega.nz/file/0GJRFDqb#Y1L9tPqV81PIl8-B0okVkXMcF9xMptfj9Qeo65G3zRQ

[5] “Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!” — It’s not only not correct, it’s not even wrong!
“Where Pauli Made His ‘Wrong’ Remark”: In answer to the query raised by Leonard X. Finegold (September, page 103): Wolfgang Pauli’s remark “Das ist nicht einmal falsch” (”That is not even wrong”) was made not as a comment on a seminar talk but as a reaction to a paper by a young theoretician, on which a colleague (I believe it was Sam Goudsmit) had invited Pauli’s opinion.
Rudolf Peierls, Physics Today, December 1992, p.112.

[6] Science-deficiency of the MD-trained: Robert Gallo and Anthony Fauci; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/science-deficiency-of-the-md-trained

[7] John Crewdson, Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, Little, Brown, 2002

[8] Jon Cohen, “HHS: Gallo guilty of misconduct”, Science, 259 (1993) 168-170; DOI: 10.1126/science.8380653

[9] Marcello Truzzi, “On Pseudo-Skepticism”; https://www.anomalist.com/commentaries/pseudo.html; see Daniel H. Caldwell, “Parapsychology, Anomalies, Science, Skepticism, and CSICOP: A Collection of Weblinks presenting Arguments for and against the Paranormal with a Critical Look at Pseudo-Skepticism and CSICOP”, https://blavatskyarchives.com/zeteticism.htm

[10] AIDSTruth: The scientific evidence for HIV/AIDS; https://www.aidstruth.org

The scholarly literature is also replete with discussions of the so-named phenomenon of denialism, including various attempts at describing and defining it [1-3]. For instance, “the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none. . . . Creationism/Intelligent Design, Global Warming denialism, Holocaust denial, HIV/AIDS denialism . . . ” [3].

But with both HIV/AIDS [4] and global-warming/climate-change [5] “denialism”, for example, the vast literatures in both popular media and professional journals include entirely substantive arguments based on tangible and generally accepted evidence offered by the so-called “denialists”, a significant number of whom have substantial scientific credentials, including some Nobel Prizes; intellectually legitimate grounds for debate.

Whenever someone is charged with denialism or called a denialist, it is because of refusal to agree with some officially held belief on a particular topic, or with the generally accepted majority consensus within the pertinent community.

One might wonder why such passionately violent language is being used rather than an iteration of the evidence for the accepted view and a discussion of the supposed flaws in the substantive evidence claimed by the dissidents, the “denialists”.

I believe that the reasons are to be found in the manner in which science has become increasingly prominent, important to society, since about the middle of the 20^th century [6].

The material as well as psychological benefits of a successful scientific career are nowadays quite substantial: salaries and other earnings considerably above what other intellectuals and academics more typically receive; control of large financial and other research resources that have such side benefits as global travel and meetings at desirable resort locations; occasionally high-prestige positions with agencies of governments or the United Nations (e.g., World Health Organization, UNAIDS, UN Panel on Climate Change).

Such a successful scientific career comes from having been right: taking a fruitful research path and arriving at what are taken to be significantly correct as well as important results.

Now, the more crucial it is to be right, the greater the unconscious as well as conscious difficulty of recognizing error and, particularly, of admitting mistakes. So it is that the majority view in an increasing number of scientific and medical matters has come to be held with increasingly determined dogmatism, as I have documented in considerable detail elsewhere [7,8].

Asserting “denialism” insists that the belief being denied is beyond doubt, 100% correct and justified, that to deny it is potentially or immediately harmful in some way or ways, that the only proper response is to do everything possible to silence the “denialists”.

That is precisely how religions — certainly Western God-centered religions — deployed the epithets “heresy” and “heretics”.

Since the middle of the 19^th century and increasingly up to the present time, membership of the traditional Western religions has been declining as the society-wide choice of authority on matters of knowledge has moved from religious to scientific authorities. Particularly since about the middle of the 20^th century, scientific authorities have held their views with increasing degrees of dogmatism, for reasons of both personal and institutional self-interest. So as the frequency of allegations of “heresy” and “heretics” declined, by the end of the 20^th century the terms “denialism” and “denialist” became much more commonly used; as illustrated by Google Books N-grams:

Contrary to complex, high-falutin academic wordplay [1-3], “denialism” is very properly and easily described and defined: it is simply heresy in the eyes of those who use the term, because what they believe to be true is not accepted by the “denialists”.

Before the institutions of science attained their present hegemony on matters of knowledge, it had been universally acknowledged that the scientific approach of empirical inquiry and inference as to causes and general laws could not avoid some degree of fallibility, since the unknowable future might deliver novel empirical data incompatible with existing theories.

That undeniable fact is forgotten or ignored by those who cry “denialism”.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[1] Pascal Diethelm & Martin McKee, “Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?”, European Journal of Public Health, 19 (#1, 2009) 2–4

[2] Lee McIntyre, How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason, MIT Press, 2021

[3] Mark Hoofnagle and Chris Hoofnagle, “What is Denialism?” (30 April 2007);
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4002823
(“Note to reader: this is the original text of the What is Denialism? Essay developed in 2006 and 2007. It was first outlined on the GiveUp blog, and then published on Denialism blog as a series of posts, at https://denialism.com/about)

[4] The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis; https://www.virusmyth.com/aids/group.htm

[5] The Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change; https://web.archive.org/web/20060928121945/http://www.sepp.org/policy%20declarations/leipzig.htm

[6] Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017

[7] Henry H. Bauer, “Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 18 (2004) 643-60

[8] Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How dominant theories monopolize research and stifle the search for truth, McFarland, 2012

I call the article remarkable because it is so truly rare that any mainstream media tell the truth about all this. Contrast, for example, the obsequiousness of the New York Times with its ridiculous attempted justification for the capitalization of “Black” but not “white”, and its misplaced adoration of the biased, ahistorical 1619 Project.

That the Atlantic article would be a fitting epitaph to the passing away of DEI does not, of course, signify that I have any hope of that actually happening.

It is very easy and congenial to long for a society that features ideals of equity, inclusion, and diversity:

Equity is readily understood as being fair to every individual, treating everyone in equally appropriate ways; inclusion of course means that no individual will be excommunicated or banished or left out inappropriately from any particular activity or benefit; and diversity means that individuals are free to think and believe what they wish, to say what they wish, to do what they wish within the obvious restrictions on criminality and violence and irresponsibility needed in any properly functioning society.

It is however well known that actions speak much louder and far more honestly than words might; and the practices of those charged with seeing that DEI is accomplished are something like the very opposite of those wonderful ideals.

My academic career in the United States happened to coincide with the beginnings of what led unwittingly and unintentionally to DEI: civil-rights legislation, affirmative-action programs, political correctness.

By the 1990s, I had joined the National Association of Scholars, which had been founded to rescue academe from the pursuit of social engineering and to recapture the aim of freedom of thought, search for truth, and education of students rather than indoctrination.

I founded and for several years edited Virginia Scholar [2], the newsletter of the Virginia chapter of the National Association of Scholars.

A considerable number of my Substack articles [3] have described various aspects of the flaws in the practices undertaken in the name of DEI.

The Atlantic piece offers a heartfelt yet evenhanded first-hand account that illustrates the degree to which things have gone wrong, even or especially at the most prestigious elite representatives of US academe.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[1] Tyler Austin Harper, “Why I quit the tenure track: The insufferable hypocrisy of elite academia”, Atlantic, September 2026

[2] PDF-formatted Issues of the Virginia Scholar; https://web.archive.org/web/20131030115950/http://fbox.vt.edu/faculty/aaup/index4.html

[3] 23-12-16 A brief prehistory of the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) pandemic;
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/a-brief-prehistory-of-the-dei-diversity
23-12-25 DEI and Claudine Gay; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/dei-and-claudine-gay
24-1-10 Totalitarian DEI dictatorship at a community college; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/totalitarian-dei-dictatorship-at
24-10-6 The fundamental flaw in DEI; E pluribus unum; Melting Pot;
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/the-fundamental-flaw-in-dei
25-10-15 DEI ≡ RACISM: Political correctness “ad absurdum” (what some call “woke”); https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/dei-racism
26-4-5 DEI: Theory, Practice, Absurdity; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/dei-theory-practice-absurdity

HIV Theory is likewise a ZOMBIE, causing harm and death by insidious psychological as well as physical means, as a result of institutional incompetence, conflicts of interest, and dishonesty.

HIV Theory holds that there exists a human immunodeficiency virus that is transmittable sexually as well as through blood and perhaps in other ways as well. It causes immune deficiency in all human beings. It was first identified in cases of severe immune deficiency in the early 1980s among youngish (aged largely in the 20s and 30s) gay men and drug users in Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco. These men had originally been given a diagnosis of Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), soon changed to the now universally used AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. The well-known actual diseases that were killing AIDS patients included Kaposi’s sarcoma, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), candidiasis (fungal: thrush, yeast infection), and other so-called “opportunistic” infections: viruses or bacteria or other pathogens that are endemic in humans globally — present everywhere all the time — but cause harm only in those whose immune systems are not functioning properly.

Robert Gallo at the National Cancer Institute announced the probable discovery of an AIDS-causing virus, and a test for it, in 1984, and predicted that there would be a vaccine against it within a couple of years. After a dispute with a French laboratory, the presumed virus came to be named HIV, Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Gallo’s dishonesty is well documented [0a].

Application of Gallo’s test found exceptionally frequent positive responses among “the four ‘H’s: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users (representing all intravenous drug users), and Haitians” [1].

Later, all people of African heritage, not only Haitians, were found to test HIV-positive at higher frequency than most others, leading to the belief that HIV had resulted from an animal-to-human jump in Africa.

As more cases of AIDS were studied, and as HIV testing became extended to more and more sectors of society worldwide, evidence continued to accumulate that HIV was not, indeed could not be, the cause of AIDS. That evidence is now largely listed in a bibliography classified by topic and subtopic, with documentation from the primary research literature as well as secondary sources including more than a score of books [2].

Some of the more telling evidence includes the discovery of large numbers of HIV-negative AIDS patients [2, section 1.1.5], and that virions (actual whole virus entities) of “HIV” have never been isolated from an AIDS patient nor even from an “HIV-positive” individual [2, section 3.1.3.1].

All this had been brought back to mind by a blog on Rebecca Culshaw’s Substack [3], “Interview with Clark Baker” [4].

My academic research program for a couple of decades had focused on analyzing controversies in mainstream science and on the fringes of science. I had read the arguments for and against HIV for a decade or so before becoming convinced by the case against HIV. I published my findings in a book [5], and joined the long-standing Rethinking AIDS community [5a].

I had admired the pertinent work of Clark Baker many years ago.

HIV testing had been adopted very early by the United States Military. The supposed connection between HIV and homosexuality made problems for HIV-positive members of the Armed Forces. One result was that several HIV-positive personnel were charged with endangering others by engaging in sexual intercourse without revealing their own HIV-positive status. Clark Baker came into the picture because he had been asked to investigate possible criminal charges relating to HIV; he had been a Marine, a detective with the Los Angeles police, and subsequently a private investigator. Starting without preconceptions, Baker looked for evidence about HIV and its transmissibility, and his findings were crucial in the defense of several individuals charged with endangerment, because the prosecution was unable to present convincing evidence that HIV causes AIDS or that it is sexually transmitted [6]: “Just like that, about 25 years of risking an ‘aggravated assault’ or similar charge for not informing a sexual partner that you’re ‘HIV positive’ are effectively over. On February 23, 2015, the highest U.S. military court judged the risk of contracting ‘HIV’ from sex as so low that it is no longer a serious crime not to tell sexual partners“ [emphasis added].

Clark Baker now writes his own Substack. Many but not all of the individual articles explain various aspects of the continuing blunder of equating HIV-positive with ill health and danger of worse, and how that dangerous illusion came about. All of the entries that I have sampled are informative and well worth reading.

The four-decades-long HIV-AIDS mistake, still promulgated by official authorities across the globe, including agencies of the United Nations, is a most important lesson that remains to be learned by humankind: In this 21^st century, scientific and medical and other research authorities cannot be relied on; what they truly believe and disseminate may be demonstrably and damagingly wrong.

Secular knowledge authorities are nowadays as inflexibly dogmatic, and not to be argued with, as religious authorities were for much of the first 2000 years of the Christian era.

An intelligent alien civilization would note that the Earth’s population includes a very large number of beliefs held with utter dogmatism by groups of various sizes. Some that claim much the same label — Christian, say, or Islamic — nevertheless disagree with one another in all sorts of ways, sometimes so passionately as to bring violent confrontations. Every one of those numerous different beliefs is held by people unable even to suspect that they might be wrong. An intelligent alien civilization would have to conclude that the population of the Earth has not, collectively, reached even a moderate level of rational intelligence.

Empirically unfounded religious claims were challenged successively in the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and secular political democracy; but the attempt to understand every aspect of human existence, and the nature of the universe, has now produced secular authorities just as error-prone and dogmatic as any religions have been.

However, there is an inevitable need for authorities. Human societies have become so complex that specialization is unavoidable. We have to trust those with special knowledge and special talents in areas of our own ignorance. Inevitably we form groups and institutions, which entails Groupthink and bureaucracy, and human fallibility ensures that errors will be made.

In the 21^st century, some authoritative institutions have attained hegemony that condemns them to continue promulgating and even enforcing beliefs and practices that may produce considerable amounts of human and economic damage. The case of HIV is an iconic example, having harmed innumerable people, at a cost of tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

The only suggestion I have come across for avoiding such episodes is some way to force authoritative knowledge sources to argue publicly against the dissenting technical experts in something like a Science Court [7].

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[0a] John Crewdson, Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, Little, Brown, 2002;
“Science-deficiency of the MD-trained: Robert Gallo and Anthony Fauci”;
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/science-deficiency-of-the-md-trained

[1] National Library of Medicine; Digital Gallery;
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/surviving-and-thriving/digitalgallery_theme_6.html

[2] Henry H. Bauer, THE CASE AGAINST HIV; October 2013, Last updated December 2017;
https://web.archive.org/web/20250305094201/https://www.thecaseagainsthiv.net

[3] The Real AIDS Epidemic;

[4] Rebecca Culshaw Smith, Interview with Clark Baker, 31 July 2026;

[5] Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007

[5a] The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis;
https://www.virusmyth.com/aids/group.htm

[6] “Episode 97: The ‘Gutierrez’ Decision Ends the ‘HIV Criminalization’ Era, Says Attorney Kevin McDermott”, March 4th, 2015;
https://www.howpositiveareyou.com/2015/03/04/hpay-097-kevin_mcdermott

[7] Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland 2017, chapter 12

We all got it wrong because we were moderately literate, whereas the source of the trivia questions and answers was not, having been unable to recognize that a single vertical stroke in this case was not a lowercase “L”, “ell”, but an uppercase i, “I”.

The question seems obviously called for, how much of the “data” being accumulated in the huge data centers springing up everywhere in service to the AI Bubble is rendered misleading by typos as well as more serious errors in the data sources.

I had Googled on the day after the trivia competition, and found only one* website that had not been able to convert Latrophobia to iatrophobia and therefore continued with the uncorrected error. But that website was another example of the illiteracy that seems so pervasive among techno-geeks and techno-gurus who exemplify idiots savant or extreme Asperger’s cases — like, say, getting a Department of Government Efficiency started by chain-sawing the corpus of employees.

The website I found [1] was headed “Latrophobia: Overcoming the Fear of Doctors with VR Therapy”, and it explained: “A comprehensive guide to latrophobia — the fear of doctors and medical professionals — covering its causes, triggers, symptoms, connection to other phobias, and how CBT and virtual reality exposure therapy help patients overcome this condition”; later section headings again used “Latrophobia”.

So techno-gurus proficient (one must assume) in the practice and application of “virtual reality” claim expertise also in cognitive-behavior therapy.

I will stick with those who know what “iatro” means and “Latro” doesn’t, as in “Iatrogenesis”, which is the causation of a disease, a harmful complication, or other ill effect by any medical intervention.

* There was a second website with the same error, but it was just a one-person blog [2]

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[1] “Latrophobia: Overcoming the Fear of Doctors with VR Therapy”;
https://psytechvr.com/latrophobia-fear-of-doctors

[2] “Doctor Fear is Latrophobia”; https://www.cassialife.org/posts/doctor-fear-is-latrophobia

I would paraphrase the aphorism In this way: Religion without science goes badly wrong by ignoring or even transgressing realities of the cosmos and the world; science without religion goes badly wrong by ignoring the central importance of humankind’s needs and values.

The major Western religions, the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, focused directly on how human beings might best behave, and their beliefs and teachings about ethics and morals continue to be informative and useful. However, the institutions developed by those religions managed to go badly wrong, and they have led to much harm for at least two major reasons:

1, the misguided belief that religious inspirations can provide an accurate understanding of the physical Cosmos and worldly environment; and

2, the manner in which all human institutions become corrupted by conflicts of interest and self-interest, growing dogmatic, authoritarian, and incapable of admitting any significant error.

Beginning around the 15^th century, the Western world experienced the Scientific Revolution, followed by the intellectual/political Enlightenment, and then increasing acceptance of the fact of biological evolution that had been publicly promulgated by Darwin and Wallace mid-19^th century. These episodes were accompanied by increasing general secularization of society; for at least a couple of centuries, membership in the traditional religious institutions steadily declined, and has continued to do so.

However, moral and ethical precepts that had originated in religious inspirations were appropriated by such secular movements and institutions as humanism and existentialism, and have become taken for granted even by most of those who identify as agnostics or atheists. As Solomon Schimmel [2] has argued, the “Seven Deadly Sins”, so named by Christianity, incorporate an understanding of desirable and undesirable human behaviors that overlaps, accords with, and is entirely compatible with what secular psychologist and sociologists believe to have learned about human urges and desires.

From about mid-19^th century, science and technology progressed hand in hand to create and expand the Industrial Revolution which, together with such happenings as explorations, imperialism, trade, warfare, missionary work, resulted in today’s modern world of nation states.

Despite the great variety of different ethnic and national cultures and political arrangements, there is now, in the 21^st century, something like overall global agreement that science represents the most ultimately reliable guide to physical reality, a trustworthy guide to successful planning of desired ventures. That general agreement is illustrated by such authoritative bodies established by the United Nations as the World Health Organization and the International Panel on Climate Change.

Unfortunately and sadly, this very wide agreement that science is reliably trustworthy is outdated and has become an illusion. Science developed its deserved awesome reputation under quite different circumstances than those in which “science” is nowadays practiced. “Until about the middle of the 20^th century, science could have been described as a cottage industry; now it is a globe-spanning, significantly bureaucratic enterprise” [3, p. 25].

The intellectual developments culminating in the so-called Scientific Revolution had originated with individual, independent, intellectual entrepreneurs motivated almost entirely by sheer curiosity, though sometimes with a tinge of religious idealism — seeking to illustrate the marvels of God’s creation by uncovering specific truths. Such idealistic motivations and considerable independence characterized a great proportion of those who were engaged in much of the scientific research that was done up to about the middle of the 20^th century.

It had only been during the 19^th century that doing science was even recognized as a way of life and eventually even a profession and a way of earning a living. It should be obvious that the requirements of a profession or of earning a living represent possible conflicts of interest with pursuing the truth no matter where it might lead. But these conflicts were not serious so long as there was no way to benefit personally in any significant way from cutting corners or behaving dishonestly: personal benefits from advancing in professional status were merely social and psychological, and there were almost no possible ways to benefit appreciably in a financial way, since lucrative patents came from applications and technology, not from the discovery of new truths. Science as such, what used to be called “pure” science by contrast to “applied”, had reached its height of prestige by the beginning of the 20^th century; the 19^th century is sometimes described as having brought “The Age of Science” [4].

There were some quite notable scientific discoveries and achievements in the early half of the 20^th century, but the conditions of scientific research underwent no great change, nor did the conditions under which scientists worked. The Second World War, however, brought revolutionary changes through such scientific contributions to the wartime successes as not only the development of atomic bombs and atomic reactors but also sonar and radar and the effective use of penicillin. After the War, governmental support for science, and commercial investment in science, finally and definitively transformed “science” from a primarily truth-seeking endeavor by independent individuals into a highly institutionalized and thereby bureaucratic activity. Actual practices as well as public perceptions also brought confusions and misunderstandings, as many sectors of society and many professional individuals tried to benefit by sharing in the admired mantle of “science”. The identity of “scientist” was assumed and presumed without proper warrant by experts in any number of fields — psychology, sociology, medicine, economics — and activities and results in those fields came to be often misleadingly described by the impressive honorific, “scientific” [3].

So the admiration for reliability and trustworthiness that had been earned by genuine science has become no longer appropriate for all the ventures that now flaunt the label of scientist or scientific.

The genuinely substantive changes come from the fact that all the activities now described as scientific are associated with institutions and not with individuals. Individuals are capable of exhibiting all manner of highly desirable qualities --- honesty, intelligence, empathy, discernment, appropriate discrimination, judgment, etc. --- but institutions are incapable of behaving in such desirable ways. Corporations, institutions, groups of people are simply not individuals (no matter what some judgment from a specific United States Supreme Court might assert). Institutions cannot but be bureaucratic, whereby any spirit of ideal institutional purpose is all too often lost by bureaucratic adherence to the letters of the rules and regulations. Rare indeed, and greatly to be applauded, are the bureaucrats who are insightful and courageous enough to make commonsense exceptions to the written regulations, so that no individual is treated unfairly or inhumanely because of rules written to cover indiscriminately everything and everyone.

The institutionalization of even “pure” science has made it no longer trustworthy. The traditional requirement that scientific results be published nowadays requires that manuscripts run the gauntlet of “peer review”, which most publishing researchers know to be a potential battlefield of conflicts of interest. Academic research almost invariably requires obtaining resources from patrons or government agencies, another almost inevitable source of conflicts of interest.

As a result, almost every avenue of research has seen the periodic formation of a generally accepted “consensus” of axiomatic beliefs, bringing real disadvantages to deviating from that consensus. The majority view tends to attain hegemony, and to effectively suppress minority views and unorthodox ideas. So, in many fields of science and medicine, a particular view has come to be held with increasing dogmatism.

Because I had been interested particularly in controversies on the fringes of science as well as in mainstream science, I had become aware of this dogmatism several decades ago [5] and published a full-length monograph about that in 2012 [6].

All that has come back to mind because I learned that a revised edition of a 2009 book, Denying AIDS [7], is being published in modified form. The book’s author is a social psychologist whose unethical and incompetent antics in attempting to infiltrate “denialist” groups I have described at some length [8].

I am one of the so-called “denialists” mentioned in that book, because in 2007 I had published The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory [9]. “Denialism” is the term nowadays used to dismiss deviations from mainstream views, perhaps when the earlier common pejorative “pseudoscience” is regarded as not strong enough. In any case, either term represents for the mainstream “majority consensus” the same undesired challenge that religions describe as “heresy”: so far beyond the pale as to be dismissed out-of-hand, not to be addressed substantively and argued with in terms of evidence and plausible interpretations of facts.

The frequency with which the new term is used began to grow rapidly in the early 2000s, when those books [7,9] were published (Google N-gram):

So the issue of HIV/AIDS may deserve some of the credit for arousing authoritative institutions to do determined battle against heretical dissent, and against the heretics themselves.

So at the turn of the century, the institutions of science were behaving as dogmatically as had religious institutions, at their worst, during the Western “Dark Ages” and medieval times. Many heresies and heretics were then eliminated in one way or another; but a great number of religious heresies appealed so strongly to so many people that there now exist innumerable different sects under the overall umbrella of the Abrahamic religions.

The modern religion of science, scientism, having faith in “science” as the ultimate trustworthy source, insists that what the authoritative institutions say is the ultimate truth. Those who dissent are excommunicated and their views dismissed out-of-hand: No research grants, articles refused publication, not invited to professional seminars, and more.

One of the first publicly well-known instances of such treatment concerned Peter Duesberg, a previously highly honored professor of microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley, after he had demonstrated in two detailed articles in well-respected journals that HIV was not and could not be the cause of AIDS [6, pp. 36 & passim]. Nevertheless, the generally accepted view remains, more than four decades later, that HIV caused AIDS and continues to be a serious global health threat — even though the factual evidence, much of it in the officially accepted mainstream peer-reviewed literature [10], shows beyond any doubt that HIV was not the cause of AIDS; see also [9] and [11].

Another topic on which the globally accepted theory is almost certainly wrong is that of global warming or climate change: the accepted belief that the primary cause is the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide runs counter to long-accepted data in the literature of geology over the whole life of the Earth [6, pp. 18-26].

This latter topic also illustrates the naive faith that large sectors of scientific and technical communities have developed as to the ability of computers to do more than human beings can.

All the dire warnings and predictions about future temperatures and climates, often delivered with precise numbers, come not from empirical data from the real world but from computer models. Yet even cursory consideration reveals that it is impossible to represent, in any plausibly realistic way, the innumerable variables and interactions among them in the atmosphere and the oceans and on the land, as well as what Earth receives from the Sun and elsewhere — it would be unmanageable even if we had the needed actual knowledge of all those variables and their interactions, as well as the external impacts.

The naively misguided love-affair with the power of computing has now instigated the AI bubble. Many companies, old and brand new, are rushing to build ever bigger data-centers and to design ever better learning algorithms, and pundits everywhere are amplifying the hype about how AI can replace white-collar workers and do better what they used to do.

This is a bubble, unsustainable because there is no conceivable way in which actual eventual applications of AI could bring continuing steady income at a level needed to justify the cost of data-centers and associated infrastructure. As Galbraith pointed out [12, p.19], financial crashes and bubbles have the common characteristic of “the creation of debt secured in greater or less adequacy by real assets”; and the huge investments in data centers are effectively debts and certainl6y not real assets.

AI enthusiasts have forgotten what we were taught at the very beginning of the computer age: GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out. The central flaw in AI is the lack of judgment, let alone control, of quality. AI can only learn from what is available, and all available data and theories and insights are the work of fallible human beings. Consider Just one example that ought to be sufficient in itself: Most published research findings are false [13]. For human purposes, for the good of humankind, AI — robots, in other words — simply cannot replace people, because robots are incapable of exerting human judgment and human values, as Isaac Asimov demonstrated long ago [14].

The AI gurus do not know what they are doing, as they even acknowledge by hiring philosophers to explain what consciousness is and how to distinguish right from wrong [15]. Pope Leo XIV has it right about AI [16]:

Marking the 135th anniversary of Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIV releases his first encyclical, entitled ‘Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.’ He appeals for the safeguarding of humanity, promotion of truth, dignity of work, social justice, and peace.

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[1] Jerry A. Coyne, “Einstein’s Famous quote about science and religion didn’t mean what you were taught”, 4 December 4, 2013;
https://newrepublic.com/article/115821/einsteins-famous-quote-science-religion-didnt-mean-taught

[2] Solomon Schimmel, The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical reflections on human psychology, Free Press, 1992

[3] Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017

[4] David Knight, The Age of Science: The Scientific World-view in the Nineteenth Century, Basil Blackwell, 1986

[5] Henry H. Bauer, “Science in the 21^st century: knowledge monopolies and research cartels”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 18 (2004) 643--660

[6] Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How dominant theories monopolize research and stifle the search for truth, McFarland, 2012

[7] Seth C. Kalichman, Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, Springer, 2009

[8] Henry H. Bauer, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll-Kalichman and Mr Hyde-Newton;
https://mega.nz/file/0GJRFDqb#Y1L9tPqV81PIl8-B0okVkXMcF9xMptfj9Qeo65G3zRQ

[9] Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007

[10] Henry Bauer, The Case against HIV, October 2013 (last updated December 2017); https://web.archive.org/web/20250305094201/https://www.thecaseagainsthiv.net/

[11] Henry H. Bauer, “Confession of an ‘AIDS denialist’: How I became a crank because we’re being lied to about HIV/AIDS”, pp.378- 82 in You Are STILL Being Lied To -- The REMIXED Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths, ed. Russ Kick (Disinformation Co., NY, 2009)
https://mega.nz/file/wegVGAqL#0kJGxh0KWMhW3OsZJUFonh6c7cetmCQAhJ-0b1B1aAo

[12] John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria, Whittle, 1993

[13] John Ioannidis, “Why most published research findings are false”, PLOS Medicine, 2(8): e124. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124;
(minor correction to a table, doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1004085)

[14] Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (The Robot Series), Spectra, 1991

[15] Matthew Sparkes, “AI firms turn to philosophy”, New Scientist, 11 July 2026, p.10

[16] Isabella Piro, “Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power”; https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html

Good manners include not saying bad things unnecessarily about people who have passed away, often stated as the Latin phrase, “De mortuis nil nisi bonum” [4].

Even casual observers of Senator Graham’s activities cannot have avoided noticing, and now recalling, Graham’s innumerable inconsistencies and apparent changes of friendships and loyalties and policies, perhaps most notably becoming one of President Trump’s greatest supporters and closest confidants after having stated publicly, at a much earlier time, that electing Trump would be a disaster for the United States, to be avoided at all costs.

Political pundits and others were faced with the dilemma of how to be reasonably accurate with the facts of unpredictable, more than unhelpful changes of attitude, while not saying bad things about a man who had just passed away. For instance, at MSNOW, which speaks with a determinedly left-of-center-Democratic-Party slant, the emphasis was on what a cheerful individual Graham had been, always ready with jokes, never taking things personally, not holding grudges; as for his chronic and drastic changes of attitude and connections, well, he was just an adept political shapeshifter [5].

Whoever was the first to have thought to resolve this dilemma by using the name “shapeshifter” will have been ignorant of the fact that the term refers to one of the entities in the genre of such postulated psychic entities as Doppelgӓnger, Poltergeist, Ghost. “Shapeshifter” is that kind of postulated psychic entity that is capable of assuming animal or human form, typically with bad intentions, for example in the guise of vampires or werewolves:

“A shapeshifter can assume the physical and psychological signature of virtually any life form whose genetic material it has consumed. They are distinct from Skinwalkers as the latter is capable of shifting into any animal whilst a Shapeshifter can assume a human form. Shifters would gain these abilities either through divine intervention, demonic manipulation, sorcery, spells or having inherited the ability. Regardless of how they obtained their abilities, they are extremely dangerous supernatural beings as they could very easily infiltrate society undetected and cause great damage” [6].

In Scottish folklore, “Kelpies” or “water horses” graze next to large bodies of water, invitingly saddled up, ready to kidnap and drown anyone ignorant and rash enough to get in the saddle [7].

Some political commentators of course thought it more important to be factually accurate about what Graham’s impact on public affairs and well-being had been:

“Let’s remember the real Lindsey Graham: Evil’s Shape-Shifting Enabler” [8].

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[1] More medical names masquerading as knowledge: Dementia; Alzheimer’s;
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/more-medical-names-masquerading-as

[2] Reification in medicine: Some misleading names — ADHD; autism; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/reification-in-medicine-some-misleading;

[3] Reifying — Giving something a name does not make it a reality; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/reifying-giving-something-a-name

[4] The full phrase is “De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est”:
Of the dead, nothing but good should be said

[5] “Remembering ‘shape-shifter’ Congressman Lindsey Graham”, MS NOW;

https://www.reddit.com/r/msnow/comments/1uv8o0t/remembering_shapeshifter_congressman_lindsey

[6] https://the-demonic-paradise.fandom.com/wiki/Shapeshifter

[7] https://folklorescotland.com/kelpies

[8] David Rothkopf, “Let’s remember the real Lindsey Graham: Evil’s Shape-Shifting Enabler”,
https://www.thedailybeast.com/lets-remember-the-real-lindsey-graham-evils-shape-shifting-enabler

“Dementia is a general term for loss of memory, language, problem-solving and other thinking abilities that are severe enough to interfere with daily life. Alzheimer’s is the most common cause of dementia” [1].

“Alzheimer’s disease is a type of dementia that affects memory, thinking and behavior. Symptoms eventually grow severe enough to interfere with daily tasks” [2].

So now you know?:

“severe enough to interfere with daily life”; “severe enough to interfere with daily tasks”.
Interfere to what extent?

If “Alzheimer’s is the most common cause of dementia”, what causes Alzheimer’s?

“Scientists believe Alzheimer’s disease prevents parts of a cell’s factory from running well” [2] [note “believe“];

“Two abnormal structures called plaques and tangles are prime suspects in damaging and killing nerve cells” [2] [note “prime suspects“].

The mainstream medical consensus obviously does not understand what specifically causes the conditions to which we assign the names “dementia” and “Alzheimer’s”. These conditions are “diagnosed” by making judgments about the severity of the experienced problems. These judgments are presumed to be helped by observations of behavior and by testing memory. But since the causes of the conditions are not understood, no such tests or observations can be known to actually be real tests of those conditions.

One sad consequence is that even popular publications seeking to explain science and medicine can feature articles that make doubtfully reliable assertions. For example, New Scientist carried recently a piece with the title, “Alzheimer’s tests are failing women” [3].

A highlighted inset asserted that women appear cognitively normal compared with men for 2.7 years “despite having the same Alzheimer’s pathology in the brain”. “Women tend to have more robust verbal memories than men, which can mask signs of early Alzheimer’s disease. This means that commonly used memory tests may fail to pick up on the condition in women, delaying their diagnosis and treatment”.

This is a rich collection of assertions that have no basis in genuine knowledge.

→ Alzheimer’s pathology in the brain is only believed to be amyloid plaques and/or tangled tau proteins.

→ That women tend to have more robust memories than men means nothing in any particular case.

→ The “2.7 years” Is misleadingly precise, though I would question even something like “about 3 years” since there are no really reliable general tests of memory. Thus one of those commonly used led president Donald Trump to find that those administering the test were overwhelmed when his performance was far better than any they had ever before observed [4].
What “memory”? Long-term or short-term? What, in this context, are “long” and “short”, exactly??

→ That diagnosis of Alzheimer’s may be delayed with women implies misleadingly that there are soundly reliable ways to diagnose.

→ That treating women for Alzheimer’s may be delayed suggests misleadingly that there are known and reliable ameliorating treatments.

A truly fundamental question is whether a tendency for dementia or Alzheimer’s is significantly discernible in a particular genetic constitution:

“The biggest genetic study of Alzheimer’s disease so far has identified 127 gene locations that are associated with the condition, of which 48 are new. The study also pinpoints several genes that could be prioritized as drug targets and cell types linked to a higher genetic risk of the condition” [5].

The most fundamental axiom in the interpretation of statistical data is that statistical association may have nothing at all to do with causation. That is so contrary to everyday common sense that it is all too often forgotten or ignored — as here with Alzheimer’s genetics.

And that article continues: “Alzheimer’s disease . . . is highly heritable, with twin studies showing genetics can account for about 60 to 80% of a person’s risk . . . . Inheriting one copy of a variant of . . . [the gene APOE4] makes someone two or three times as likely to develop Alzheimer’s as someone without the variant, and getting a copy . . . from both parents can increase risk up to 12-fold” [5].

Despite the citing of actual numbers, nothing here is certain knowledge. That is already implied by the “up to”; but the chiefly misleading factor here is the assertion of increased risks that are given in relative and not absolute terms. That is a very common form of unintended misinformation or intentional disinformation.

The assertion of heritability will be interpreted by many readers as demonstrating that there is a genetic cause; but that is not so. The data indicate that “about 60 to 80% of a person’s risk” is associated with things that are the same with twins; but that could be environmental rather than genetic, and the article does not even specify identical twins. Yet the most crucial missing information is the absolute magnitude of the risk. Does having one copy of that variant gene mean that one in 100 of those affected will develop Alzheimer’s, or is it one in a thousand, or one in 10,000? That’s what really matters when it comes to potential treatment.

In everyday language, by “cause” we mean something that always follows, that the cause must be present and that it is sufficient in itself It to produce the consequences. To demonstrate that a gene has a causative influence, it would have to be shown that it is always present in cases of Alzheimer’s.

Pharmaceutical companies routinely hype their products by citing their efficacy relative to some control group, not in absolute reduction of the illness or its outcome. For example, pravastatin is claimed to reduce the risk of heat disease by of 22% relative to controls, when the absolute reduction is only 0.2–0.5% [6, p. 89]; “data on 5 common statins showed that they produced an average reduction of mortality risk of only 0.27% per year . . . . The risk of non-fatal heart attacks was reduced by only 0.037%, whereas Bufferin reduced that risk by 0.11%, three times better” [6, pp. 88-90, 93].

Geoffrey Kabat has illustrated for the cases of lung cancer, heart disease, and environmental factors how misleading relative risks are when the absolute risks are not specified [7, p. 42 ff.]

I recommend heartily the books by Kaufman and Kabat; they ought to be read by everyone who is ever prescribed a prescription drug.

What we really should be told is, how likely it is that the treatment will be of significant benefit compared to how likely it is that some “side”-effect will actually be of harm. In technical terms, what is the number of patients that must be treated in order to produce definitively one beneficial outcome (NNT) compared to the number of patients exposed to the drug to produce one notable harmful case (NNH).

In such a comparison, statins come out badly [8].

A comprehensive discussion of how to assess risks and benefits of medical treatments is Risk Savvy [9], described at length in an article by the BBC [10].

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[1] https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/what-is-dementia

[2] https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/what-is-alzheimers

[3] Alice Klein, “Alzheimer’s tests are failing women”, New Scientist, 30 May 2026, p. 4

[4] Public communication from Donald J Trump, television, n.d.

[5] Chris Simms, “Huge study of Alzheimer’s genetics finds new drug targets”, New Scientist, 6 June 2026, p. 5

[6] Joel M. Kaufmann, Malignant Medical Myths, self-published via Infinity Publising.com, 2006, ISBN 0-7414-2909-8

[7] Geoffrey C. Kabat, Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology, Columbia University Press, 2008

[8] “How (not) to measure the efficacy of drugs”;
https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/2015/02/19/how-not-to-measure-the-efficacy-of-drugs

[9] Gerd Gigerenzer, Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions, Viking, 2014

[10] William Kremer, “Do doctors understand test results?”;
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28166019

When someone is told, however, “Your child has ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder)”, such assumptions are not appropriate. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 5th edition (2013), the diagnostic criteria for ADHD are anything but unambiguous, as I pointed out in another blog long ago [1]:

Even casual acquaintance with the contents of this supposedly authoritative DSM-5 makes it obvious that criticism is more than called for. In DSM-5, the Diagnostic Criteria for ADHD are set down in five sections, A-E.
A: “A persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development, as characterized by (1) and/or (2):
1. Inattention: Six (or more) of the following symptoms have persisted for at least 6 months to a degree that is inconsistent with developmental level and that negatively impacts directly on social and academic/occupational activities
Note: The symptoms are not solely a manifestation of oppositional behavior, defiance, hostility, or failure to understand tasks or instructions. For older adolescents and adults (age 17 and older), at least five symptoms are required.
a. Often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, at work, or during other activities (e.g., overlooks or misses details, work is inaccurate)
b. Often has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities (e.g., has difficulty remaining focused during lectures, conversations, or lengthy reading) and so on through c-i, for a total of nine asserted characteristics of inattention.

Paying even cursory attention to these “criteria” makes plain that they are anything but definitive. Why, for example, are six symptoms required up to age 16 when five are sufficient at 17 years and older? There is nothing clear-cut about “inconsistent with developmental level”, which depends on personal judgment about both the consistency and the level of development. Different people, even different psychiatrists no matter how trained, are likely to judge inconsistently in any given case whether the attention paid (point “a”) is “close” or not. So too with “careless”, “often”, “difficulty”; and so on.
It is if anything even worse with Criteria A(2):
“2. Hyperactivity and Impulsivity:
Six (or more) of the following symptoms have persisted for at least 6 months to a degree that is inconsistent with developmental level and that negatively impacts directly on social and academic/occupational activities
Note: The symptoms are not solely a manifestation of oppositional behavior, defiance, hostility, or failure to understand tasks or instructions. For older adolescents and adults (age 17 and older), at least five symptoms are required.
a. Often fidgets with or taps hands or feet or squirms in seat.”
and so on through b-i, for again a total of nine supposed characteristics of inattention. There is no need to cite any of those since “a” amply reveals the absurdity of designating as the symptom of a mental disorder a type of behavior that is perfectly normal for the majority of young boys. This “criterion” makes self-explanatory the reported finding that boys are three times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD, though experts make heavier weather of it by suggesting that sex hormones may be among the unknown causes of ADHD ([Donald W. Pfaff, Man and Woman: An Inside Story, Oxford University Press, 2010: p. 147]).

A(1) and (2) are followed by
“B. Several inattentive or hyperactivity-impulsivity symptoms were present prior to age 12 years.
C. Several inattentive or hyperactivity-impulsivity symptoms are present in two or more settings (e.g., at home, school, or work; with friends or relatives; in other activities).
D. There is clear evidence that the symptoms interfere with, or reduce the quality of, social, academic, or occupational functioning.
E. The symptoms do not occur exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder and are not better explained by another mental disorder (e.g., mood disorder, anxiety disorder, dissociative disorder, personality disorder, substance intoxication or withdrawal).
It should be plain enough that this set of so-called criteria is not based on any definitive empirical data, as a simple thought experiment shows: What clinical (or any other sort of) trial could establish by observation that six symptoms are diagnostic up to age 17 whereas five can be decisive from that age on? What if the decisive symptoms were apparent for only 5 months rather than six; or five-and-three-quarters months? How remarkable, too, that “inattention” and hyperactivity and impulsivity” are both characterized by exactly nine possible symptoms.

Obviously, ADHD is a name for something that is not unambiguously defined, applied on the basis of judgments that are unlikely to be made in the same way in any given case, by different doctors, even specialized expert ones. The consequences might be serious, since strong medications are sometimes prescribed to treat ADHD.

Another example of misleading medical naming is “autism”. Once again, this is “defined” in so indefinite a way that it is nowadays acknowledged implicitly as parents are no longer told that their child “has autism”, today they are informed that the child is “on the spectrum”, of “Autism Spectrum Disorder”.

One authoritative description of this condition is [2]:

Autism spectrum disorder is a condition related to brain development that affects how people see others and socialize with them. This causes problems in communication and getting along with others socially. The condition also includes limited and repeated patterns of behavior. The term “spectrum” in autism spectrum disorder refers to the wide range of symptoms and the severity of these symptoms.

Autism spectrum disorder includes conditions that were once thought to be separate — autism, Asperger’s syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder and a form of widespread developmental disorder that isn’t specified.

Rather obviously, “how people see others and socialize with them” does not describe a condition that can be diagnosed definitively; one cannot say for certain that someone definitely has it or definitely does not have it. As with ADHD, it is a matter of judgment. Different doctors and different experts will not always agree in any given case, because it is as the Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography: “I know it when I see it”.

Again as with ADHD, medical institutions will not just admit ignorance, they attempt to pretend knowledge and even understanding [2]:

Autism spectrum disorder begins in early childhood. Over time, it can cause difficulty functioning in society. For example, people with autism spectrum disorder may have problems being social or when in school or at work. Often children show symptoms of autism within the first year of life. A small number of children with the condition appear to develop as expected in the first year. Then between 18 and 24 months of age, they may lose some skills and develop autism symptoms.

There is no cure for autism spectrum disorder. But getting treatment early, during the preschool years, can make a big difference in the lives of many children with the condition.

Yet the recommendation of early treatment offers, once more, nothing particularly definitive or helpful:

The range of home-based and school-based treatments for autism spectrum disorder can be overwhelming, and your child’s needs may change over time. Your healthcare professional can recommend options and help find resources in your area.

If your child is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, talk with experts about creating a treatment strategy and build a team of health professionals to meet your child’s needs.

Other similarly unhelpful designations include “dementia” and “Alzheimer’s”

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[1] “The banality of evil — Psychiatry and ADHD”, 25 April, 2017; https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/the-banality-of-evil-psychiatry-and-adhd

[2] Mayo clinic, “Autism spectrum disorder”;
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/autism-spectrum-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20352928

I have learned a great and useful deal about PTSD from The Body Keeps the Score [1], including a description of the development and structure of the human “triune” brain — the reptilian (basal ganglia — most primitive instincts); the mammalian (limbic system — emotions, reactions); and the neocortex (reasoning). That description seems to parallel Sigmund Freud’s description of Id, Ego, Superego; and at times I’ve found myself using those names as though they provide adequate explanations of behavior. But they do not. As discussed in the previous post [2], there is continuous, simultaneous interaction among beliefs, emotions, and reasoning; and the relative influences of these interactions vary with circumstances. Id, Ego, Superego, are not distinct, self-contained, isolated or isolatable things, they are metaphors for distinguishing primitive instinctual tendencies from more mature emotions as well as attempts at reasoning and accommodating cultural norms and principled beliefs. All three “entities” of the triune brain exchange electrical signals with each other, somehow or to some degree, directly or indirectly; and some of those signals interact with our systems of hormones which produce or modify feelings and emotions.

At any given time, our thinking about an issue draws to some degree on instinct, learned responses, and beliefs about proper behavior; in ways that vary from time to time and in some sort of connection to that specific issue.

In order not to go astray in thinking, the names and terms we use should properly describe what we are thinking about; and in talking with others, or when writing, names and terms should be unambiguous.

“Consciousness” is one of those terms to which some people lend more reality than might be justified, as when they speculate whether only human beings have “it” and how “it” may have come about through evolution. That implies that consciousness is more than being at any moment conscious of, aware of, something. What is that “more”? There is simply no agreed meaning of “Consciousness” [3].

If it is something that humans have but not animals, how does that show up in practice? Is the way that my cat Pepper is aware of my presence different in some way from how I am aware of her presence? If so, then it would indicate that she has more “consciousness” than I do, because she seems always to know where I am, whereas I often have no idea where she is.

Here is one of those rare times when Wikipedia is usefully accurate:

“Consciousness is being aware of something internal to one’s self, or of states or objects in one’s external environment. . . . It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia. There is no consensus on what exactly needs to be studied, or whether consciousness can be considered a scientific concept. In some explanations it is synonymous with mind, while in others it is considered an aspect of it” [4].

Another such undefined or badly defined but commonly used term is “intelligence”, with rather many researchers and others insisting that there is no such thing, just many kinds of intelligences [5]. It follows that the current fad for “artificial intelligence” promises an electronic equivalent of some aspect of human life that is not well enough understood to be properly defined, an insight worth adding to the many other commentaries about the multifaceted damage that data centers and applications of “AI” are bringing about.

A recent article describes a very serious harm that AI has brought, that I had never seen mentioned before: “every website, application and operating system relies on” open-source software, which is written by volunteers in their own “spare” time. But the open-source-coding community is being overwhelmed by a flood of AI-written code that desperately needs checking before it can be relied on [6].

So add “AI” to the list of names given to “things” that do not exist.

The problem with “Id, Ego, Superego” Is not that there is no meaningful reality behind the name but rather that they suggest a reality that is quite misleading, namely, self-contained, independent entities, when the actual reality is a complicated interacting system of simultaneous as well as sequenced processes.

That kind of misleading nomenclature also occurs in many other connections, for example, in discourse about history. I learned long ago about the remarkable intellectual advance from the ancient Greek prescience that culminated in The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. It took me very much longer to re-learn that what is quite universally called the Scientific Revolution and usually dated to the 16^th and 17^th centuries refers to the reality of organization and institutionalization --- for example, the Royal Society and the groups that presaged it --- that culminated many centuries of diverse activities with intermittent specific and partial progress.

So too with the Enlightenment, which in some sense is not a just a specific intellectual consequence of the Scientific Revolution but rather refers to a cultural development that is still occurring, in fits and starts, and differently in different societies.

The anthropological history of the human race is yet another illustration of names that are shortcuts for complicated realities and thereby seriously misleading. It is commonplace to recognize that the modern human species originated on the continent of Africa, and it is also common to speak of the human migration out of Africa into Europe and Asia, taking place probably between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. But what most likely happened during those times was the movement independently of various small groups venturing in different directions to varying distances, perhaps sometimes returning rather than remaining or going further. There is a great deal remaining to be discovered before the modern distribution of genetic characteristics can be convincingly explained in any convincing detail [7].

I remain curious, as I have been for a long time, about when and from where and how the Australian Aborigines came to settle their continent, with quite reliable evidence demonstrating that they were there no less than 50,000 years ago.

Names do not always refer to real things; and, as the saying goes, “things are not always what they seem”.

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[1] Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Viking 2014, Penguin 2015

[2] “Cognitive behavior therapy and the mind-body problem”, 14 June 2026; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/cognitive-behavior-therapy-and-the

[3] Rubina Veerakone, “What is consciousness?”, 29 April 2024; https://mcgovern.mit.edu/2024/04/29/what-is-consciousness/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Spiritual_approaches (at 1 July 2026)

[5] Kendra Cherry, “Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences”, updated 23 January 2026; https://www.verywellmind.com/gardners-theory-of-multiple-intelligences-2795161
Nord Anglia, “What are the nine types of intelligence that should be considered in all school curricula?”, 21 December, 2022; https://www.nordangliaeducation.com/pbis-prague/news/2020/12/09/the-nine-types-of-intelligence

[6] Matthew Sparkes, “On the edge of burnout”, New Scientist, 13 June 2026, p. 8

[7] Michael Marshall, “Out into the world”, New Scientist, 20 June 2026, pp. 42-3

“If mind and matter are such different things, then how can minds have effects in the material world? . . . How can consciousness simply be something material, since it seems so unlike everything else in the physical world?” [1].

Cognitive behavior therapy focuses on, and seeks to exploit, the empirical fact that what we think influences what we feel and how we behave. The theoretical basis is sometimes described as a “cognitive triangle” of thoughts emotions and behaviors: Thoughts create feelings, emotions; Feelings create Behavior; Behavior reinforces thoughts [2].

In some ways, all this is quite commonly taken for granted. “It feels good to be right” seems self-evidently obvious, needing no further explanation. But it is worth noting that being right refers to something mental, an intellectual judgment made by the mind; whereas feeling good is an emotion, an actual physical sensation, which in this case we find pleasurable.

Such physical sensations are caused by physiological mechanisms, for example, the release of hormones. Something in the neo-frontal cortex of the brain decides the “valence” of an emotion, whether we experience it as pleasurable or as distressing. Release of the hormone adrenaline, for example, is associated with excitement, an increase in the heart rate and blood pressure; but our brain/mind decides or interprets whether this is pleasurable, as in love and love-making, or stressful as in anger and fighting.

There is no substantial disagreement over these mutual influences of thoughts and emotions and behaviors. But many people will not welcome some of the inevitable consequences of these undoubted empirical facts.

For one thing, that thoughts are influenced by emotion and behavior is clearly a basis for skepticism about the possibility that humans could be entirely objective, impartial, independent-minded. At the same time, this does serve as at least partial explanation of the common observation that facts and evidence do not usually suffice to change beliefs, let alone systems of belief, ideologies or religions.

We learn how to behave, and how to react emotionally, and what to believe, long before we are capable of rational thought based on experience and observation. Starting at birth, we learn “default settings”, the attitudes most likely to be appropriate in various circumstances. If we feel safe and loved as babies, we tend to take pleasure in exploration, play, and cooperation; and this “default” instinct remains with us; but if we were unwanted and frightened as babies, we learned how to manage feelings of fear and abandonment and expect to do that later in life [3: 56]. We become able to exercise reason at some age that is typically around 5 or later, the age at which elementary schooling can begin; age 7 was sometimes called the age of reason, but since the neocortex begins to develop rapidly in something like the second year of age [3: 57], learning to reason surely begins at different ages for different individuals.

At any rate, long before we have much in the way of reasoning ability, we begin to learn — or, rather, we begin to accumulate beliefs. Not uncommonly, learning is taken to be the acquiring of knowledge; but how we learn, and the sources from which we learn, means that what we learn — learn to believe to be true — is often (or perhaps never) guaranteed to be objectively true to reality; it is belief, not true knowledge.

We learn from parents and other caregivers, from partners in childhood play, from schooling with its teachers and peers, from doing chores or not doing chores, from all sorts of physical and social environmental influences. Since every individual experiences such things in a unique manner, it follows inevitably that people differ in all manner of their beliefs on all manner of topics.

Since it feels good to be right, we like to take our beliefs to be confirmed by our continuing experiences; and if a given happening can be interpreted in more than one way, we will most likely choose to interpret it in a way that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. If however some event seems incompatible with our beliefs, we may find ways of overlooking or denying that it happened, or of interpreting it in some roundabout manner that jibes with our beliefs.

So human beliefs cover the widest range of possibilities, and random encounters between any two individuals would be unlikely to find much overlap in belief. However, our encounters are far from random. Typically we grow up in a small family, often with quite a large extended family, often in a village; and the chances of encountering people with vastly different beliefs are less in those environments than at large. So we like to enjoy comforting “small-town values”; and we tend to be cautious and suspicious with strangers and foreigners.

In adulthood, we form other close associations through work environments and social and political obligations, and again we like the comfort of encountering people whose beliefs are typically compatible with ours on matters of joint interest. That shows itself in the phenomenon of Groupthink [4], which is dysfunctional in putting higher value on agreement than on objectively, fact-based, decision-making. Advice commonly given in group settings, often self-advice, is “ Don’t Rock the Boat” — if at all possible, do not disagree with what one of the others says. A consequence is that “consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one may actually believe individually [5]. Irving Janis [4] described and illustrated this phenomenon of Groupthink with examples of expert advice on political matters that turned out to have been disastrously bad.

In group settings, the factors that lead to Groupthink make it likely that the favored opinions become those held by the most persistent and dogmatic advocates, namely, the extremists. Human affairs in general would proceed much more peacefully and productively if the most powerful influences were those of the judiciously critical who hold moderate views, rather than those of the extremist ones. It is, however, unfortunately characteristic of human nature that the dogmatists are also more passionate than the moderate, level-headed, thoughtful ones who are capable of considering more than one side of any given issue. There are not many who describe themselves, as philosopher Susan Haack does [6], as “passionately moderate” or passionately impartial.

The necessary, desirable, passion is not over the nature and content of any particular belief, but for a way of interacting with others that makes possible the reaching of tangible, practical arrangements for mutual behavior that is acceptable all around. It means believing passionately that others need not hold the same beliefs as we do, just so long as they accept that we can hold our own, different from theirs.

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[1] Tim Crane, “The Mind-Body Problem”, Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science; 10 February 2025, DOI 10.21428/e2759450.3614036a; https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/7fjwb5k3/release/1?readingCollection=9dd2a47d

[2] “The three-component model of emotions”; https://cogbtherapy.com/cbt-model-of-emotions#insight

[3] Bessel van der Kolk, The Boy keeps the Score, Viking Penguin, 2014

[4] Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes, Houghton Mifflin, 1972/1982

[5] Credited to Abba Eban; https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/abba_eban_167934

[6] Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (Unfashionable Essays), University of Chicago Press, 1998

It has become the general practice to accept as unquestionably factual what scientific authorities disseminate. But that is only whatever so-called “consensus” has attained hegemony in the particular research community. Not widely enough appreciated is that any given consensus reflects only one particular interpretation of evidence while other interpretations may be equally plausible.

As noted in my previous post [1], the widely accepted consensus on such major issues as HIV, COVID, or climate change was dissented from, and continues to be disagreed with, by a very substantially large minority of well-informed inside

One of the paths that led me to this understanding was an interest in topics that the mainstream of science regards as beyond the pale, matters often described as fringe science or pseudo-science.

The intellectual environment that I found most congenial for some three decades is the Society for Scientific Exploration [2]. It was founded by well-established scholars and scientists, most prominently a group of astronomers and astrophysicists, together with engineers, psychologists, statisticians, sociologists, and others. The astronomy theme was that claims of “ flying saucers” or “UFOs” should be investigated properly — which may now (half a century later!) be starting to happen after the claims have been renamed as “UAP”s [3].

This would not, by any means, be the first time that officialdom and mainstream science has had to admit that a topic once firmly categorized as pseudo-science is a genuinely real matter deserving, indeed needing to be studied and understood. Among other examples mentioned in my overview, Science or Pseudoscience [4], is that of the interactions between electromagnetic energy and physiological processes. That had been written off as quackery at various times during the 19^th century, yet has become even the chief continuing research interest of some well-established contemporary scientists (for example, Michael Levin [5]).

On such publicly and politically salient matters as AIDS, COVID, or climate change, the mainstream consensus was wrong in important ways: respectively, in these cases, definitely, or definitely on some points, or almost certainly. But somehow the conventional wisdom is not yet able to pay attention to highly qualified voices pointing this out. Fringe topics provide an opportunity to observe how equally qualified and informed experts are able to reach diametrically opposite conclusions; thus the fringes of science offer excellent material for learning about the complexities and difficulties of observing and interpreting different kinds of evidence.

My own continuing main interest has been the nature of the Loch Ness “monsters”; and I illustrated the difficulty of interpretation by showing how the very same pieces of evidence can be quite plausibly interpreted either as supporting the reality of the creatures or, to the contrary, their existence as only mythical [6].

My personal interpretation of the evidence that is available nowadays [7] makes me quite sure that the animals are real, albeit their exact genetic nature remains a matter for speculation [7a]. Many other well-informed individuals reached the same opinion: Tim Dinsdale, who filmed the back of a “monster” in 1960; Sir Peter Scott and several other wildlife experts; Robert Rines and his team of sonar and underwater photography experts that included Harold Edgerton, Medal-of-Freedom honoree for inventing strobe photography; Roland Watson, who has written several noteworthy books [8] and publishes a contemporary blog [9].

Many of the popular books written by professional scientists or science writers continue to deny the reality of Nessies.

An interesting individual here is Adrian Shine. For a decade or more he sought evidence for the existence and nature of “Morag”, the cousin of Nessie reported from Loch Morar. Unsuccessful there, Shine moved to Loch Ness and, during a decade or so, recorded quite an impressive array of sonar echoes from apparently large, fast-moving, underwater objects. At some point, for so-far unexplained reasons, Shine’s efforts turned to postulating alternative explanations for the various types of evidence for the reality of the creatures, efforts that Watson and I have critiqued [10]. Shine has summarized his views in a booklet [11], and has recently applied the same debunking approach to the centuries-long reports of “sea-serpents” [12], postulating similarities between eyewitness reports of Nessies and sea serpents by, among other things, greatly over-emphasizing the frequency at Loch Ness of “multi-humped” reports.

Different interpretations by equally well-informed and sensible commentators, quite often diametrically opposite interpretations, are more or less standard in topics on the fringes of science. The same is true within all of science and medicine, though that is less obvious to outsiders.

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[1] The full COVID story: an education in contemporary medicine and science and the fallibility of experts and institutions; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/the-full-covid-story-an-education
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/the-full-covid-story-an-education

[2] https://www.scientificexploration.org/

[3] “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena --- Preliminary Intelligence Assessment”; https://www.intelligence.gov/publics-daily-brief/publics-daily-brief-articles/unidentified-aerial-phenomena-preliminary-intelligence-assessment

[4] Henry H. Bauer, Science or Pseudoscience: Magnetic healing, Psychic Phenomena, and Other Heterodoxies, University of Illinois Press 2001

[5] https://drmichaellevin.org/\

[6] Henry H. Bauer, The Enigma of Loch Ness: Making Sense of a Mystery, University of Illinois Press, 1986; Wipf & Stock, 2012

[7] https://henryhbauer.homestead.com/LochNessFacts.html

[7a] Henry H. Bauer, “Loch Ness Monsters as cryptid (presently unknown) sea turtles”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 34 (2020) 93-104

[8] Roland Watson, The Water Horses of Loch Ness: An inquiry into the kelpie or water horse of Loch Ness and elsewhere, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011;
When Monsters Come Ashore: Stories of the Loch Ness Monster on Land, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018;
Photographs of the Loch Ness Monster: The good, the bad, and the ugly, 2019, ISBN-13: 9781793256843
Dragons West of Loch Ness: Tales of dragons roaming the hills and forests near Scotland’s infamous loch, Kindle, 2020;
How to Investigate a Loch Ness Monster Sighting, Kindle, 2022

[9] https://lochnessmystery.blogspot.com

[10] Henry H. Bauer & Roland Watson, “Failings of Nessie Debunkers and of Debunkers in General”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 38 (2024) 138-54; https://journalofscientificexploration.org/index.php/jse/article/view/2877/2095

[11] Adrian Shine, Loch Ness, Loch Ness Project, 2006

[12] Adrian Shine, A Natural History of Sea Serpents, Whittles Publishing, 2025

When the COVID pandemic first became news, the conventional explanation was that the virus had somehow jumped to a human being from something in the wholesale seafood market in Wuhan, China. The notion that it might have escaped accidentally from a laboratory in the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology was widely and officially described as a conspiracy theory lacking supporting evidence.

It is now known with something like certainty, however, not only that the virus did originate in that lab, but that the virus had also been deliberately engineered to make it more infectious to human beings.

That had been done as part of “gain-of-function” research intended to provide information possibly helpful for creating treatments if a similar pathogen evolves in the wild; or perhaps for devising counter-measures in case some “bad actors” seek to use viruses in biological warfare. A research proposal had in fact described possible experiments for specific genetic engineering to introduce features that make the virus more infectious; features that are in fact present in COVID-19.

A leading researcher was Professor Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, in collaboration with researchers at the Wuhan Institute. Funding came from the National Institutes of Health, sponsored by Francis Collins, NIH director, and Anthony Fauci, Director of NIH’s Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases.

Early in the pandemic, several articles were published that discounted the possibility of a laboratory origin; prominent virologists including Baric and people connected with NIH had initiated or sponsored these articles.

This deplorable, scandalous, situation has now been recounted in lengthy detail [1a]. Leading institutions and medical researchers in the USA created the unusually infectious and pathogenic coronavirus which caused the global pandemic after accidentally escaping from laboratory, and those institutions and individuals tried to cover their footprints and convince everyone that the lab was not the source of the virus.

Self-interested researchers lobbied the political powers to allow them to continue “gain-of-function” research despite the obvious risks, without specific foreseeable benefit other than the usual shibboleth of advancing science and gaining knowledge. Those researcher-lobbyists included NIH’s Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci.

The clear lesson is that official statements about medicine and science cannot be trusted; and that the mass media as well as many commentators and pundits cannot be relied on to unmask lies from the official authorities. The detailed unmasking of the cover-up cited here [1a] is dated 28 April 2026. However, a newsletter from the White House had exposed the same information already a year earlier [2]; as had the Report of the House Oversight Committee [3] six months before that.

Yet I had not learned of these even though the topic is of high interest for me. Not only cannot we trust official sources about such things as the origin of a pandemic-causing virus, even long afterwards the mass media remain in the bubble of earlier deliberate official misinformation, to the degree that detailed admissions from government sources are not given the intense exposure that would seem called for.

It may appear incredible that soon after the detailed publications by the White House and the earlier House Report, the World Health Organization (WHO) should continue to deny the truth, but that is the case: “the weight of available evidence…suggests zoonotic spillover…either directly from bats or through an intermediate host” [4]; and an editorial in the Journal of Korean Medical Science [5] seconded WHO and also tried to discount the details and conclusions published by the White House.

It is well past time that the conventional wisdom — the understandings among the media, the general public, and particularly policy-makers — should recognize that official, “authoritative” statements about medicine and science cannot be relied on any more than can official, “authoritative” statements about politics, or about economics, or about such social matters as race relations or economic inequalities.

Instead, contemporary opinion continues to reflect an outdated view of “science” as objectively reality-based. The achievements of science and advances in technology, since the 15^th-18^th “Scientific Revolution” and “Enlightenment” had brought increasing general trust in the authoritative voices in those domains. The atom-bomb project and many other technical advances during World War II accelerated that long trend. The media, journalists, science writers as well as medical practitioners acquired the same habits of relying without question on such authoritative voices as the Director of the National Institute of Health or one of its Institutes or, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

But scientists, engineers, technologists, doctors, are the same human beings as anyone else, and are no less fallible; they are equally prone to prejudices, subject to conflict of interest, influenced by Groupthink, tempted in innumerable ways and liable sometimes to submit to temptation. Yet completely misleading material — for example, the concept of “the scientific method” — continues to be taught in schools and colleges, about the possibility of eliciting reliable knowledge from the words of authoritative “scientific” experts.

Nothing about what happened during COVID is illuminated by an “the scientific method”. Nothing about the behavior of scientists or doctors or engineers or anyone else is illuminated by “the scientific method”. As David Goodstein wrote in a book review in Science magazine [6], everyone who had not yet learned that the scientific method is a myth should read Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method [7]. A more recent and more comprehensive description of the nature as well as history of science is Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed [8].

The fully exposed COVID story, of a laboratory-made virus and the attempt to cover that up, illustrates the hubris that tends to infect experts in any field, the illusion that since they understand the topic better than others, therefore they are also better equipped to make decisions not only internal to that special technical field but also about its applications, including judgments as to possible consequences for society at large. Ralph Baric, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and many others decided that the possible advances in understanding to be achieved by gain-of function-research with viruses outweighed any risks of harm, as they typically believed themselves expert enough not to make mistakes or experience laboratory accidents.

This episode might also serve to remind of the distinction that used to be quite commonly made long ago between hard and soft sciences, as when medical experts appear to think of themselves as scientists [9].

Also illustrated in the behavior of Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci is the inevitable conflict of interest between telling the truth and safeguarding the status of official institutions for which one is responsible. Institutions and organizations of any kind try to avoid having to admit that they ever make mistakes of even a quite minor nature.

That COVID-19 was man-made, and that the experts allowed it to escape from a lab, is a very important lesson to be learned globally. Another equally important lesson is that much about what happened during COVID reflects an earlier blunder of taking HIV as the cause of AIDS. (For the evidence that it was a blunder, see my index of the pertinent literature [10]). The chief COVID advisors to the US government were those primarily responsible for committing and maintaining the mistaken view about HIV --- Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birks, Robert Redfield (director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] for several years).

Redfield, now retired, points out in his memoir [11] that he had recognized the probable lab origin of COVID from the beginning. He illustrates nicely the important generality that the recognized experts in a particular field or on a particular topic can be very much right on one matter and very much wrong about even a closely related one; and that they can be right when their opinion is maverick and non-mainstream (COVID lab origin) while they can also be wrong when they agree with the mainstream (HIV/AIDS).

My own dim view of Redfield’s supposed expertise stems from the fact that I first came across his name in a joint publication from the Army HIV Research Group that ought to have caused its authors to recognize that the HIV hypothesis was wrong [12].

Not commonly known in the HIV story is that the US government’s Office of Research Integrity (ORI) had found Robert Gallo guilty of scientific misconduct for misappropriating a sample obtained from the French team that later was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of HIV, which Gallo had claimed for himself, a claim that was ignored by the Nobel committee.

The ORI finding was later retracted on the technical ground that deliberate intent on the part of Gallo had not been proved; however, Gallo’s intent and general dishonesty seem perfectly clear [13]. Yet somehow Gallo’s undeserved high reputation has survived: “Living Legend: Dr. Robert Gallo — renowned as a co-discoverer of HIV” [14]; “the storied career of one of the world’s most influential virologists” [15].

The HIV blunder has left permanent marks on virology as a whole, because HIV “tests” have never been validated with a gold standard based on purified samples of actual virions of the postulated virus. The presence of HIV, and even its amount (“viral load”), is simply inferred from detection of bits of RNA or DNA that are presumed characteristic of, and specific for, the postulated virus.

The last half-century has seen major errors by the scientific and medical mainstream “consensus”, recognized and publicly proclaimed as errors at the time, by substantial minorities of well-established, high-achieving experts who were nevertheless ignored by the official powers-that-be.

With HIV/AIDS, there was the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis [16]; with COVID-19, the Great Barrington Declaration [17]; with climate change, the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change [18]. In each case, the dissent from the mainstream consensus was initiated by some dozens or so fully qualified, well-regarded members of the relevant scientific community, subsequently joined by many hundreds of other signatories.

To avoid repetition of such major blunders, policy-makers must pay attention whenever a professional “consensus” is openly criticized and opposed by a significant group of fully qualified experts. To that end, they must be informed by advisers who know and understand the histories of science and medicine, especially the histories of modern times. Presidential Science Advisers and Committees, and analogous House and Senate Committees, must be staffed primarily not by technical experts but by historians, scholars of science and technology studies. Policy-making should then call on the help of a Science Court [19] to adjudicate disagreements between mainstream consensus and well-founded dissent.

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[1] Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, HarperPerennial, 1992 (revised edition)

[1a] Paul D. Thacker, RealClearInvestigations, “COVID cover-up: Hiding star researcher Ralph Baric’s ties to”; 28 April 2026;
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2026/04/28/covid_cover-up_campaign_to_hide_star_researcher_ralph_barics_ties_to_global_pandemic_1179562.html

[2] “Lab Leak: the true origins of Covid-19”, The White House, 18 April 2025; https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19

[3] Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic, “After action review of the COVID-19 pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward”, December 4, 2024;
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2024.12.04-SSCP-FINAL-REPORT-ANS.pdf

[4] “WHO Scientific advisory group issues report on origins of COVID-19”, 27 June 2025; https://www.who.int/news/item/27-06-2025-who-scientific-advisory-group-issues-report-on-origins-of-covid-19

[5] Jin-Hong Yoo, “On the controversies surrounding the lab-leak theory of COVID-19”, J. Korean Med. Sci.,;40 (16, 2025):e153

[6] David L. Goodstein, “Rangings of the mind”, Science, 256 (1992) 1034-36

[7] Henry H. Bauer, Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, University of Illinois Press, 1992

[8] Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland 2017

[9] “Doctors are not scientists”; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/doctors-are-not-scientists
“Science-deficiency of the MD-trained: Robert Gallo and Anthony Fauci”; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/science-deficiency-of-the-md-trained

[10] Henry Bauer, The Case against HIV, October 2013, updated December 2017; https://web.archive.org/web/20250305094201/https://www.thecaseagainsthiv.net/

[11] Robert R. Redfield, Redfield’s Warning: What I Learned (But Couldn’t Tell You) Might Save Your Life, Skyhorse, 2025

[12] Burke et al., Human immunodeficiency virus infections . . “, New England Journal of Medicine, 317 (1987) 131-136; teenage females tested positive more often than teenage male. See also graphs showing that on pp. 26 & 101 in Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007

[13] John Crewdson, Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, Little, Brown, 2002

[14] Newsletter, Global Virus network; https://gvn.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Living-Legend.pdf

[15] https://health.usf.edu/virology-institute/founder

[16] https://www.virusmyth.com/aids/group.htm

[17] https://gbdeclaration.org/

[18] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1260/0958305042886732

[19] Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017, chapter 12

In order to know the history, it must be somehow preserved safely and securely. During the age of writing — scrolls and manuscripts, printing and books — preserving history and making it publicly available became a well-established and institutionalized art and profession, exemplified in libraries as well as museums.

However, that age is drawing to a close as the age of digitized information has already begun. Much work needs to be done, and many resources must be created, in order to make possible preservation of the flood of digital information that can only continue to grow exponentially.

I cannot remember when it was that a website I had frequently used suddenly became unavailable, and I was forlorn until I discovered the Wayback Machine [1] which has been preserving copies of websites since the 1990s.

When I was active in the campaign to spread the word that HIV was not the cause of AIDS, I put together a sort of index of the copious literature that holds the relevant evidence; and a colleague in Rethinking AIDS [2] made that index available as a website. Not so long ago, that website disappeared; but it is still publicly available [3] through the Wayback Machine.

This resource has now renamed itself Internet Archive [4], and has mounted an active campaign to enlist all the influence and resources needed to make it possible to preserve not only websites but also contemporary news items and cultural expressions in the forms of music, videos, films.

The crying need for this is described in the book-length discussion, Vanishing Culture [5], which should be required reading for everybody. Among the examples of digital culture and information that has already been long lost are silent-era films (“only 14% of American silent feature films [1,575 of 10,919 titles] survive as originally released in complete 35mm copies”, p. 32) and records of and content from the Dumont Network (pp. 84-92), the first producer and broadcaster of TV entertainment.

The needed work is not only the provision of technical resources: national and international agreements are needed to change copyright rules from those relevant to a book age to those needed in a digital age, as large commercial corporations that produce and own so much material have no incentive to preserve it, let alone make it publicly accessible, once it is of no further commercial benefit to them.

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[1] https://web.archive.org

[2] http://rethinkingaids.com

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20250305094201/https://www.thecaseagainsthiv.net

[4] https://archive.org/

[5] https://dn720703.ca.archive.org/0/items/vanishing-culture-report/Vanishing%20Culture%202024.pdf

A recent piece by Rebecca Culshaw Smith [5] explains in minute detail how this continues to happen concerning HIV and the misguided, unnecessary, harmful, practice of administering toxic, supposedly antiretroviral, medications to individuals who happen to have tested “HIV positive”, or who are regarded as at risk for acquiring HIV.

In truth, testing “HIV-positive” can result from several dozen different conditions, by no means all of them health-threatening [6]; and the notion of risk of acquiring HIV is based on the belief that this is a sexually transmissible condition, which is not true [7].

As Smith’s piece [5] makes clear, the combined greed of the media for advertising revenues, and of pharmaceutical companies for profits, are the only reasons why huge amounts of money continue to be wasted exposing many people to toxic medications without any kind of countervailing possible benefits.

So major and long lasting a technical blunder as attributing AIDS to HIV harms not only the individuals and families directly affected, as well as national economies; it distorts any general picture of social culture and world conditions that sociologists, historians, and others seek to achieve and to pass on to coming generations.

For instance, I have found enormously informative a couple of books by historian Paul Johnson; a history of the Jews [8] and a general world history of the 20^th century [9]. Both books inspire confidence through their meticulous attention to detail, with profuse citing of evidence including specific facts and figures, all supported by comprehensive primary sources.

The world history presents convincingly what is evidently also Johnson’s personal conclusion, that the story of the 20^th century “put to the test, on a colossal scale, and tested to destruction” (p. 784) the ideological belief “that human beings could be transformed for the better by the political process”; resulting in Stalinism, Nazism, and other authoritarian collectivisms, “the modern state in . . . characteristic twentieth-century posture — trying to do collectively what the sensible and morally educated person did individually” (p. 783).

The problem of major technical blunders on matters of science and medicine is illustrated by the fact that Johnson’s magisterial world history concludes by reporting as established fact that HIV causes AIDS and that carbon dioxide causes climate change, both of which are wrong mainstream consensuses.

The whole world and all in it would benefit greatly if there existed something like a Science Court [10] in which the proponents of majority consensuses could be forced to argue their cases In the face of contradictory evidence and under cross-examination.

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[1] Could science really be so wrong for so long about global warming, HIV/AIDS, and more?
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/could-science-really-be-so-wrong

[2] Why contemporary science is very likely to go wrong on important matters
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/why-contemporary-science-is-very

[3] No one’s perfect — not even Daddy!
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/no-ones-perfect-not-even-daddy

[4] Politics and law are damagingly — I would like to say culpably — ignorant about science
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/politics-and-law-are-damagingly-i

[5] Rebecca Culshaw Smith, “Perplexity AI on HIV Advertisements”, 26 April 2026;
see her substack of 26 April

[6] 3.1 in The Case against HIV, https://web.archive.org/web/20250305094201/https://www.thecaseagainsthiv.net

[7] 3.3 in The Case against HIV, https://web.archive.org/web/20250305094201/https://www.thecaseagainsthiv.net

[8] Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, Harper & Row, 1987

[9] Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, Harpercollins, 1991

[10] Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017, chapter 12

That wise and very consequential insight Is often credited to Mark Twain; but the source has not been conclusively identified [1]

Unfortunately, what everyone knows is in actuality all too often wrong [2].

Some of my long-standing frustrations along that line include the mistaken notion that HIV caused AIDS, that cardiovascular disease is caused by too much cholesterol in the bloodstream, that healthy blood pressure is the same at all ages, and that the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the prime cause of global warming and climate change.

A correspondent recently told me of a convincing deconstruction of the latter mistake, on a podcast that features other criticisms as well [3]. Jamie Andrews is so convincing because he talks in everyday language and enables his listeners to imagine themselves in his place, drawing the same conclusion.

There are many other topics on which the mainstream professional consensus happens to be either doubtfully correct or clearly wrong, without that having such serious widespread public consequences as with HIV or with climate change: what the mechanism of smell is, or what brought extinction of the dinosaurs [4], or my own pet subject, that Loch Ness “monsters” are real animals [5].

What seems to me the most really important thing is not whether a given wrong belief has major consequences, but the evident fact that the conventional wisdom has not yet grasped that the knowledge claims of professional experts and official institutions are quite often wrong, and can remain wrong for decades, causing immense tangible harm to innumerable people and to national economies.

Nowadays it is too generally assumed that what “science” says can safely be taken as true; and it seems to be generally believed also that contemporary medicine is now so based on science that what the medical institutions and associations say can safely be taken as true, that no harm can flow from believing what comes from the World Health Organization or the National Institutes of Health or the American College of Cardiology, or the like.

The essential but missing point of understanding is that “Science” cannot speak for itself, human beings speak for it; and all human beings are irreducibly fallible. Everything disseminated as scientific or medical knowledge is disseminated by human beings on the basis of what specialist “expert” human beings think they know. However, everything that science or medicine is supposed to know comes ultimately from humanly made observations and experiments and human analysis and interpretation of those observations and experiments, all of which are therefore irreducibly fallible.

Further, since science and medicine and research in general are nowadays so highly organized, effectively done by institutions, wrong theories and beliefs are not self-corrected by new facts and evidence — so contemporary science is very likely to go wrong on important matters [6].

It is fairly common knowledge that in matters of politics or economics (say), some very bad decisions and consequences followed from widely accepted knowledge disseminated by relevant institutions and authorities, knowledge “that just ain’t so” — hence blunders like the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and several economic depressions and recessions and market crashes. But it still remains for the conventional wisdom, and the media and the public pundits, to become aware that science and medicine are human activities, and thereby no more based on certain knowledge than is politics or economics.

Or, for that matter, religion.

In the many millennia of human civilization before the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the supposed source of certain knowledge came from religious beliefs. But Gods do not speak for themselves directly to all human beings, any more than Science or Medicine do; Gods too speak through individual human beings, who then pass the purported knowledge on, orally or in writing.

A huge percentage of human populations treats their own religious belief as thoroughly believable, completely trustworthy, objectively TRUE.

An obvious fact seems to be widely overlooked or ignored:

Since there is no unanimity on religious beliefs, and since there are such a huge number of differing religious beliefs, differing on many or most or all details, therefore it seems most highly unlikely that any one of them could be, in objective reality, true.

Humanity’s prominent thinkers and leaders over the millennia illustrate our species’ inherent weaknesses, failings, fallibility, as each one of them has urged us — often believing it themselves — to believe them rather than any of the many other possibilities on offer.

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[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble

[2] “What everyone knows is all too often wrong: dinosaur extinction, and much more”, 2018/08/26;
https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/what-everyone-knows-is-all-too-often-wrong-dinosaur-extinction-and-much-more

[3] Jamie Andrews: “Control Studies” | Tom Nelson Pod #373;

[4] Henry H. Bauer, Science or Pseudoscience: Magnetic healing, Psychic Phenomena, and Other Heterodoxies, University of Illinois Press, 2001;
Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How dominant theories monopolize research and stifle the search for truth, McFarland, 2012

[5] https://henryhbauer.homestead.com/LochNessFacts.html

[6] Why contemporary science is very likely to go wrong on important matters; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/why-contemporary-science-is-very

Perhaps by considering what those words mean or should mean, and how in practice they are mis-applied in ways that bring the very opposite of the ideals they are claimed to represent, all too often to a degree that approaches utter absurdity.

I have been fortunate enough to have lived for appreciable lengths of time in four countries, and to have participated in quite a variety of professional and amateur pursuits, and I have enjoyed friendly and rewarding relationships with a variety of men and women of considerably different ancestries, economic circumstances, and professional and amateur interests. I have benefited significantly from that experience of diversity.

But in the contemporary world, “diversity” has come to signify a greatly impoverished restriction to only a very specifically racial “diversity”.

“Equity” of course means fairness, fair dealing, treating fairly. In any given set of circumstances, judgments are inevitably likely to differ as to the prevailing degree of actual equity. But in the contemporary world, equity is typically mis-defined in terms of equality or sameness: any statistical differences between identifiable groups, on anything at all, are presumed to result from deliberate intent — even though one of the cardinal principles of statistical analysis disallows interpreting statistical differences as demonstrating causation rather than happenstance.

“Inclusion”, in the practices of the contemporary world, again has a very particular meaning, namely, the inclusion of specific people from supposedly under-represented groups or populations.

So theoretical ideals are transgressed and inverted as they are practiced in existing institutions.

One major reason lies in the nature of the individuals appointed to administer the actualizing of the ideals. Be it in academe or elsewhere, the role of administering DEI is a relatively new one, and those who come to hold those positions have different backgrounds than those who work in the institutions that are introducing DEI. In academe, for example, DEI administrators very rarely if ever have the qualifications typical for being appointed as a researcher or teacher.

DEI is not an academic discipline, it is not a field of knowledge like history or sociology or anthropology; it is a social doctrine, an ideology. The officials, administrators, bureaucrats, who are appointed to DEI positions may have any number of credential letters after their name, but their relevant qualifications are simply the acceptance of the belief, the adherence to the ideology. So rather naturally a common background of DEI administrators is social activism.

All ideologies, be they religious or anything else, cannot countenance truly critical thinking. A corollary characteristic is a passionate, deadly, seriousness, and a total absence of any sense of humor, as well as a truly unfortunate lack of ordinary common sense. It is wrong-headed-ness, which is not the same as a lack of cleverness or ingenuity. Critical Race Theory, for instance, can engage in intellectual complexities capable of bamboozling even people who are by no means unintelligent.

The roots of DEI are in affirmative action, which led to political correctness and the creation of institutional arrangements in academe intended not for any educational or intellectual purposes but rather for social engineering; the same shift of priorities that has been disastrous for secondary education.

My first-hand experience of such wrongheadedness began when my University first appointed a Women’s Affairs Officer, which led to the University’s loss of its finest, most popular, nationally admired teacher [1].

Soon thereafter we experienced a vice-president (Cornel Morton) who asserted the insight that racism consists of prejudice plus power, and that since black people have no power, by definition they cannot be racist. He insulted us for having systemic bias, among other things by insisting that all search committees needed to have a female or racial-minority member; and by mandating attendance at indoctrination seminars.

The campaign for “diversity” evolved plans for dormitories and study spaces and activity centers for minority students only, illustrating how these idealistic good intentions so readily deteriorate into sheer absurdity, “inclusion” becoming actual specific exclusion.

I had lapsed over the years into the illusion that I could no longer be surprised by any further illustrations of such wrong-headed absurdities, but a recent article [2] set me straight once again. It reports efforts to find solutions to the asserted problem of inequity and continuing discrimination against women and minorities that is shown by the fact that research published by people belonging to those discriminated-against groups is cited less often than is research by others. The attack on this problem consists of “citation diversity statements” and actions [3]:

“A citation diversity statement is a short paragraph, included before the References section of a paper, where the authors consider their own biases and provide data on the proportion of identities represented by authors cited in the reference list. The goal [sic] of citation diversity statements are [sic] to help expand the diversity of voices represented in research!

A citation diversity statement includes:

(i) Expressing the importance of citation diversity.

(ii) The percentage breakdown (or other diversity indicators) of citations in the paper.

(iii) The method by which percentages were assessed and its limitations.

(iv) A commitment to improving equitable practices in your field of research.

Each component indicates the value of developing means for supporting citation diversity and diversity in academic research overall (Zurn, Bassett, & Rust, 2020).”

The cited resource “(Zurn, Bassett, & Rust, 2020)” acknowledges implicitly that citation diversity statements in themselves do nothing to “correct” the lack of citation of politically-correctly-authored sources, and suggests other actions as well: “conscious efforts to familiarize oneself with the work of minority scholars” [4].

The same theme is elaborated elsewhere, including editorials in such STEM publications as Nature Reviews Bioengineering: “before starting the writing process, we suggest identifying key research groups and performing an in-depth literature survey” [5].

Thus the editors of a Nature Review journal appear to imagine that people who set out to write a review article may not be familiar with the topic they choose to review? That they do not already know where the significant work has been done and published? This seems rather sad as well as absurd.

A discussion of “Citation bias, diversity, and ethics” [6] refers specifically to citation diversity statements and recognizes that actions beyond such statements would be needed to produce actual changes. Quite properly, however, that article insists that accepted norms should not be transgressed: “Citations should be included because they provide information that supports the arguments, methods, or conclusions in a paper, not because they are needed to bolster diversity or check a box on a manuscript submission form” [6]. Yet the citation diversity statement in that very publication states, “We have included some references to enhance diversity but have not omitted any references for this purpose”; thereby illustrating that there is no way in which citation diversity can be enhanced without adding citations that would not otherwise have been included, in other words, by indeed transgressing accepted norms.

Some developments in recent and contemporary scientific (or pseudo-scientific) activity will make it extraordinarily easy to add large numbers of citations for the sole purpose of increasing the diversity of authors represented.

One such development is the mushrooming of so-called predatory publishers and their on-line “journals” [7]. Since the costs of publishing online are insignificant, and since how often one is published has rather direct influence on career advancement, a number of entrepreneurs initiated new, purportedly scientific publications that accept virtually any submission provided the author pays the “Article Processing Charge”. The result has been a proliferation of online publications that could not meet the quality requirements of the well-established print journals, but that enable authors to list name, date, and place of their “publications”, which has no doubt served to advance the careers of some significant number of people at institutions not in the top rank, where such matters as predatory publishing are not known or understood.

A more recent development is the proliferation of so-called artificial intelligence (AI) with such easy means of using it as chatGPT. That will now enable anyone to find any number of publications by authors of any desired sex or race, on any given topic. The prevalence of predatory publishing over the last decade or two indicates that such AI searches are very likely to bring all the information needed to make any list of citations on any given topic as diverse as may be desired.

All this seems to me to illustrate what Julien Benda described in 1927 as La Trahison des Clercs [8]. Academe, universities in particular, have the duty to support the search for genuine truth, to speak truth to power. That duty is not being performed, and it is treasonable for those institutions and the people in them to place a higher priority on other matters.

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[1] Henry H. Bauer, “The trivialization of sexual harassment: lessons from the Mandelstamm case”, Academic Questions, 5 (1992) 55-66;
“Affirmative Action at Virginia Tech: The tail that wagged the dog, Academic Questions, 6 1992-93) 72-84

[2] “Harry Haufele”, “Woke citations: a norm reversal in science”, Academic Questions, 38 (2025-26) 50-53

[3] Graduate Student Research Institute, University of Washington, “Activity: Explore and create a citation diversity statement”;
https://sites.uw.edu/libid/writing-and-citing/activity-writing-citing/activity-citation-diversity-statement

[4] Perry Zurn, Danielle S. Bassett, & Nicole C. Rust. “The Citation Diversity Statement: A practice of transparency, a way of life”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, September, 24 (2020) 669-71

[5] Editorial, “Citation diversity statement”, Nature Reviews Bioengineering, 1 (2023) 227

[6] Keisha S. Ray, Perry Zurn , Jordan D. Dworkin, Dani S. Bassett, & David B. Resnik, “COMMENTARY: Citation bias, diversity, and ethics”, Accountability in Research, 31 (2024) 158-172

[7] Henry H. Bauer, “Fake, deceptive, predatory science journals and conferences”; https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/fake-deceptive-predatory-science-journals-and-conferences;
“Money has corrupted science, including some individual scientists;
https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/2017/03/11/money-has-corrupted-science-including-some-individual-scientists/
“Predatory publishers and fake rankings of journals”; https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/2017/04/06/predatory-publishers-and-fake-rankings-of-journals

[8] Julien Benda, La Trahison des Clercs , Paris, 1927
First British edition, 1928, tr. Richard Aldington, The Great Betrayal (UK), The Treason of the Intellectuals (USA); reprint, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, Beacon Press, 1955
Henry H. Bauer, “Editorial: La Trahison Des Clercs”, Virginia Scholar, 8 (1996); https://web.archive.org/web/20131030115950/http://fbox.vt.edu/faculty/aaup/index4.html

1. The parlous state of book publishing

2. That the widely accepted view on several highly important matters is not in accord with the factual evidence.

When Kalichman’s book was first published, I became preoccupied with writing lengthy corrections of the numerous wrong and misleading assertions in it; and as I said at the time, since there was so much about me personally in the book, I was not an appropriate reviewer of the book as a whole.

Looking at the book now with fresh eyes, I am appalled that so prominent and prolific a publisher as Springer could issue something so shoddy and sloppy. Even the most basic copy-editing would have corrected the misuse of “refute” when simple disagreement is meant, or the wrong spelling of “hominem” (see sources 5 and 6 in [1]).

Several other things in the book are no less reprehensible. Appendix B offers a detailed discrediting of several prominent “denialists”, with superscript numbers 1-14, the usual indication of footnotes or endnotes — but there are no such footnotes or endnotes to be found, even as there are a dozen pages of Notes for the earlier 6 chapters.

What is described as an index is so incomplete as to be perfectly useless.

Book publishing comes increasingly from a very small number of conglomerates that have incorporated the names of original publishers without incorporating the care and quality that had made good reputations for those original ventures.

I have written in many places about several highly and publicly important matters over which the global conventional view is clearly contradicted by factual evidence: of course HIV/AIDS, but also carbon dioxide as primary cause of global warming and climate change, as well as a number of standard views in medicine, for instance about cardiovascular disease and cholesterol, or HPV vaccines.

I pointed out that what “science” says about these matters is heavily influenced by the fact of innumerable conflicts of interest with many sectors of society, and the manner in which a majority consensus exerts hegemony in scientific and medical communities.

It occurs to me now that this state of affairs actually describes human social activities quite in general, not merely in science or medicine. That established beliefs rather than facts of reality determine policies and practices is just because scientists and doctors are human beings, and medical and scientific communities behave just like other organized groups of human beings.

Once an activity becomes organized, there comes a division of roles that includes, as one or several, the responsibility to speak for the activity as a whole. An orthodoxy is established, in other words. If participants in that activity come to the conclusion that the orthodox view is incompatible with reality, they are unlikely to be able to convince the guardians of orthodoxy of that and to alter the official views; instead, the dissenters are likely to be excommunicated and to establish their own rival orthodoxy.

That has happened on religious matters for at least two millennia, as the number of sects and cults calling themselves Jewish or Christian or Muslim (or whatever) has proliferated.

Nowadays in most of the developed world, knowledge and understanding are looked for in, and accepted from, scientific and medical and research communities rather than from religious authorities. Those who disagree with scientific or medical orthodoxies are treated with as much disdain as were heretics, in the past, on religious matters. Modern-day dissenters have their careers undermined, their personal characters attacked, are generally treated as unwelcome “Others” for whom no bad treatment is too bad.

It is quite rare that individuals relinquish and change long-held beliefs because of the weight of contradictory factual evidence. With orthodoxy, which is the group equivalent of individual belief, the same lesson is taught by history. Guardians of orthodoxy are not swayed by the facts of reality. That is illustrated in contemporary times by, for example, the more than four decades during which HIV/AIDS Orthodoxy has remained globally hegemonic even as the theory is quite demonstrably contradicted by the facts [2].

Policies and practices based on wrong theories can bring tangible harm. Many people have been tangibly damaged physically, socially, psychologically, by the belief that a positive HIV test demonstrates a real danger of becoming terminally ill with AIDS; and tens of billions of dollars have been mis-spent in research based on the wrong theory, and in the production of so-called antiviral medications that are more toxic than beneficial.

The mistaken belief that human-caused production of greenhouse gases is responsible for global warming and climate change has also brought much useless expenditure as well as international negotiations that include such absurdities as expecting developed countries to make huge tangible gifts to “the third world” as compensation for emitting greenhouse gases.

Unfortunately, that wrong theories bring tangible harm does not mean that those policies and practices can be modified by showing that the theories are wrong; human institutions don’t work that way.

The illusion that facts can be the decisive basis for policies and practices is particularly common among intellectuals, particularly those of about my generation, and perhaps especially those engaged in scientific endeavors. Since we have strived continually to uncover genuine facts of reality and to base understanding on those facts, we lapse into assuming that this is the natural way of things. That illusion is helped along by a cherry-picking acquaintance with history as supposedly an overall steady progress from superstition to genuine knowledge, via the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the enlightenment, and the triumph of science over religion in the understanding of temporal affairs.

But it remains an illusion that individual beliefs could often be changed by sheer force of facts, and it is also an illusion that mistaken theories, once established as accepted mainstream consensus, can be “self-corrected” by demonstrating contradictory facts. The “scientific method” may be an ideal, but it is only a myth that scientific activity actually works in that self-correcting way [3]. As to how beliefs are formed, in matters of science as elsewhere, and pitfalls that separate our beliefs from factually demonstrable truth, see “Motives for believing” and “Accomplices to belief”, chapters 11 and 12 in my analysis of the 1940s-~1970s controversies about the assertions of Immanuel Velikovsky [4].

Since expert communities cannot be relied on to self-correct, something like a Science Court [5] would be a wonderful public good. Unfortunately, lobbying for public goods is not nearly as powerful as the lobbies acting for self-interested groups, which includes professional expert communities.

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[1] “An unwelcome voice from the past”;
https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/an-unwelcome-voice-from-the-past

[2] THE CASE AGAINST HIV; https://web.archive.org/web/20250305094201/https://www.thecaseagainsthiv.net

[3] Henry H. Bauer, Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, University of Illinois Press, 1992

[4] Henry H. Bauer, Beyond Velikovsky: The History of a Public Controversy, University of Illinois Press, 1984

[5] Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017, chapter 12

Smith provides continuing coverage on her substack [1a], for example about HIV drugs and court cases about them. She recently mentioned that Seth Kalichman has started a substack blog and plans to reissue his 2009 book [1b].

After I had published (in 2007) my book [2] about the flaws in HIV/AIDS theory, I had started a blog at WordPress [3] as a forum for further discussion. Kalichman’s book was so full of errors, and his behavior so egregiously dishonest, that he features in quite a large number of my posts at WordPress. For example, he makes the ludicrous assertion that only publications after 2000 need be attended to [3a] and that “scientists are by their nature and training systematic and objective” [4]. His grammar and syntax verge on illiteracy — for instance, “refute” is used as though it meant “disagree with” [5], and “ad hominem” is misspelled “homonym” [6].

Kalichman was blatantly dishonest, deciding that he could obtain insider knowledge about HIV/AIDS dissidents by impersonating a graduate student, “Joe C Newton”, and communicating with “denialists” in that guise. He went so far as to attend as “Joe Newton” a meeting about cancer organized by Peter Duesberg, who had long been the most well-known critic of HIV/AIDS theory.

Such deceit is specifically banned by Kalichman’s profession of psychology; yet he even had one of his own real graduate students at the University of Connecticut help in his deceptive practices [7].

His lies about me included that I had never done science [8], ignoring the many articles and several books in electrochemistry listed in the C.V. with which he was familiar

Eventually I wrote a satirical piece about his relationship with Newton [9].

I hope this might be the last time I hear anything about him.

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[1] THE CASE AGAINST HIV; https://web.archive.org/web/20250305094201/https://www.thecaseagainsthiv.net/

[1a] https://substack.com/@rebeccaculshawsmith

[1b] Seth C. Kalichman, Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, Springer, 2009

[2] Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007

[3] https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/

[3a] https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/proving-hivaids-kalichman%e2%80%99s-blunders-in-a-nutshell

[4] https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/the-social-psychology-of-%e2%80%9cdenialist%e2%80%9d-scientists-kalichman%e2%80%99s-komical-kaper-2-part-2/

[5] https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/hivaids-refuted-according-to-kalichman-kalichman%e2%80%99s-very-komical-kaper-8

[6] https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/kalichman-disclaims-and-makes-ad-homonym-attacks-does-illiteracy-matter-kalichman%e2%80%99s-komical-kaper-9/

[7] https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/how-not-to-create-a-persona-kalichman%e2%80%99s-komical-kaper-4/

[8] https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/kalichman-disrespects-bauer-bauer-blows-his-own-trumpet-kalichman%e2%80%99s-komical-kaper-11/

[9] STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL-KALICHMAN AND MR HYDE-NEWTON as told by Henry H. Bauer;
https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/jekyllkalichmantale.pdf