Sometimes honest observers take a too idealistic view of the past.

I’ve recently read George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) set in 1829-1832. The financial sector in England was nearly as corrupt then as in today’s USA. Society and public opinion nearly as stupid and parochial as the US media. At this time, the Triangular Trade in human slaves was just coming to an end. In fairness to England, they were among the first to outlaw slavery in modern times (1834) and even allotted a fleet to the west coast of Africa to hinder the slave trade. Yet the expropriation of the natives continued apace, in both the Dominion of Canada and the United States of America. Simultaneously India was despoiled by the British, as they prepared for the Opium Wars to cripple China (1839-1842, 1856-1860).

Tonight I just happened to read a bit of Percy Shelley, “Song to the Men of England” (1839). Here’s the most moving stanzas:

Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed and clothe and save
From the cradle to the grave
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?...

The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.

The American militiaman and worker effectively lives today as Englishmen did 185 years ago. Not Percy Shelley, not Juan Cole, not Philip Weiss, not Richard Medhurst, not Bernhard Horstmann, not Ron Unz and certainly not Alec Kinnear have been able to put a stop to it. Those who would enslave, expropriate and war carry on making the human condition worse as quickly as technology will enable it and the laws allow them.

The ubiquity of evil in the past does not excuse us from fighting evil where we find it in the present. In recent times, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden did manage to put a small dent in evil doing by exposing it to light. Collateral damage will never as effective a euphemism (Assange), while conspiracy theory has become conspiracy reality (Snowden), thanks to their efforts.

Like many of you I abhor the destruction of art work to make a political point. The removal of historical monuments and statues, I also oppose.

But in this case, the targeting is exact. It is Balfour.¹

In the comments, TarquiniusSuperbus notes:

Good for this protester, and very courageous! And what is so wrong about being anti-Israel anyway ? Israeli Zionist Jews are anti-Christian, anti-Druze, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian, and anti anyone else who is not a Jew. Let’s face it, Zionist Jews are the most hateful people on earth.

That’s awfully blunt but not far off the mark. Charles Manson was close competition but he’s no longer with us.

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however, far it is pushed one way or the other.

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim-for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives-is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves, or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them they are fighting for liberty and Justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High….

This is a slight oversimplification. The lines blur and cross between these groups. On the other hand, the basic idea is sound. Those who create revolution come from the middle classes, sometimes the lower middle class, sometimes the upper middle class. Persuading the rabble, and later the army to follow them, is the first prerequisite for a successful revolution.

Even a word like rabble is loaded, suggesting that people of lower social-economic bracket do not deserve the same respect or are not as worth as those from a higher caste.

Regardless of language and one’s feeling about equality, the pattern does remain the same. Revolutions are almost always a bloody affair (the Velvet Revolution in Czechloslovakia is the rare exception, but even it was followed by the Bloody Nineties in Bratislava, and gangland turfs enveloping even the family of the president of the republic). Avoiding revolution should be one of the primary goals of a democratic country.

Sadly our current leaders seem to think that people’s patience for their self-indulgence and graft and endless off-shoring of assets is infinite. It’s not. What will happen eventually is that we’ll put our foot down and thrown them all out of power, and we’ll cancel existing currencies, leaving off-shore assets completely out in the cold. Neither England’s Charles I thought it was coming, nor did France’s ancien regime. Certainly Leo Tolstoi’s peers in the Russian nobility did not anticipate that their much loved Tsar with his beautiful family would be torn off their thrones and executed in a basement in Sverdlov. All of their country mansions and city houses forfeit and property of the state.

In every case, the disorder and bloodshed which followed each revolution was in many ways worse than what the discontented revolted against. Push humankind hard enough we’ll take the risk of an uncertain future over certain present slavery. Every time.

From Joe Biden through Boris Johnson-Rishi Sunak through Emmanuel Macron, and especially the venial social climber Ursula von der Leyen, our current leaders have shown a total lack of concern for the well-being of the people. If more enlightened leaders are not soon forthcoming, revolution is again in the air. This time it will be technology against the people.

A race like this has been run again, the Soviet Union had almost infinite resources to crush dissent and monitor its citizens. Before the Do-As-We-Say-Not-as-We-Do-Rules-Based-Order falls we can likely expect decades of persecution. The January 6 Show Trials in the United States along with the crushing of the Trucker Protests in Canada, are the opening chapter, early balloons like Stalin’s opening show trial in August 1936 where NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda presided over the evidence. Less than two years later in March 1938, Yagoda was no longer in the witness box, but in the cage of the accused and himself purged.

If the work of reformers is rejected, the revolutionaries will follow in our place, and all levels of society will have reason to lament rejecting a fair social contract in favour of graft and corruption to the benefit of the then ruling classes. To share the wealth fairly would not be that difficult. Canada managed to do it between 1945 and 1980, Scandinavia until close to 2000. A side benefit is that a just society is usually a safe one.

Photo is of Genrikh Yagoda in parade uniform on Red Square before his own downfall.

Capitalism can grow externally in terms of wars, foreign interventions and militarized accumulation. In fact, as UC Santa Barbara Sociologist William I. Robinson describes, global capitalism has become dependent on war-making to sustain itself. Or it can grow internally by intensifying privatization, destroying labor rights, human rights and environmental protections within existing capitalist markets in order to open up more avenues for profit. In this interview, Robinson describes it:

For 530 years now, since 1492, we’ve had outward expansion – constant waves of colonialism and imperialism, bringing more and more countries, more and more people into the system. Now every country- every community on the planet- is integrated directly or indirectly into global capitalism. There’s no more room for what I call extensive enlargement or outward expansion. The other mechanism that capitalism has to expand is what I call intensive expansion, meaning that you turn more and more sectors and spheres of society into opportunities for accumulation. That’s been privatization – you privatize education, healthcare, public infrastructure, and nature. You’re not opening up new territories but opening up new areas.

In either case, capitalist growth is the growth of poverty, the growth of social and political inequality, of human suffering, and the destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems. We can see it on a global scale— everywhere capitalism has gone, the ecological commons have been destroyed. Indigenous people have been killed or displaced. Workers are enslaved or become alienated from their labor and exploited. And poverty has been created for masses of people where there was none before, while the commons and the public wealth have been privatized and consolidated by the top tier of the economy. . . . . “It’s Time to Call it What It Is: A Capitalism-Induced Ecological Crisis” by Erin McCarley.

Capitalism is predicated on growth, which is exactly the opposite of sustainability. Sustainability is predicated on stability with occasional contraction. There’s no reason for contraction to be particularly painful as long as it is in steady degrees and not all at once.

I.e. if population goes down 10% in a town where there are 12 restaurants, there’s still room for ten restaurants. In this same town, the decline in population means home prices will probably fall further – say 20%, or rather simply not appreciate. In relative terms, it means young couples will be able to buy larger apartments. If one looks at the films of the French New Wave in the sixties, middle class newlyweds in a good marriage were moving into 120 m2 and not the 55m2 one bedroom apartments they have now. France was supposed to be a poor country and the US and Canadian dollar were enormously value in French francs.

With a 120m2 apartment, the idea of having two or three children instead of a single child or none, becomes far more tempting. Hence, contraction effectively creates growth.

Of course for the capitalist, a temporary 20% decline in real estate prices or even a twelve years without growth in prices is simply unacceptable. This is the constant push for growth, even when that growth is destructive.

European countries are being told again that our populations are declining and hence we must accept whomever breaks through our borders (in the 90’s it wasn’t this way: it was hard to get into Europe on a permanent basis). Even to the point, we should encourage this migration. What is not discussed is how we should pay for the education and accommodation of these newcomers. It will pay for itself in growth, is what is thrown out blithely. In carefully chosen immigration, with selection for education, intelligence, cultural affinity this is true. But not when adding people whose skillset is not required and whose education is rudimentary. When one adds individuals with no cultural affinity it’s a recipe for trouble which creates angry ghettos, including the no-go zones of both Sweden and even earlier in France.

More crime does create growth – for insurance companies, police departments and prisons. But it reduces the quality of life and even the potential for real positive growth in the future.

In reality, it would be just fine if European populations fell to two-thirds of their peak and young working families could enjoy spacious homes in peaceful towns. Quality of life would go back up and there would be a desire to bring more babies into this attractive and comfortable environment. Contraction in this case is a natural phase of true growth.

This is not just theory. Europe over the last two thousand years has had many periods of increasing prosperity with the attendant increase in population. When population became too high for current conditions, sadly either disease or war reduced the population by as much as half within six months. To avoid enormous health crisis and/or massive wars, it’s important to control population and encourage occasional contraction. No one needs lebensraum in this case, no country suffers a critical shortage of essential resources.¹

AGuy scoffs at resistance, recommending going off the grid alone:

LOL You’re that guy going to do a citizens arrests for Hilter & Himmler in NAZI germany. Its just not going to happen.

I recommend Plan B: Go Galt, Build a homestead with the means to provide all of your basic needs. Be ungovernable & not dependent on the system.

In turn conhopco points out the obvious: “You can run, but you can not hide!” in-the-ether makes explicit the logic implicit in Joe Louis’s warning.

“going galt” is another way of saying RETREAT – fall back, try to stay out of the way.

They will NOT leave you alone. eventually we must confront this great evil. Imagine doing it before it was far too late….

in-the-ether is right. Humans do not allow other humans to hide. We are social animals and joyfully destroy the lives of individuals who leave the herd. As a concrete example, if you buy land off-the-grid and don’t participate in town meetings, what will happen is that the zoning will be changed, your taxes will be changed and you will have to sell or forfeit your property. Or the town will simply claim eminent domain and take your property for a fraction of its commercial value.²

Remember what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said: “If only we had fought back against the security forces when we could, the Bolsheviks/Communists could never have built their totalitarian state.”³

Every good man (for the most part this isn’t women’s work, though there are notable exceptions) lost to attempted isolationism or passivity or slow waves of arrest and persecution makes resistance that much harder.

It seems to me the US is at a tipping point. Resist or live as frightened slaves to a “progressive”/neocon agenda. Have to give credit to the neocons here, using the progressives/woke/antifa as their brownshirts is a stroke of genius. It makes allies of people who should be part of the resistance and allows them to lurk in the shadows, starting their foreign wars, carrying on with their assassinations.

^{Image: Morris Gordon photo of Billy Conn v Joe Louis, Yankee Standium, 1946. Source, artnet sale.}

At least a whole lot of people can now answer the question of what they would have done in Germany as the Nazis came to power — resist, or be a good German.

The answer to that question we now know is very little. As Goebbels noted, the masses are easily led. Even in a country like the United States with a tradition of free speech, it appears free speech can be more or less suppressed both socially and legally within a single generation. What’s worse is how few people seem to care.

“If it keeps us safe from [Terrorists | Trump | Republicans | Libertarians], then I agree. I don’t need free speech.” I’ve heard this grovelling for safety by censorship in these words from at least four adult North Americans in the last year.

What is at the the root of the loss of critical thinking? SDShack has a theory:

Idiocracy. People literally have a 5 second attention span. There is no way you can engage any critical thinking processes when you simply flip from one video/audio stimuli to another. This is deliberate programming and nothing else. Only breaking the cycle will allow for any chance at returning to a functional society, which is why TPTB have gone all in on doing EVERYTHING to maintain their brainwashing.

Indeed, it is shocking at how difficult it is even for trained critical thinkers to maintain their concentration in the Social Media Age. Raising generations to be unable to sit and concentrate and think for themselves is extremely frightening.

Gone quite appropriately reminds us that, based on past performance, trusting authority in the West is really not much better than trusting authority in the Soviet Union or a theocracy:

Well known psychological fact that people go for the easy option and the easy option is to trust the government and do what they say. Same people who gave you Thalidomide and Mad Cow Disease.

The language of the question is important runningman18 reminds us:

The poll says they support censorship of “misinformation”….that’s how they rig the stats. How do they define “misinformation”? Anybody polled would interpret it differently according to their politics. Democrats are so dumb and indoctrinated they think there is actually such a thing as “hate speech” and they think it’s legal to ban it. Of course they think “misinformation” is legal to ban also. What if the poll asked them “Is it okay to censor information?” It’s all about how censorship is presented. Despotic governments always present it as a “greater good” situation….

The goal here was clearly to present that most or nearly most Americans support censorship (“suppression of misinformation”). Poll seems to have been weighted in an unrepresentative way according to JimmyJones:

if you look at the method they are giving weight to minority respondents and sampled way more Dems, as usual. By doing that, especially now with weighted values they can make the poll reflect anything.

So it’s a nonsense poll created to manufacture consent for censorship. As G.W. Bush would say about the Iraq war in May 2003, Mission accomplished! G.W. Bush would follow that up a month later in Afghanistan: “America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished.”

Perhaps free speech is not as dead as the Jack Dempsey, CNN and the Democrat party would like us to believe. As Afghanistan’s tribes eventually liberated themselves from the foreign imperialist yoke, with persistence and over time guerilla thinkers can bring critical thinking and open debate back to Western society.

Photo by Kyle Cleveland.

As a senior engineer at Google for many years, Zach was aware of their bias, but watched in horror as the 2016 election of Donald Trump seemed to drive them into dangerous territory. The American ideal of an honest, hard-fought battle of ideas — when the contest is over, shaking hands and working together to solve problems — was replaced by a different, darker ethic alien to this country’s history.

Apparently already in 2016 Google was rewriting its algorithms to make sure searches smear Donald Trump and praise Hillary Clinton. WB at Zerohedge notes:

In 2016…

Typed “Donald Trump” into Google and all the search results were anti-Trump. Typed “Hillary Clinton” into Google and all the search results praised Hillary.

It was so painfully obvious that Big Tech and mainstream media was no different than state-run media in present-day and past China, Russia, Iraq, East Germany, etc.

AND YET, liberals in my circle of family and acquaintances CANNOT SEE THIS. “Snopes proves yet again that Trump is bad, Hillary is good. See?” Idiots.

While I don’t particularly like Donald Trump, not so much for his politics as his sharp business practices⁴, it is not the place of a technology company to attempt to decide an election (2016) or participate in a conspiracy to decide an election (2020). The idea of a level playing field was a huge part in the culture of North America up until the last twenty years and was important to how North American companies outperformed Europe and other regions. The alternative to a level-playing field is nepotism and rigged courts, both of which rarely end well for the civilisation which embraces them.

The separation of politics and business were very important to the success of North American business. Most companies were focused on business and excellence, not on state handouts and lobbying for political favour.

Citizens, whether of the United States or elsewhere, deserve a free media, not a captive media consolidated in the hands of six deeply establishment corporations. Citizens also deserve elections free of interference from tech providers who should remain neutral. It should not be Google’s job nor Facebook’s job to tell people how to think. That they do recalls the state papers of the Soviet Union – Izvestia, Pravda, Krasny Zvezda, Trud – they were all the news and they all printed the same thing: what the party wanted proles to think.

I thought the US goal was to defeat the Soviet Union in the name of freedom, not to adopt its worst practices.

Image credit: Project Veritas.

Today there is no knowing the nature of this new Taliban patriotic government but it will reveal its spots in the next week or two.
I believe that Afghanistan under the Taliban will follow the same evolutionary cycle that almost every state in the world must follow to reach modernity and some semblance of utopia:

There will be many atrocities, barbarities, injustices and tragedies during the next few years, perhaps decades under the Taliban, just like there always is when new states are formed.

However, as long as the West (and everyone else too!) stays the hell out of that region the Afghan state will eventually modernise, along with the corresponding improvements in human rights and quality of life.

The only thing that can stop this evolutionary path towards a modern, self sufficient government of and for the Afghan people is interference from foreign powers. The kind of interference that would boot them straight back down the evolutionary cycle every time they appear to be making some progress.

The US too, emerged from "Rule By Taliban":

Picture the stoning/burning/branding of adulterers and 'immoral' women, the Salem witch trials, slavery and the lynching of blacks and others and you'll realise that even "The Greatest Country on Earth" began as something resembling a medieval theocracy.

The same with Great Britain and most European countries ... for some reason this is forgotten when it comes to Islamic countries, we in the West demand that they become immediately what we want them to become, on a schedule suitable to us while forgetting that we had thousands of years to learn from similar mistakes and the good fortune to not have our cultural evolutionary cycle interrupted too many times.

Given a few decades of peace, barring any further foreign interference, I predict Afghanistan will become a force to be admired.

Optimistic from a Western perspective but certainly on point with the historic comparison. Part of the underlying issue of Westerners judging other societies is that just as Catholic Inquisition we believe that the only path forward for humanity is our own path. Our “secular humanism” has its limitations: there’s more racial strife in the United States than almost anywhere on earth, huge incarceration rates in the United States. In most places in the West we enslave our young people from university age under mountains of debt. The United States and most of its allied governments are pushing hard for the privatisation of health care everywhere. Even in death, citizens will be parted from almost all of their assets, first to the predatory medical system and then to the taxman. What does a dying person care? What if s/he has children or grandchildren who are counting on that $300,000 or $400,000 of medical costs to buy a home for their own family? Yet another family rendered basically rootless.

This is not to say there should be no inheritance taxes. Of course there should. But there should be a fairly high minimal amount to ensure middle class families can continue to be the productive and loyal yeo(wo)men of society. Instead, Western politicians cater to the plutocrats and protect the wealthy from inheritance taxes above a certain threshold.

Westerners have certainly not solved the underlying issues of human civilisation, strife, crime and co-operation. We’ve just papered over the craps and called our neo-feudalism for plutocrats an ideal.

In reply to Arch Bungle, Roger notes this is not the first time the US and the UK have destroyed progress in the Middle East:

Sorry, but you need to actually study the history of the Middle East. In the post-WW2 period many of these nations were well on their way to modernity, including Afghanistan (the socialist regime that was overthrown by the US-backed warlords), as well as Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The West destroyed these and also directly fostered the religious fanatics (as with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan). The Saudi Arabian theocratic monarchy was put in place by the Brits and the US, and they have been the biggest funders of the Wahhabi head-choppers.

The Othering of the whole Muslim world is disgusting propaganda. Go visit Malaysia, a Moslem nation or even Iran. You will be surprised by the "modernity" there. The European nations and US only became "civilized" at home, their crimes abroad include concentration camps, Agent Orange, and the bombing of civilian targets to drive countries "back to the Stone Age" (a war crime); something now giving way as seen in France where hand grenades are used to blow off demonstrators hands and rubber bullets to blind them and a US where death by cop is a definite risk and mass shootings happen on a regular basis.

To discredit socialism, Western pundits wasted a lot of paper and now continue to waste a lot of bits maintaining that the natural order of the world is selfishness and economic self-interest. I’m not persuaded. The majority of people I’ve met in my travels around the world are not primarily motivated by money. The majority wish to live in health and peace foremost, respected within their community. Many desire that respect to border on love. In the West, these balanced people are never held up as examples of civilisation and humanity but instead we are supposed to turn our eyes to sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Mitt Romney whose only goals from early childhood was to acquire riches and/or power.

Indeed, the question to be posed is could we do any worse? Our only get-out-of-jail-free cards so far have had the images of chaps like Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Augusto Pinochet printed on them. Strangely, these leaders were tolerated and encouraged and supported by our elites for much of their careers, much as we funded and encouraged corrupt Afghan puppet presidents Harmid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani over the last twenty years.

I’m not sure what the West can offer to the world at this point besides selfishness and dysfunction.⁵

splash image for pourquoi je danse – see video at bottom of post

This week the Ontario Arts Council announced OntarioDances.ca a program to connect dance companies with dance presenters.

For some reason there are only nine theatres included:

• Burlington Performing Arts Centre (Burlington)
• Capitol Centre (North Bay)
• Centre for the Arts – Brock University (St. Catharines)
• Flato Markham Theatre (Markham)
• The Grand Theatre (Kingston)
• Living Arts Centre (Mississauga)
• Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts (Oakville)
• The Registry Theatre (Kitchener)
• River Run Centre (Guelph)

Why just these nine? Where are the other theatres who get money from the Ontario Arts Council or Canada Council? Why can they not be mandated to participate? Have they been excluded as they are not good enough:? Should not a program like this be inclusive?

Remember the goal is to unite dance companies with theatres.

Amateurs are warned off:

We cannot accommodate information posted by amateur or recreational groups.

The only problem is who will decide what is amateur or recreational and what is professional. I’ve been to some professional performances (full time dance artists) which are so awful and risible there are no words for them. I’ve been to some amateur performances (people whose income is not dependent on dance) who have moved my soul.

In music, neither Lana del Rey nor Carly Simon could get gigs for years before they hit it big.

During that time, I worked as an overweight secretary in the offices of a production company. I pretended to type and take shorthand while extending my luncheon breaks to drown my sense of failure in more and more puff pastry and puddings.

What’s worse is that all this information is not offered to the world but locked behind closed doors.

What kind of portal does not allow the world to see what is there? Dance is not MI6 or CSIS or even the Ministry of Defence.

But go to http://ontariodances.ca and there is nothing for the public to see.

Hopeless. With friends like this, dance needs no enemies.

On the other hand, the video about what dance means to people, amateur and professional (I’d say about 80% of the people in this video are non-professionals in the sense of making the majority of their income from dance related activities) is pretty awesome.

Bad Pharma, a new book by Ben Goldacre, looks into the research practices of big pharmacy. Apparently any negative information about new drugs is systematically suppressed even in the academic environment:

In 2010, researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug…: were they positive, and were they funded by industry? They found more than 500 trials in total: 85% of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50% of the government-funded trials were. In 2007, researchers looked at every published trial that set out to explore the benefits of a statin….This study found 192 trials in total, either comparing one statin against another, or comparing a statin against a different kind of treatment. They found that industry-funded trials were 20 times more likely to give results favouring the test drug.

…In 2003, two [systematic reviews] were published. They took all the studies ever published that looked at whether industry funding is associated with pro-industry results, and both found that industry-funded trials were, overall, about four times more likely to report positive results….

In general, the results section of an academic paper is extensive: the raw numbers are given for each outcome, and for each possible causal factor, but not just as raw figures….In Fries and Krishnan (2004), this level of detail was unnecessary. The results section is a single, simple and – I like to imagine – fairly passive-aggressive sentence:

“The results from every randomised controlled trial (45 out of 45) favoured the drug of the sponsor.”

How does this happen? How do industry-sponsored trials almost always manage to get a positive result? Sometimes trials are flawed by design. You can compare your new drug with something you know to be rubbish – an existing drug at an inadequate dose, perhaps, or a placebo sugar pill that does almost nothing. You can choose your patients very carefully, so they are more likely to get better on your treatment. You can peek at the results halfway through, and stop your trial early if they look good. But after all these methodological quirks comes one very simple insult to the integrity of the data. Sometimes, drug companies conduct lots of trials, and when they see that the results are unflattering, they simply fail to publish them.

Still feeling confident about your industry sponsored cell phone radiation tests?

Here’s what happens if someone speaks up about negative results:

Rosiglitazone was first marketed in 1999. In that first year, Dr John Buse from the University of North Carolina discussed an increased risk of heart problems at a pair of academic meetings. The drug’s manufacturer, GSK, made direct contact in an attempt to silence him, then moved on to his head of department. Buse felt pressured to sign various legal documents….

In 2003 the Uppsala drug monitoring group of the World Health Organisation contacted GSK about an unusually large number of spontaneous reports associating rosiglitazone with heart problems. GSK conducted two internal meta-analyses of its own data on this, in 2005 and 2006. These showed that the risk was real, but although both GSK and the FDA had these results, neither made any public statement about them, and they were not published until 2008.

During this delay, vast numbers of patients were exposed to the drug, but doctors and patients learned about this serious problem only in 2007, when cardiologist Professor Steve Nissen and colleagues published a landmark meta-analysis. This showed a 43% increase in the risk of heart problems in patients on rosiglitazone. Since people with diabetes are already at increased risk of heart problems, and the whole point of treating diabetes is to reduce this risk, that finding was big potatoes. Nissen’s findings were confirmed in later work, and in 2010 the drug was either taken off the market or restricted, all around the world.

Still feeling that independent scientists would be able to get the word out over the billions of dollars of industry sponsored research?

When the paper describing this situation was published in Jama, Lif, the Danish pharmaceutical industry association, responded by announcing, in the Journal of the Danish Medical Association, that it was “both shaken and enraged about the criticism, that could not be recognised”. It demanded an investigation of the scientists, though it failed to say by whom or of what. Lif then wrote to the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty, accusing the Cochrane researchers of scientific misconduct…

The investigation went on for a year. Peter Gøtzsche, director of the Cochrane Centre, told the British Medical Journal that only Lif’s third letter, 10 months into this process, made specific allegations that could be investigated by the committee. Two months after that, the charges were dismissed. The Cochrane researchers had done nothing wrong. But before they were cleared, Lif copied the letters alleging scientific dishonesty to the hospital where four of them worked, and to the management organisation running that hospital, and sent similar letters to the Danish medical association, the ministry of health, the ministry of science and so on. Gøtzsche and his colleagues felt “intimidated and harassed” by Lif’s behaviour. Lif continued to insist that the researchers were guilty of misconduct even after the investigation was completed.

If the Romney presidential campaign were not illustration enough, some people are prepared to say and write anything for money. And that includes the pharmaceutical companies which are supposed to be looking out for our health.

Why is this article focused on cellphone radiation? We can decide to take pills or not, or accept a certain medical treatment. We have little control over cellphone radiation, just as for decades we had little control over second hand smoke.

Goldacre’s book looks fabulous, peeking behind the curtains of pharmaceutical companies practices. Well researched but popular works like Bad Pharma are essential to reforming out of control industries, like tobacco, oil or pharmacy.

Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients will be released on January 3, 2013 by Faber and Faber. A pity that it won’t be out in time for Christmas. In the meantime, Goldacre’s Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks starts down this road. In an interview in 2008, Goldacre stated that “one of the central themes of my book [Bad Science] is that there are no real differences between the $600 billion pharmaceutical industry and the $50 billion food supplement pill industry”. Goldacre has been sued several times for exposing medical shams and won damages and/or court costs up to €220,000 from the plaintiffs.

Excerpts above from Bad Pharma are from an extract published in the The Guardian.