Category: Bad Science

By Kazue Avril – Free Press

It has been a busy day here at the NPYP center, where the members of Nuclear Power Yes Please held a press conference. They recently discovered a devastating text by Professor Chris Busby, where he shows that their criticism of his research is completely unfounded. The NPYP Scientific Director Mattias Lantz had attacked Professor Busby’s articles about Fallujah (here, here, and here), by making a comparison of the sex-ratio (i.e. the number of boys born vs number of girls born) between the Iraqi city of Fallujah and his own city of birth, Avesta in Sweden. According to Lantz the variations in Avesta were as large, or larger, than the ones in Fallujah, so he reasoned that one could not claim that the variations in Fallujah were due to depleted uranium (DU). Professor Busby turned the data from Avesta around, and showed that Lantz had used the data in a dishonest way, even trying to hide an obvious correlation between increased sex-ratio in Avesta and the 2003 war in Iraq. Professor Busby’s eminent rebuttal can be found on the LLRC web site (here). Below is the figure made by Lantz, with Professor Busby’s hand-written notes that give evidence of the dishonesty of Lantz.

 

– ”I never even thought of the correlation,” a humiliated Mattias Lantz said at the press conference, ”but Professor Busby clearly shows that the deviating sex-ratio in Avesta around 2004 is due to the DU-weapons used in Iraq. Furthermore,” Lantz continued, ”this means that all of our past criticism of Professor Busby falls apart, just like a house built from a deck of cards. I now realize what an omnipotent genius he is. He is right about everything, even when he cheats with statistics.”

– ”And he is a great musician!” Gender Issues Director Nils Rudqvist adds.

– What does this mean for the future of NPYP?

– ”This changes everything.” says Policy Director and NPYP founder Michael Karnerfors, ”We have been wrong about all these issues; about radiation effects, nuclear power, cell phone radiation, chem-trails, dowsing, crystal healing and the HAARP experiment. Therefore, we will now turn sides in the debate on all these issues, and we will join Professor Busby, Mona Nilsson, Lennart Hardell and all the other serious researchers in their noble quests. From now on, scrutinizing alarmist claims, checking statistics, or asking the simple question ‘Is this relevant?’ has no place in what we consider to be a serious debate. Google was created to find the scary claims, not to scrutinize them. Many people are scared about radiation. From now on we will help them to maintain that status.”

 

– What about your close ties to the nuclear industry?

– ”We will pay back every penny of the funding we got from those bastards,” says Financial Director Christoffer Willenfort, ”and those of us who are employed by the nuclear industry will submit letters of resignation today, we are all done with it.”

– And the organization?

– ”The first reaction was of course that we should dismantle NPYP and join other groups, but after some intense brain storming we decided that it is better to continue, although under a different name.”

– ”Yes, from today we are Nuclear Power No Please,” confirms the Public Relations Director Johan Kreuger, ”and here is the new logotype!”

An embarrassing silence grew in the press room, until somebody in the audience dared pointing out an obvious error in the spelling.

 

– ”C’mon people, give us a break!” Kreuger burst out. ”We have been wrong about so many things for years, so how can you expect us to get every tiny detail right immediately?”

– What is Lantz’ status within the organization, can he continue to be a member?

– ”Well,” says Karnerfors, ”at first we thought that he had to go. We were all very disappointed with him and felt that we needed to distance ourselves from him and the dishonesty that he brought upon us. But we are all to blame. It was certainly Lantz who would initiate the studies of Professor Busby’s claims, but we all started to act like stupid physicists and make independent double checks of numbers and other details. That was of course foolish of us, we should have trusted Professor Busby from the beginning without asking any questions.”

– So you now believe in Professor Busby’s claims?

– ”How can you not, after what we have been through?” Reactor Technology Director Johan Simu says. ”Professor Busby has an expertise in so many scientific fields, not only in radiation effects. A few months ago he introduced a new definition of the term ‘spontaneous fission’, and with it he showed that TEPCO is lying about the status of the reactors in Fukushima. With the new definition, the reactors must clearly be active in a critical configuration. My personal reflection at the time was that this is utter nonsense. But now, after Professor Busby’s proof of our dishonesty, I am all for it. The effects will be tremendous; all courses in reactor physics will have to be revised, and the commercial codes used today for criticality calculations have to be changed. But that is not all, recently he also showed that Einstein is wrong.”

– What?

– ”Yes indeed, Professor Busby’s interpretation of the twin paradox is quite convincing. He has also promised to explain quantum mechanics on Youtube, something that we are all looking forward to. It is about time that somebody settles the issue whether that cat of Schrödinger is alive or not, the world deserves to know. Furthermore, this poor creature has been in this un-collapsed wave function state for so long, it is clearly a violation of animals rights that needs to be brought to an international court. Professor Busby’s expertise also in legal matters will be very helpful in order to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

 

On the way out from the press room we manage to get hold of Mattias Lantz for a personal comment, he looks tired and stressed out.

– Will you apologize to Professor Busby and the other people that you have attacked over the years?

– ”No, of course not!” Lantz responds rather agressively. ”Earlier we would have done such a thing, or corrected our statements if they were found to be in error. Now when we have changed sides in the debate we will follow the established customs of our new friends. Apologies or amends are out of the question. Instead we move on forward, though in the opposite direction as before.”

– How did you react when it became clear that you had been so wrong about Professor Busby?

– ”I felt awful, of course. Not so much for my unfounded attacks on Professor Busby, but on a personal level it is devastating. In the plot that Professor Busby turned against me there is also a peak with high sex-ratio in Avesta during the 1970’s when I was born. This puts the question about my gender at stake, maybe I was supposed to be a girl? This will take years of psycho-therapy to sort out.”

Then he excuses himself and pushes through the crowd towards the entrance, stopping every now and then, asking people if they know where he can get hold of a good beret.

 

We get a private interview with Industry Liaison Director Johan Kihlberg.

– ”Former Industry Liaison Director, if I may! The title does not exist any more now that we have severed the ties with the nuclear industry.”

– So, what is your title?

– ”Alarmist Organizations Liaison Director.”

– Ok, ok, so how was the error of Lantz discovered?

– ”We knew for a while that something was not right. Lantz has of course always been obsessed with Professor Busby. Certainly the money from industry and Socialstyrelsen kept him motivated, but there was also something else, some sort of…envy. And during the last few months he has become more and more deranged. You could find him at late hours in his office, but he would not deliver any new blog posts or forum entries. If you met him in the corridor you could hear him mumbling weird things for himself.”

– Weird things?

– ”Yes, phrases like ’eminent scientists’, ‘Bramhall is not a pushover’, ‘ICRP doesn’t get it’, or ‘there must be a third event’ were often repeated. Things like that. Then, a few days ago in the coffee room he made no sense at all, trying to convince us that ‘the alarmists get laid more often than we do’ and that we should buy a boat, or two. Last Friday we discovered that he had asked the market analysis division for an evaluation about entering the field of anti-radiation pills, and there were follow up plans for major investments in this field. When this was found out we decided to check his computer. It turned out that for the last month he had used the computer for only one thing, to visit the ‘Dishonesty’ page on the LLRC web site, over and over again.”

– So what did you do?

– ”It was the first time that any of us saw that web page, and after reading it we realized that it was all over. A crisis meeting was held, thereafter we summoned Lantz in order to have him explain himself. There was an intense discussion, with harsh words being exchanged in all directions, but finally we could agree on a strategy and decided to call for the press conference.”

– These plans that Lantz had initiated for anti-radiation pills, how far had he gone with them?

– ”Actually, very far,” Kihlberg responds with some excitement.

– So how did you stop it?

– ”We didn’t. The analysis shows that we can make a huge profit even if we sell the pills at half the price compared to what Busby and his friends had in mind. We have some connections in Japan that will help us with the promotion, there are many ways to scare people into becoming your customers. For instance the Japanese TV-channel NHK has been very helpful by making an alarmist documentary in which the credibility of ICRP is undermined. We are also considering to buy the recently closed candy factory in Gävle. In that way we can have a local production directly in the areas that were most affected by the Tondel study.”

– You mean the areas that were most affected by the Chernobyl fallout?

– “No, by the Tondel study.”

– Ah, whatever. So you will manufacture and sell pills in order to raise money for the suffering children?

– ”What do you mean? We have to make up for the losses now that we have stopped the funding from the nuclear industry. We are the good guys now, we need to make a living. Just look at Green Audit, the Cancer and Birth Defects Organization, and so on. They are registered as companies, not as charities, why should we be any different? Why live on secret funding from evil companies when we can make as much money in the open by exploiting the gullible, the naive, and the vulnerable? To have funding from the industry in order to change people’s opinion is a difficult task, it is much easier to get money directly from concerned citizens in order to help them preserve their already established views. Busby is of course a huge inspiration in these matters, but we are also looking at other options.”

– What kind of options?

– ”For instance, Joseph Mangano and his Radiation and Public Health Project is a good example. They have managed to recruit celebrities like Alec Baldwin and Christie Brinkley for the fundraising. And they are very successful, just look at the suits of Mangano! So we hope to be able to do something similar from a Swedish perspective, if we can get stars like Manne the Clown and Solveig Ternström on our team, then we are all set.”

– So the future is bright…?

– ”Yes, brighter than ever. This has been a severe crisis situation for us, but thanks to Professor Busby we are finally on the right track. An event like this does not happen every day, but today it did indeed happen.”

 

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