Substack supports extraordinarily detailed, timely, thoughtful and pertinent discussion

Linotype, Internet, HTML, search engines, blogs, Open Access academic publishing, SciHub, Substack . . .

In September 2021, Substack CEO Chris Best spoke with CNN’s Brian Stelter, about Substack’s business model of enabling direct relationships between readers and writers, including with paid subscriptions - rather than the advertising based model of many prominent websites, or the single subscription to all model of Medium.com (which is highly censorious - they deleted my account because of something I wrote in a comment). edition.cnn.com/2021/09/26/media/substack-ceo-reliable-sources/

At 5:00 he said:

Part of the reason why we have a society where we know there are things we can trust is because dissent is allowed, and because the discussion of unpopular things is not suppressed.

He must be talking optimistically about a future we strive to attain, since the current mainstream media, government control and majority opinion situation is the largely the opposite of what he describes.

Substack makes a great contribution to the processes he outlines. It is a basis for a growing numbers of significant authors who challenge the pervasive environment of groupthink [WP ¹], channeled by ignorance, corruption and deliberately slanted communications, in which most governments, doctors and lay people make their decisions today.

I started writing a comment to this article:

Shaky DNA integration study

in which Brian Mowrey critically assesses Igor Chudov’s assessment igorchudov.substack.com/p/worst-fears-realized-pfizer-mrna of a recent article by Alden et al. 2022 Intracellular Reverse Transcription of Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 In Vitro in Human Liver Cell Line concerning in-vitro (cell cultures, not living organisms) research into the possibility that the information encoded in the RNA [WP] of the Pfizer BNT162b2 mRNA [WP] quasi-vaccine could be copied into the DNA [WP] which controls our cells.

I started writing a comment in appreciation of Brian Mowrey’s and Igor Chudov’s work, which grew into an appreciation of Substack and how well it supports timely, detailed, uncensored discussion of complex research. What I wrote became too long to reasonably be a comment (though Substack’s comment length limit would have allowed it). So here it is, as a Substack article.

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I lack the expertise to properly understand the Alden et al. article, or these assessments by Igor Chudov substack.com/profile/15579919-igor-chudov and Brian Mowrey substack.com/profile/13852140-brian-mowrey .

Thanks very much for writing these articles.  I have bookmarked them for future reference.

Substack has strongly supported the proliferation of well-referenced, thoughtful, pertinent commentary and analysis of many aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including especially the quasi-vaccines (mRNA and adenovirus vector) and early treatments which have been proposed and variously adopted or suppressed by most Western governments, the mainstream media, the typically censorious social media networks and the medical professionals of their countries.

I do my best in this regard at nutritionmatters.substack.com regarding vitamin D, early treatment with calcifediol (25-hydroxyvitamin D) and broad questions of the unreasonable promotion of and faith in vaccines, not just for COVID-19. 

Enquiring minds can see from each such Substack - once subscribed or before that with "Let me see it first" - via the About page, then the People Link, and then by clicking on the author's name or pseudonym, a list of the Substacks the author reads.  My list is not complete, since it seems I did not flag every new subscription to be public - and I am not sure how to fix this.

However, generally, people can discover further Substacks of interest via these birds-of-a-feather links.  igorchudov.substack.com (I had not seen it until a few days ago), unglossed.substack.com (weeks), moderndiscontent.substack.com (months), statistics and math vs. reality specialist Mathew Crawford's roundingtheearth.substack.com (months) and Justin Hart’s covidreason.substack.com are some of the most detailed and pertinent sources of analysis I know of, which would be of interest to a pernickety subset of the many people who read stevekirsch.substack.com, alexberenson.substack.com, rwmalonemd.substack.com or www.eugyppius.com.

I think moderndiscontent.substack.com is a splendid example of such analysis - of many of the drugs and biochemical processes most pertinent to the COVID-19 crisis.  The author is an anonymous, late 20s, US-based, disaffected scientist.  He or she burnt through savings doing this work, and now with some paid subscribers, is wondering how to proceed given that there is no prospect of the income this generates meeting their ongoing needs:  moderndiscontent.substack.com/p/a-candid-discussion-about-this-substacks. (See my further comments there.)

I hope that many professional researchers will start their own Substacks, or at least read and comment on other peoples' Substack articles in which their work is discussed.  This is an excellent antidote to Twitter!

Email discussion lists can be a very good way of discussing research, but it takes a long time to attract a critical mass of people - and no such list can be a substitute for writing in public and inviting comment from all readers.

I think of movable type [WP] and especially linotype [WP] (forming a line of letterpress type [WP] in a single slug [brilliant ~1960 linoytpe machine documentary], since the 1880s) as crucial developments which lead to an explosion of literacy, discussion and intellectual, emotional and scientific development around the turn of the 20th century.  The next major developments in non-time-pressured one-to-many writing and communication were photography, the ability to print photographs, offset lithography [WP], electronic typesetting and graphic design [WP], especially on personal computers, the Internet, http, HTML, graphic web browsers, search engines, blogs, open-access academic publishing and (to route around academic journal paywalls) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub.  

Substack's CEO Chris Best understands the immense importance of allowing and supporting debate which is contrary to the majority-held of officially sanctioned perspectives of the day.

For better or worse, on Substack, it is possible to write long - even rambling - comments!

I find this an extraordinary contrast with the conventional academic publishing system.  The open access fee for an open-access [WP] peer-reviewed article is several thousand dollars. Without such a fee, the article is behind a paywall and may remain obscure.  Either way, peer-review can take months or over a year, and may be subject to overriding editorial resistance to articles which question the validity of mainstream assumptions about the value of narrowly targeted vaccines and drugs.

It took retired Professor of Medicine Sunil Wimalawansa and I about 4 days each, over two months, to get a short Letter published in a leading journal: asbmr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jbm4.10606, in response to an article which we think was badly mistaken.  There are some benefits in the Letter editorial process, but overall it would have been better if the editors had not been so insistent on brevity, so we could included more references and detailed arguments.

I can only properly read and financially support a fraction of the fascinating material I find on Substack.  I would rather have spent those four days doing so than writing such a short letter.

Thanks Igor and Brian for this work.  There is not enough time to fully research and understood dozens of biochemical and immunological matters.  Even a cursory reading of your analysis gives me a tentative basis on which to proceed - and I am inclined to think that it is a highly reliable basis which would have taken me days or weeks to arrive at in the absence of your Substack articles.

1. Groupthink, article and book chapter, Irving L. Janis, 1972: web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Group_Dynamics/Janis_Groupthink.pdf “‘How could we have been so stupid?’ President John F. Kennedy asked after he and a close group of advisers had blundered into the Bay of Pigs invasion."