Sunday, December 20, 2015

The lie in Canada's Syrian refugee show

REGARDING CANADA'S SYRIAN REFUGEE POLICY, an aspect which is egregiously avoided and covered up is the geopolitical dimension and motives for receiving refugees preferentially from Syria (and other specific conflict areas).

The government is not doing this primarily to satisfy its international humanitarian obligations.

Syria under Assad is a target of vicious US-Canada-NATO-Israel aggression (both direct and by proxy) that will continue even if Syria survives for-now thanks to the Russian coalition. In this context, as always, the Syrian refugees in Canada will be used as instruments: as "witnesses" pressured by many spoken and unspoken means to be critical of Assad, to not be critical of NATO, to serve as media sources in the latter, to be spies and informants, to facilitate manipulations in Syria, etc.! This ugly dimension of refugee politics is simply not ever mentioned. 

Likewise, the PR message in the very act of receiving Syrian refugees is that we are saving the refugees from the crimes of our enemies, not from our own crimes. Otherwise our (Canada's) show of generosity would be both absurd and disingenuous..., which it is! Indeed, the government and media are remarkably silent about the 26,000 other refugees that arrive in Canada every year. 

The whole Syrian refugee media and political campaign is largely a manipulation made to advance the domestic and allied illusion of a benevolent Canada that is not participating in continuous war crimes of the US and Israel, and it's wonderful for the Liberal voter base. But the actual crimes cannot go unnoticed by the targets of those crimes, and by those of us who are paying attention. Disgusting.

--Denis Rancourt
 
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Thursday, December 10, 2015

What is Cancer? -- My article published in four parts on Dissident Voice


  • Review of Randomized Trials
    Cancer Arises From Stress-induced Breakdown of Tissue Homeostasis: Part 2
    December 6th, 2015 by Denis Rancourt 
  • What is Cancer?
    Cancer arises from stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis: Part 3
    December 8th, 2015 by Denis Rancourt 

The full four-part article is available as a single PDF file on ResearchGate: LINK.
The article was presented at the University of Ottawa: Two-part video HERE and HERE.

Part 1 (from Dissident Voice) is in Spanish HERE. Part 2 in Spanish HERE. Part 3 in Spanish HERE. Part 4 in Spanish HERE.

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Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Archived news articles about Denis Rancourt

News coverage and interviews with media

TVO - The Agenda, April 10, 2009.

[see more videos on the VIDEOS page.]

[Other media include Commentary, Magazine Features, Videos, Blogs (see main menu options)]

 
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Archived magazine features about Denis Rancourt

Magazine Features about Denis Rancourt


 
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Archived notes on the scientific work of Denis Rancourt

Scientific work



Dr. Denis G. Rancourt, B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D.

… was a Full Professor with tenure in the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, University of Ottawa, a member of the Ottawa-Carleton Institute for Physics, and a member of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, when he was fired under false pretext on March 31, 2009.
(Read his statement about his dismissal HERE.)

As a scientist, Denis Rancourt has published over one hundred articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals in areas as diverse as lacustrine and marine geochemistry, soil science (pedology), environmental toxic metals, condensed matter physics theory, materials magnetism, metallurgy, organic chemistry, planetary science and meteoritics, mineralogy, aquatic biogeochemistry and biotic mineralization, diffraction and spectroscopic measurement theory (quantum mechanics and statistical analysis), and statistical sensitivity analysis (co-variance, inference, error propagation, etc.).
(Do a Google-Scholar search for author “DG Rancourt”.)
As a teacher, Denis Rancourt developed courses in undergraduate physics, environmental physics, materials science, graduate condensed matter physics, graduate measurement theory (spectroscopy, diffraction, microscopy), quantum mechanics, graduate magnetism, science in society, an "activism course" implemented by "academic squatting", a popular cinema politica weekly series, and others.

Main scientific discoveries and contributions:


•    Solution to the Invar Problem of metal physics

•    Description of the meteorite mineral antitaenite

•    Derivation of the fundamental quantification relation of X-ray diffraction

•    Discovery of the reactive diagenetic Fe-oxyhydroxide phase in lake and marine sediments

•    Description of the phenomenon of superferromagnetism

•    Advances in Mössbauer spectroscopy methodology

•    Advances in layer silicate crystal chemistry and geosensors

•    Descriptions of novel soil and aqueous environment biogeochemical reactions


Main on-going scientific interests:


•   Global carbon pools and fluxes
•   Climate-driven soil development
•   Reactive environmental Fe-oxyhydroxide nanoparticles

•    Environmental and mineral magnetism

•    Lake and marine early sediment diagenesis

•    Aquatic geochemistry and biogeochemistry

•    Development of measurement methods:  diffraction and spectroscopy

•    Physics education research (PER)
•    Professional responsibility and ethics (in science and in institutions)
•    Theory of societal change, pedagogy of liberation

Some main recent scientific publications are as follows.  

Reprints available on request.


Invar Physics and Meteorite Minerals


D.G. Rancourt and M.-Z. Dang.  Relation between anomalous magneto-volume behaviour and magnetic frustration in Invar alloys.  Physical Review B 54 (1996) 12225-12231.

D.G. Rancourt, K. Lagarec, A. Densmore, R.A. Dunlap, J.I. Goldstein, R.J. Reisener, and R.B. Scorzelli.  Experimental Proof of the Distinct Electronic Structure of a New Meteoritic Fe-Ni Alloy Phase.   Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials  191 (1999) L255-L260.

K. Lagarec and D.G. Rancourt.  Fe3Ni-type chemical order in Fe65Ni35 films grown by evaporation: Implications regarding the Invar Problem.  Physical Review B   62 (2000) 978-985.

K. Lagarec, D.G. Rancourt, S.K. Bose, B. Sanyal, and R.A. Dunlap.  Observation of a composition-controlled high-moment/low-moment transition in the face centered cubic Fe-Ni system:  Invar effect is an expansion, not a contraction.   Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials 236 (2001) 107-130.

D.G. Rancourt.  Invar behaviour in Fe-Ni alloys is predominantly a local moment effect arising from the magnetic exchange interactions between high moments.  Phase Transitions 75 (2001) 201-209.


Environmental Geochemistry


C. van der Zee, D. Roberts, D.G. Rancourt, C.P. Slomp.  Nanogoethite is the dominant reactive oxyhydroxide phase in lake and marine sediments.  Geology 31 (2003) 993-996.

D.G. Rancourt, P.-J. Thibault, D. Mavrocordatos, G. Lamarche.  Hydrous ferric oxide precipitation in the presence of nonmetabolizing bacteria:  Constraints on the mechanism of a biotic effect.  Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 69 (2005) 553-577.

A. Thompson, O.A. Chadwick, D.G. Rancourt, J. Chorover.  Iron-oxide crystallinity increases during soil redox oscillations.  Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 70 (2006) 1710-1727.

A, Génin, J.-M. Grenèche, C. Tournassat, J. Brendlé, D.G. Rancourt, L. Charlet.  Reversible surface-sorption-induced electron-transfer oxidation of Fe(II) at reactive sites on a synthetic clay mineral.  Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 71 (2007) 863-876.

P.-J. Thibault, D.G. Rancourt, R.J. Evans, and J.E. Dutrizac.  Mineralogical confirmation of a P:Fe = 1:2 limiting stoichiometric ratio in colloidal P-bearing ferrihydrite-like hydrous ferric oxide.  Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 73 (2009) 364-376.


Environmental and Mineral Magnetism


D.G. Rancourt.  Magnetism of Earth, planetary, and environmental nanoparticles.  In:  Nanoparticles and the Environment, J.F. Banfield and A. Navrotsky (editors), Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry  44 (2001) 217-292 (Chapter 7).

D.G. Rancourt, F. González-Lucena, P.-J. Thibault.  Magnetic granulometry from equilibrium magnetization measurements:  Mineral magnetometry of superparamagnetic particles and application to synthetic ferrihydrites.  American Mineralogist 89 (2004) 987-997.


X-ray Diffraction Theory


D.G. Rancourt and M.-Z. Dang.  Absolute quantification by powder X-ray diffraction of complex mixtures of crystalline and amorphous phases for applications in the Earth sciences.  American Mineralogist 90 (2005) 1571-1586.

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Some Media Interviews with Denis Rancourt

Interviews







- and follow up from listeners… [click HERE]


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Essays and articles by Denis Rancourt

Book released in January 2013::: "Hierarchy and free expression in the fight against racism"

Grouped by topic::: Links to Denis Rancourt's essays about the student condition and student liberation

Grouped by topic::: All essays about health or medicine (label "medical" at Activist Teacher)

Grouped by topic::: All essays about Israel / Israel Lobby / Palestine / Gaza  (label "Israel" at Activist Teacher)

Grouped by topic::: Denis Rancourt on climate science

All articles at Dissident Voice::: http://dissidentvoice.org/author/denisrancourt/

All articles at Veterans Today::: http://www.veteranstoday.com/author/rancourt/


All-category essays by Denis Rancourt:


 
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Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Cancer arises from stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis

Note: The full article, with 80 footnotes, is HERE-PDF.
(and ALTERNATIVE-LINK) 
(and on ResearchGate doi: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1304.7129)


Is it time to abandon mutation-centric metastasis as the dominant paradigm? Does ‘seed and soil’ do more harm than good?

By Denis G. Rancourt  , PhD

Abstract

Part-I:  I critically review the context of cancer research, where it has been advanced that most published research findings are false, that medicine itself is the third leading cause of death in the Western world, and that experienced stress arising from an individual’s position in society’s dominance hierarchy is the primary determinant of individual health.

Part-II:  I critically review the randomized trials for treatments and screening, especially for breast cancer. It has been advanced that screening does more harm than good, and that treatment protocols have little effect on net population mortality from cancer. There is no robust demonstration that the treatment protocols for the common cancers do more good than harm to individual patients.

Part-III:  I critically review the mutation-centric metastasis dominant paradigm of cancer, and various efforts to somewhat or definitively challenge the dominant paradigm, with an eye to answering the question “What is cancer?”

Final section:  I propose a conceptual model of cancer, which incorporates the leading criticisms of the dominant paradigm, and which is testable. In my model, cancer is an age-dependent and tissue-specific stress-induced breakdown of tissue-shape homeostasis. My model is aided by a graphical picture depicting age-specific and tissue-specific curves of steady-state nodule size (DT) versus experienced stress level (S). A given curve has a critical stress (SC) beyond which there is runaway tumour growth due to tissue-response feedback. Here, “metastasis” is the simple consequence of the individual’s tissue susceptibility to loss of shape homeostasis having gone supercritical for a cluster of tissue-specific DT v. S curves. The model provides treatment strategies on three branches: Psychological, tissue-surface-shape homeostasis, and tumour growth feedback attenuation.


Introduction

This paper was presented in the uOttawa Cinema Academica series at the University of Ottawa on November 21, 2015. A video of the presentation is on YouTube (PART-ONE, PART-TWO).  It will be “peer reviewed” if peers and others review it.

I am not a medical doctor. I am an interdisciplinary scientist with a PhD in physics. I have published over 100 articles in scientific journals, in a broad array of disciplines.

My starting outlook in researching cancer is best represented by these three non-journal-article publications:

•    “A Theory of Chronic Pain: A social and evolutionary theory of human disease and chronic pain” (2011)
•    “Self-Image-Incongruence Theory of Individual Health” (2014), and references therein
•    Chapter: “Human Biology id Such that People Make and Inhabit Dominance Hierarchies”, in my 2013 book

The paper is organized in three main parts, followed by my proposal for a unifying model of cancer.

PART-I: Context of Cancer Research

Approximately 30% of us who are fortunate enough to live in the Western countries will be diagnosed to have died of cancer. Breast cancer is the main life-threatening disease affecting women, when tumours are present on several organs.

Prior to starting this review to find out what establishment science actually knows about cancer, it is important to admit the possibility that medicine is largely a pack of lies, the usual kinds of lies that provide the mental environment substrate that is created and maintained by any professional group that claims high status in society. In that sense, medicine should be viewed as no different than law, or even basic science itself.

Some prominent critics have made this observation from within the medical establishment, in different ways. For example, the “Gold Effect” was described by Professor T. Gold in 1979 and is the phenomenon in which a scientific (often medical) idea is developed to the status of an accepted position within a professional body or association by the social process itself of scientific conferences, committees, and consensus building, despite not being supported by conclusive evidence. 

The Gold Effect was reviewed by Drs. Petr Skrabanek and James McCormick in their book Follies and Fallacies in Medicine,  and it is used to analyze errors in public health policy and practice, such as the widespread use of cholesterol screening in the prevention of cardiovascular disease.

Most published research findings are false

From a different perspective, renowned medical researcher John P.A. Ioannidis applied Bayesian statistical modelling to prove that it is likely that “most published research findings are false”.  I know something about Bayesian inference theory.  I found Dr. Ioannidis’ argument to be entirely rigorous. Other Bayesian practitioners were critical of the work,  but Ioannidis ably put them in their place.

Ioannidis showed that published medical claims of net benefits of a treatment (such as a regiment of one or more drugs) or of policy implementation (such as cancer screening or vaccination), based on statistical evaluation of large randomized trials, are most often false. In his words:

“Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”

He also points out what is essentially an alternative statement of the Gold Effect:

“… when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance … The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.”

And he clearly describes main sources of researcher bias:

“Prejudice may not necessarily have financial roots. Scientists in a given field may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings. Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure. Such nonfinancial conflicts may also lead to distorted reported results and interpretations. Prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma. Empirical evidence on expert opinion shows that it is extremely unreliable.”

In his most recent critical overview, Ioannidis is merciless in his assessment of the medical research enterprise, even questioning whether fundamental lab-bench science is of any use in advancing medicine for patient benefit.  In his words:

“… a novel model is needed in funding research to avoid the creation of narrow, isolated specialties that only self-perpetuate … For example, human genetics research has received tremendous funding. This money has not been wasted because other activities and high-tech industry have emerged to support the needs of the genetics community. However, few lives have been saved because of accumulated human genetics knowledge to date, and future prospects (eg, extensions to personalized and precision medicine) also are not promising. Similarly, intellectual fascination in neuroscience for many decades has led to few new practical applications …”

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Dear honourable Sayyid Ali Khamenei

Dear honourable Sayyid Ali Khamenei:

Although I am not young in years, I read your November 29, 2015, letter to Western youth (in English, en français) with great interest and fascination. The letter excited both my intellect and my heart.

Iran is truly blessed to have a servant such as you. In Canada, we have only disingenuous and self-interested petty politicians who vie for corporate and USA favour, and who speak in platitudes for the national media.

I really appreciated your deep analysis of the psychological and geopolitical roots of global terrorism. I believe that your explanation is fundamentally correct, and I am amazed at your communication of this truth.

I hope that Western youth will study and critique your letter, and, as you, I hope that it will help to catalyze a much needed awakening of the Western heart and mind.

In thankful admiration,

Denis Rancourt
(Former university professor)

Related post: Paris - Who made the terror?


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