Downwinders deluded and waiting to die
This phrase has nothing to do with Rocky Flats. It’s the subtitle of a book by Dr. Daniel Miles (a former postdoc at the American Medical Association and a retired physics professor who died in 2024). [For more, see p 32 of the February 17th PDF presentation.] There is a connection with Rocky Flats downwinders: Carl Johnson M.D. [see p 31], after being fired as Jeffco Public Health chief and after his Rocky Flats work was discredited, went on to Utah to foment more radiation anxiety. There too his work was discredited.
Back to Rocky Flats. Being a downwinder is very much a form of identity politics. For them `Do your own research’ means read Full Body Burden and watch The Half Life of Memory. After I posted to Nextdoor about where to find the video and PDF from which I gave a February 17th presentation, there was a flurry of additional postings objecting to my findings without having read them.
When it comes to evidence, there are two kinds of non-scientists: (i) those who need to understand it for themselves and (ii) those who trust what other people in their in-group say. Those unhappy with Darwin can get sincere statements from adherents of creation science. For those in the second category, opinions grow firmer the more references by like-minded people they can find. This always brings to mind a wonderful quote from Einstein, in response to the anti-“Jewish physics” book A Hundred Authors Against Einstein (published in 1931), criticizing relativity: “If I were wrong, one would be enough.”