Today the European Commission released its “ _plan to accelerate high-speed rail across Europe_ ” (press release here). Only it’s not a plan. And Community of European Railways (CER), the state owned railways’ trade body, stated this will “ _revolutionise the way travel distances are perceived in Europe_ ” (press release here). Only this is no revolution. All of this is about the **Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions – Connecting Europe through High-Speed Rail** (PDF of the 22 page document here). And reading it leaves me thoroughly non-plussed. A plan – were it to justify the name – tells you where you are you are going. This does not, other than to vaguely aspire to there being more high speed rail lines. There is a map in the document (reproduced here, click to enlarge), but even within the niche genre of crayoning imaginary routes onto maps of Europe, this is a poor one. I am not sure how Paris-Madrid – that at least is doable currently with changes, and is half built anyway (Paris-Bordeaux and Burgos-Madrid are done, Bordeaux-Mont de Marsan and Basque-Y are in various stages of planning and building, only Mont de Marsan-Irun is totally missing) – is framed as a new route, while Sofia-Athens that has no HSL whatsoever and is not even possible by train is not shown as new. And Sofia-Athens in 6 hours by 2035 is laugh out loud funny. Budapest-Bucharest in 6 hours 15 minutes is a good belly ache too. So in terms of what lines would get built, this plan is a failure. It isn’t remotely precise enough. You could instead reverse the thinking about what to build. Back in January I wrote about what a High Speed Rail plan should include, and one of the ideas was to identify where existing TEN-T plans could be uprated, from the existing minimum of 160km/h to 250km/h and above. This at least makes it into today’s document as an idea. And then comes the issue: if lines are to be built, who is to initiate that (it sounds rather like that’s still the Member States of the EU from the document) and finance the construction (here too there are ideas, and we should know more in 2026). But reading the document I am left with the impression that the Commission thinks that Member States and the railway industry is standing ready to build dozens of high speed lines, and all that is lacking is the money. But I do not see it that way – there is scant little political will in the Member States to want to get any major projects even done. Everyone is one step further back than the Commission seems to think. And then we come to what would actually run on these lines that may or may not get built. At least the problem is there in black and white – building lines does not necessarily mean trains run, especially on cross border sections. There are nice words about needing to sort out finance for new rolling stock, more powers for the EU Agency for Railways to coordinate path allocation, and even a EU-wide commitment to stop useable trains being scrapped (something I think I was the first person to publicly propose as an idea, in 2021). But on all of this the plan is a wish list – things that are to be proposed, worked on, suggested, coordinated. Some might eventually happen, but not just yet. More widely I still take the view that we need EU-wide commitments to the service levels on EU-funded infrastructure – and I would frame this as a _Europatakt_ – a commitment not only to how quick a trip is between city pairs, but how often that train would be offered, and where connections to other routes would be guaranteed. That sort of idea is nowhere in the Commission’s text. A commitment to fix railway ticketing is in today’s document, although it has been known for months already that legislation on this is forthcoming. Welcome of course, but hardly new, and not high speed rail specific. To sum it up, I can find very little I disagree with in this Communication. But likewise I cannot point to any line or service that is going to be more likely to be built or be run as a result of today’s document. I cannot see what concrete changes this is going to bring to us railway passengers. We want more high speed rail, sure, but what? Where? By who? In whose interest? Hard to say. I will leave the final words to Community of European Railways. “ _CER and its members have worked intensively towards a high-speed rail master plan in the last 4 years and stand ready to help bring the vision to life_ ” they write. Four years of work for an outcome this thin – that’s damning about the state of Europe’s railways! ### Share this post: * share * share * share * email ### Related posts: 1. Replying to the European Commission’s call for evidence on revision of Rail Passenger Rights 2. Detailed night train research from Oui au train de nuit 3. A consortium to order night train carriages? 4. Only EU law is going to solve cross border rail ticketing problems

I realize that it’s been four weeks since I posted here, posting about the soft eugenics of MAHA. I’ve been meaning to get back into it, but, for whatever reason, whenever I’ve tried to do so something got in the way; that is, until now. Perhaps it’s because there are few things that I enjoy writing about more than a good crank fight, and few cranks are as cranky as disgraced Dr. William Makis, Makis, as you might recall, is the disgraced nuclear medicine radiologist who lost his medical license in Alberta and, while probably not the originator of the antivax concept that COVID-19 vaccines cause not just cancer, but _**turbo**_ cancer, has arguably been the most vocal antivax quack promoting the idea. In Makis’ telling, COVID-19 vaccines are so full of mutating evil humors that they cause cancers that are not just run-of-the-mill cancers that anyone can get as they get older, but rather cancers so fast-growing and malignant that the are called “turbo cancers,” cancers. Never mind that he can’t define what the heck a “turbo cancer” is compared to regular cancers or provide any good evidence that cancer, much less “turbo cancers,” are associated with COVID-19 vaccination. None of that stopped him from becoming a total cancer quack, promoting all manner of quackery. On the opposing side of this crank fight is Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, who actually comes off closer to the side of reason, not to mention being the more sympathetic character due to his having been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer that he tried to treat with Makis’ “protocol,” which involves: > I used a combination of Fenben, IVM, Mebendazole, HCQ, Quercitin, IV Vit C, and other supplements to treat my wife's Glioblastoma. Going on 18 months completely free of any cancer. > > — Bellisa2022 (@bellisa2022) October 23, 2024 As you will see, Makis is a big fan of ivermectin, that anthelminthic drug that is very effective against diseases caused by parasitic roundworms and was seized upon as a miracle cure for COVID-19 not long after hydroxychloroquine was being promoted as a miracle cure. He’s also a fan of other anthelminthic drugs mebendazole and fenbendazole, drugs that had shown mild antitumor effects in preclinical models (but not in humans), drugs that he recommends, as is the case with many cancer quacks, in a “protocol” or cocktail with ivermectin, vitamins, and supplements rather like the one touted above. I’ve discussed how mebendazole and fenbendazole show mild promise in the lab but have never been validated in clinical trials in humans, making them at best unproven and at worst quackery now (barring new evidence); indeed, I referred to the claims about fenbendazole as reminding me of those of cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski about his antineoplastons therapy. I’m not going to go into that more here, as you can read my previous posted linked to in this paragraph. Rather, I’m interested in what happened after Adams posted this on X, the hellsite formerly known as Twitter: > UPDATE 1: > > Please don’t recommend I take Ivermectin and Fenben. > > I tried that last year, via Dr. Makis, to no effect. There are claims of it working, but I am aware of no patient who benefitted from it. Neither are you. > > Please don't recommend fasting or any diet-related… > > — Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 22, 2025 I haven’t written much about Scott Adams before, other than to note that over time he has increasingly embraced COVID-19 minimization, antivax narratives (even saying that “antivaxxers were right“), and conspiracy theories, although there were signs as long ago as 2007 that he was slowly heading down the rabbit hole of unreason. (These days, he’s become fairly Trumpy, and President Trump apparently even called him after his announcement to check on how he was doing.) Adam’s history aside, a little more than a week ago he announced that he had been diagnosed with metastatic stage 4 prostate cancer; within a day or two of that came the post/Tweet cited above. It’s unclear when Adams was initially diagnosed with prostate cancer, but he was fairly calculating about when he chose to announce his diagnosis. In fact, he quite frankly says that he decided to do so after former President Joe Biden had announced that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer: > It was not clear when Mr. Adams was diagnosed, but he said that he decided to share the news after learning that Mr. Biden had the same disease, in part because he hoped that Mr. Biden’s announcement would draw attention away from his own. He had kept quiet about it to prolong a sense of normalcy, he said: “Once you go public, you’re just the dying cancer guy.” > > Mr. Adams said he was also wary of sharing his diagnosis because he wanted to avoid the kind of negative online attention that Mr. Biden has received since his office announced the news on Sunday. > > “One of the things I’ve been watching is how terrible the public is,” he said, adding that people had been “cruel.” > > “There’s no sympathy for Joe Biden for a lot of people,” Mr. Adams said. “It’s hard to watch.” It’s true, too. Biden’s announcement immediately unleashed a storm of conspiracy theories, ranging from claims that his prostate cancer was a “turbo cancer” caused by COVID-19 vaccines to claims that he had been diagnosed last year and had kept it covered up so as not to affect his reelection chances. (That latter conspiracy theory doesn’t explain why he waited until a couple of weeks ago to announce his diagnosis.) Of course, even as he expressed concern about how news of his diagnosis would be received, Adams couldn’t resist adding to his statement that he had had his cancer longer than Biden has had it, “well, longer than he’s admitted having it“—and that after after having spent several minutes of the first part of his podcast wondering if Biden had known about his cancer in 2024. Adams wasn’t entirely wrong to be concerned about how he would be treated either. Just look at how Makis reacted, within hours of Adams’ announcement with a post on his Substack responding to Adams stating that Makis’ protocol didn’t work for him, calling the article Scott Adams reveals his Prostate Cancer and our attempts to beat it – my response to Scott’s Podcast: > I want Scott to beat prostate cancer, and respecting patient confidentiality, I will say this: > > **Ivermectin and Fenbendazole combination has about a 75% response rate across all cancers.** > > While that’s better than any cutting edge cancer treatment out there, **I wish it was 100%**. It isn’t. > > There is no way to predict who will respond and who won’t. It’s not an issue of prostate cancer. I have dozens of Prostate Cancer success stories. > > It comes down to the individual’s unique cancer cell type. > > **For every patient who doesn’t respond, we adjust the dosing and the Ivermectin Treatment Protocol and we fight on to try and beat the cancer.** > > I have had several situations where 1000mg Fenbendazole didn’t work, but 2000mg Fenbendazole did. > > I have had situations where 1000mg Fenbendazole didn’t work but 1000mg Mebendazole did. > > I have had situations where 1000mg Mebendazole didn’t work but 2000mg Mebendazole did. > > You get the idea. I most definitely do get the idea. Makis has been burned by a famous, high profile cancer patient announcing on his podcast that he has prostate cancer. Worse, he had tried ivermectin, mebendazole, and fenbendazole and had concluded that Makis’ concoction doesn’t work, saying: > Do you remember last year I was making a big deal online about the claims that ivermectin and fenbendazole are a cure for this exact condition? Well, in case you’re wondering, I did try that and I did try it with the assistance of the doctor who was the the famous doctor Dr. Makis, and it wasn’t that I believed it would work. It was just that there wasn’t much downside risk; so with my doctor’s you know blessing—he didn’t think it would work, of course—and it didn’t work at all. So I did it for a few months. My PSA probably went up by a factor of ten during that time. So what I was hoping was that it would work and then I could be, you know, part of the solution. Wouldn’t that have been cool? And so I was teasing you that I was working on something that that could be, like, life-changing but it didn’t work. So I can’t say that it never worked for anybody with some different cancer or some different situation, but I can tell you it didn’t work at all for me. So that’s all I know about that. First of all, I do feel bad for Scott Adams. He repeatedly describes how he’s in pain all the time, how painful his eventual demise is likely to be, and how he was proud of having been part of activism to push for the State of California to allow terminally ill patients the right to assisted suicide. I also have to give him credit for realizing that Makis’ quackery wasn’t working and his cancer was continuing to progress. Given all that, I can overlook his digs at Joe Biden, his insinuations that he had known about his cancer for a long time before announcing it, and the like. But back to Makis. Yes, I get the idea. He’s trotting out all the usual excuses that cancer quacks trot out whenever their quackery doesn’t work, which is basically always: * It worked for other people. * Hey, Adams is an outlier, because my concoction works 75% of the time! * The dose was wrong. * Maybe he should have tried my other unproven drug, in this case mebendazole. * It was Adams’ fault for giving up. (That last part is implied, an insinuation.) What really riles Makis up is a subsequent video by Adams, in which he reveals that he’ll be taking an experimental drug—no, not an “experimental drug” as quacks like Makis mean it, but a real drug that’s undergone real testing—even though it only has a 0%-30% response rate. At least, that’s what it sounds like. Certainly it’s what Makis thinks it is, given his reaction, as ranted in his Substack entitled SCOTT ADAMS and the Betrayal of Modern Medicine, although in the clip from Scott Adams’ podcast included with the post Adams remains kind of coy about it, saying for instance > However, I have decided on a path of treatment that I’m not gonna tell you about. Now, it has to do with real doctors. It’s not going to be me grazing in my backyard and rubbing mud on myself like most of you are recommending. I’m not going to be taking ivermectin. I’m not going to be spending more time in the sun. I’m sure all those are good things. but I don’t believe any of them would make me better. I think somebody would have noticed if you could cure incurable cancers with just sort of minor diet changes and things like that. So the reason I’m not gonna tell you what I’m gonna do is because I know what the reaction would be Adams then notes that the reaction “had started to turn” with the antivaxxers coming out and asking him if he got his cancer after getting a COVID-19 vaccine. Yes, Adams is right to say that these are “just terrible people,” because they are. In any case, Adams continues a little later: > So if you’re saying to yourself, I wonder if it’s X, no, because you’ve heard of it. If you say, I wonder if it’s Y, no. It isn’t because you’ve heard of that. So only a very few of you would have ever been heard of the path I’m taking. But it’s with top doctors. It’s not something I’m making up. It’s not some little thing I’m doing on my own. It’s with top doctors in the field who know a lot about this. And it looks like my odds of survival may have jumped from zero to something closer to 30%, which means don’t do my funeral yet. I’ve got a solid 30% chance of getting on the other side of this. And by the way, this is brand new. Like, this is information that I was not aware of until just recently. So I will give you updates at some point, but not until I know if it’s working, which actually won’t take long. So in a matter of, I don’t know, a month or so, I should have a pretty good idea if it’s working. But I’ll let you know. To me, it sounds as though Adams is probably enrolling in a phase I or II trial of a new anticancer drug. I am, however, skeptical that anything could produce a 30% durable remission rate against metastatic prostate cancer, and I also suspect that Adams is probably conflating response rate (percentage of patients with measurable tumor shrinkage) with a “cure” rate. Be that as it may, I wish him well, as it sounds as though Makis is probably correct to conclude that Adams has enrolled in an experimental protocol of some kind. Unsurprisingly, Makis can’t handle a high profile cancer patient like Adams repudiating his quackery as not having worked and choosing instead an experimental therapeutic with a low, but measurable, chance of prolonging his life; so he amps up his “blame the victim” narrative, even as he tries to pretend to be sympathetic to Adams as a having been “betrayed” by “Modern Medicine.” The giveaway is Makis’ complaints before he talks about Adams: > I was pleasantly surprised when Scott approached me in October 2024 for help with a serious health condition. Of course, I agreed to help. > > Fast forward to May 19, 2025. Scott let the world know that he has terminal Stage 4 Prostate Cancer metastatic to bones, that he tried Ivermectin and Fenbendazole with my assistance and that it didn’t work. > > He followed that up with a May 22, 2025 Tweet that again mentions my name and he has it pinned. It now has 2.3 million views. > > Since Scott’s May 19, 2025 video, my Twitter account has been flooded with hundreds of negative messages, attacks, threats, smears and I have had to block hundreds of Twitter accounts to protect myself from the tsunami of abuse. > > As they say: “No good deed goes unpunished”. Poor baby. If you’re a cancer quack promoting misinformation and treating patients with unproven and disproven treatments, it’s to be expected that when a famous person tries your quackery and it doesn’t work you _**will**_ be called out—and rightfully so! Some of your patients with treatable cancer likely paid with their lives, and you’re complaining of a little social media piling on? Seriously, dude, you’re pathetic. So, what, according to Makis, happened? I bet you can guess. That’s right; there’s a whole lot of blaming the victim going on, but not before he blames Adams’ oncologists for having failed “to stop Scott’s cancer from progressing rapidly to a “terminal stage” in a short period of time,” because, if you believe Makis, “Prostate Cancer patients can live many years, even decades without progression, with the proper Cancer Treatment.” (Capitalizations his, not mine.) Of course, as any oncologist or urologist who treats prostate cancer knows, this characterizations is often, but far from always, accurate. Yes, _**most**_ prostate cancer patients who have the most common indolent varieties of prostate cancer die _**with**_ prostate cancer rather than _**of**_ it. Yes, we often speak of how in autopsy series 75% of men who live into their 80s have detectable tiny foci of prostate cancer in their prostates. These men with indolent disease, however, are usually older than Adams, who is only 67 years old, usually in their 70s and 80s (and beyond). Moreover, around 5-10% of prostate cancers are metastatic at the time of diagnosis, and there are aggressive subtypes that can grow and metastasize rapidly. Stepping back, we don’t know what stage Adams’ cancer was at diagnosis (mainly because he hasn’t really told us). Nor do we know which conventional treatments he’s undergone other than that apparently he’s never had surgery to remove his prostate and his primary tumor, which implies to me that the cancer was probably advanced and at least unresectable at the time of diagnosis. The next section of Makis’ lament is a master class in quack deflection and victim-blaming. Seriously, Stanislaw Burzynski couldn’t have whined more plaintively. First, he says that Adams was “betrayed” by Modern Medicine (again, Makis’ capitalization), because he took the COVID-19 vaccines, characterizing it as a “life-changing betrayal.” Actually, Adams had it right the first time getting vaccinated; where he went wrong was when he fell under the sway of antivaxxers and came to doubt vaccines. Here’s the part that made me laugh out loud as Makis complains about Adams’ oncologist, whoever that oncologist might be: > In addition to failing to treat his cancer properly, Scott’s Oncologist lied to him, repeatedly. > > First, he told Scott that Ivermectin wouldn’t work, even though he had no way to know whether it would or wouldn’t. > > Second, he told Scott that he had 0% chance of survival and would die shortly. > > I wish Scott had told us the name of his Oncologist, and the name of the Cancer Center he was treated at, so that other Cancer patients could avoid them and save themselves from harm. Unfortunately, he hasn’t given us these names. > > Instead, he has given the world my name, for reasons I don’t understand. Later on, he repeats his lament: > And yet, amidst all of this betrayal of Modern Medicine, Scott doesn’t give us his doctors’ names, or the name of the Cancer Center that failed to treat him properly. > > Instead, he has my name pinned with 2.3 million views. Again, poor baby! Actually, I rather suspect that Makis loves being the center of attention and is hoping to gain a few new marks from it, his expressed unhappiness notwithstanding. In any case, I approve. I always try to name and shame quacks like Makis whenever I can. Second, Adams was probably actually pretty smart here, given the social media reaction from antivaxxers to his post in which he announced that he had stopped Makis’ ivermectin and febendazole protocol. I laughed even harder as I watched Makis try to avoid admitting that he’s almost certainly practicing medicine without a license: > I have never been Scott’s doctor. I was his Health Coach, very briefly. How does a delicensed and disgraced quack avoid being prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license? He calls himself a “Health Coach” and then practices medicine anyway! Also, one wonders how much Makis charges for his “Health Coaching” services, one does! Actually, one doesn’t have to. You can Google him and find stories of his charging patients $650 just for email consultations in which he sends people a “personalized protocol.” His grifting aside, it doesn’t take long before Makis goes on to claim that he barely knew Scott Adams: > Our Health Coaching relationship lasted 1.5 months, at which point Scott left. > > Scott supposedly tried Ivermectin and Fenbendazole, for a total of 1 month. > > Scott never completed my Ivermectin Protocol, which is a minimum of 3 months with follow-up blood work and imaging. > > So we will never know if Ivermectin and Fenbendazole would have worked for him or not. Trying it for one month and then stopping, is not sufficient to make any sort of conclusion. > > It is the equivalent of doing one chemo cycle, stopping and declaring chemo doesn’t work. I might say “Fair enough” in response to Makis’ excuse-making, but there’s a difference. Chemotherapy has copious evidence developed over decades to show that it works, how it works, how it should be used, how long a course of therapy should be for the best balance between efficacy and safety, as well as hard data about its success and failure rates. Makis just makes it up as he goes along, clainming that it takes at least three months for his concoction to work and that it is not unusual for a prostate cancer patient’s PSA to rise during treatment because, according to him, that’s just evidence the magic of the treatment killing cancer cells. Where have I heard variants of “it’s just killing the cancer” in response to clinical evidence that a cancer is progressing? Hint: Lots of places and times! Yet, like quacks the world over who make excuses when their patients don’t get better or their patients’ cancers progress, Makis claims: > Scott didn’t try Ivermectin and Fenbendazole in any proper shape or form and we will never know if it would have worked for him or not. Actually, we can know. It didn’t work. It wouldn’t have worked if Adams had stuck with it. There’s no good evidence, clinical or medical, to suspect otherwise. As much as I love a crank fight, I don’t like to see anyone suffer and die from cancer, not even a crank like Scott Adams. In this crank fight, I know which crank I’m rooting for, even if Adams can’t resist conspiracy mongering about Joe Biden’s recent diagnosis of metastatic prostate cancer. Everything I’ve observed about William Makis leads me to the opinion that he is not just an antivaxxer, but he’s a cancer quack—and a grifting cancer quack at that!—as well as a truly unpleasant person, to boot. Whatever my opinion of a cancer patietn as a person, I’m always going to be on the side of the patient against a quack like Makis. On that note, I noticed that another crank (who’s a big fan of DMSO, rather than ivermectin, as a cancer treatment) has entered the fray, and Makis is really, really unhappy about it. That, however, will have to be a topic for another day. * Is it so wrong… * A “clinical trial” of foot bath “detoxification” * A Snow job on evolution * S2173: NJ antivaxxers show up too early and refuse to leave a meeting about NJ Transit. There’s a metaphor there somewhere ### Share this: * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Tweet * * * Share on Tumblr * * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Telegram * Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) WhatsApp * Like Loading... ### _Related_