Category: Truth or Fiction

KMAG DAILY THREAD 20260909 & Scientific Fraud part 2

Site rules stolen from our good friend PAVACA

There are Important Notifications from our host, Wolf Moon; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here. Note: Yours Truly has checked today’s post for any AI-generated content. To the best of her knowledge and belief, there is none. If readers wish to post any AI-generated content in the discussion thread for today’s post, they must cite their source. Thank you.

Do not forget to LABEL AI articles video and such.

In talking about scientific fraud, I wanted to provide as much information as possible in the hope that the overwhelming amount might encourage people to stop and think before blindly following the recommendations of a drug salesman aka doctor.

And then more information showed up so I am going to include that.

What I found significant is:


US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, finds a trawl of officially withdrawn (retracted) studies.


British Medical Journal


Why the USA?

Because we were intentionally targeted. The Brits never gave up their desire to retake the USA.

Despite all the hype about slavery, if you look you can see the fine Italian hand of the Brits and French who were hoping to grab the USA after the ‘colonials’ had exhausted themselves fighting each other. When they were about to make their move the Czar of Russia warned he would attack on behalf of the Americans, thwarting their plans. My reference for that bit of info is long gone but there is this.

Abraham Lincoln and Russia’s Czar Alexander II formed an unusual, but crucial, wartime alliance.

…Russian and American interests quickly coalesced around the prevention of French and British interference in the Civil War. The British decision to recognize the belligerency of the Confederacy by declaring neutrality in May 1861 opened the possibility of recognition of the Confederate States of America as an independent nation. “England will take advantage of the first opportunity to recognize seceded states,” Stoeckl warned, “and France will follow her.”…

Czar Alexander-II

After the American Civil War you had the assassinations of Lincoln (April 14, 1865) and the Czar of Russia ( March 13, 1881) Both can be traced to British influence. In 1913 we had a covert overthrow of our government (Federal Reserve Act) and in 1917 the Russian Revolution facilitated by the same bankers. Meanwhile in the middle of all of this the Fabian Society was founded on 4 January 1884 in London. A decade later in 1895 the Fabian Society founded the London School of Economics which has been training world leaders ever since. John Dewey – “father” of progressive education was a member of the American Fabian Society. And helped establish it in 1895.

At that point the switch was made to a gradual destruction of the USA instead of a frontal assault.

Dumbing Down America by Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld

I am often asked to name those educators responsible for the change in primary reading instruction which has led to the decline of literacy in America. People ask this because by the time they understand the history of the reading problem and of the dumbing down process that has been going on in our public schools for the past forty years, they recognize that all of this is not the result of a series of accidents but of conscious, deliberate decisions made by our educational leaders.

After twenty-five years of research, I can state with complete confidence that the prime mover in all of this was none other than John Dewey who is usually characterized as the father of progressive education. Yet the change of the teaching of reading is probably Dewey’s greatest contribution to the tranformation of American education from an academically oriented process to a social one.

The progressives were a new breed of educator that came on the scene around the turn of the century. These rejected the religion of the Bible and placed their new faith in science, evolution and psychology. Indeed, men like G. Stanley Hall, James McKeen Cattell, Charles Judd, James Earl Russell traveled to Germany to study the new psychology under Prof. Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig. It was these men who later imposed the new psychology on American education and transformed it permanently from its academic function to one dedicated to behavioral change.

John Dewey got his education in the new psychology under G. Stanley Hall at John Hopkins University. In 1887, at the tender age of 28, Dewey felt that he knew enough about psychology to be able to write a textbook on the subject, entitled fittingly Psychology. In 1894, Dewey was appointed head of the department of philosophy, psychology and education at the University of Chicago which had been established two years earlier by a gift from John D. Rockefeller. In 1896, Dewey created his famous experimental Laboratory School where he could test the effects of the new psychology on real live children.

Dewey’s philosophy had evolved from Hegelian idealism to socialist materialism, and the purpose of the school was to show how education could be changed to produce little socialists and collectivists instead of little capitalists and individualists. It was expected that these little socialists, when they became voting adults, would dutifully change the American economic system into a socialist one.

In order to do so he analyzed the traditional curriculum that sustained the capitalist, individualistic system and found what he believed was the sustaining linchpin — that is, the key element that held the entire system together: high literacy. To Dewey, the greatest obstacle to socialism was the private mind that seeks knowledge in order to exercise its own private judgment and intellectual authority. High literacy gave the individual the means to seek knowledge independently. It gave individuals the means to stand on their own two feet and think for themselves. This was detrimental to the “social spirit” needed to bring about a collectivist society…


The rest of that article is even more damning. Our education system was deliberately poisoned by the Fabians.


Antonio Gramsci took over where John Dewey left off. (H/T to the Q-treeper that brought this to the tree.)

The Frankfurt School

In 1924, it was created as part of Frankfort University, the Institute for Social Research. One of its founders was Max Horkheimer and its director since 1930. They will also be part of this group thinkers such as Adorno, Marcuse and Erich Fromm (who will then distance himself from the school).

The Nazi persecution in 1934 resulted in the transfer of the Institute to Columbia University in New York (Horkheimer, Marcuse and Fromm were of Jewish origin) and although some of its members would return to Frankfort at the end of the war, others, such as Marcuse, will choose to stay in the USA. In this second stage, it will be its directors Adorno and Habermas, who will be the main representative of the school from 1956.

The Institute for Social Research emerges in a clear Marxist line…

The Frankfurt School adopted an interdisciplinary persepective, adding approaches not only from philosophy but also from sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, Protestant theology and criticism of culture and art. These are, therefore, studies of “social theory”. The works produced by the Frankfort school are known as “Critical Theory”: it is not a system of doctrines but a particular methodological conception.

Related topics

Critical Theory of the Media

Critical Theory and Education


Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century.

Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century. Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who invented the long march through the institutions. Everything that followed — the Frankfurt School, the Fabian Society’s operational model, the WEF formation pipeline, the captured university, the HR department enforcing approved speech — is downstream of what he wrote in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, in code, between 1929 and 1935.

1. His central question: why hasn’t it happened? The working class was supposed to rise. The contradictions of capitalism were supposed to produce the revolution. They hadn’t – not in the West. Gramsci’s answer was precise and devastating: because the ruling class does not maintain power through force alone. It maintains power through cultural hegemony – the control of the ideas, values, and frameworks through which people understand the world. The worker who accepts that the existing order is simply how things are will not revolt, regardless of his material conditions. The revolution requires cultural change first.

2. The instrument was the long march through the institutions. Not the barricade. The school, the university, the media, the judiciary, the civil service, the cultural establishment – every institution through which a civilization transmits its values to the next generation. Capture these, fill them with people who share the counter-hegemonic project, and the cultural assumptions that maintain the existing order gradually dissolve. No barricades. No visible moment of rupture. Just the slow replacement of one cultural hegemony with another.

3. The educational capture was the masterpiece. Control the curriculum and you control the categories of thought available to the next generation. Not by telling them what to conclude – by shaping what questions they think to ask, what they consider obvious and what they consider unthinkable. The generation educated after the long march does not need to be told what to think. It thinks what it was formed to think – and experiences that thinking as its own…

And so we have the destruction of the independent thinking mind. Followed by utter crap science such as Global Warming and 72 genders. I kid you not

MedicineNet — How Many Genders Are There? All 72 Genders List “How many genders are there? Besides male and female, here is a list of all 72 other gender identities that a person may belong to. How can I help my child understand gender?” This is actually written by MDs!

From my point of view, I see this as when the government got into using OUR tax dollars to fund THEIR pet projects.

Manhattan Project Background Information 

Background Information: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) traces its origins to World War II and the Manhattan Project effort to build the first atomic bomb. As the direct descendent of the Manhattan Engineer District, the organization set up by the Army Corps of Engineers to develop and build the bomb, the Department continues to own and manage the Federal properties at most of the major Manhattan Project sites, including Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico.

In a national survey at the turn of the millennium, both journalists and the public ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb and the end of the Second World War as the top news stories of the twentieth century. The Manhattan Project is the story of some of the most renowned scientists of the century combining with industry, the military, and tens of thousands of ordinary Americans working at sites across the country to translate original scientific discoveries into an entirely new kind of weapon. When the existence of this nationwide, secret project was revealed to the American people following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most were astounded to learn that such a far-flung, government-run, top-secret operation existed, with physical properties, payroll, and a labor force comparable to the automotive industry. At its peak, the project employed 130,000 workers and, by the end of the war, had spent $2.2 billion.

The legacy of the Manhattan Project is immense. The advent of nuclear weapons not only helped bring an end to the Second World War but ushered in the atomic age and determined how the next war, the Cold War, would be fought. In addition, the Manhattan Project became the organizational model behind the remarkable achievements of American “big science” during the second half of the twentieth century. Without the Manhattan Project, DOE, with its national laboratories — the jewels in the crown of the nation’s science establishment, would not exist as it does in its present form…

Did you catch that?

In addition, the Manhattan Project became the organizational model behind the remarkable achievements of American “big science” during the second half of the twentieth century. Without the Manhattan Project, DOE, with its national laboratories — the jewels in the crown of the nation’s science establishment, would not exist as it does in its present form.

U.S. Department of Energy

A Brief History of Science Funding | Columbia [Univ.] Magazine

(Remember the Frankfurt School moved to Columbia University.)

Universities have come to rely on federal funding to support scientific and medical research. How did we get here?…

Columbia history professor Alma Steingart ’06GS recently provided some answers. From her office in Fayerweather Hall, Steingart, who studies how mathematical thought and computer technology have influenced US electoral politics, explained that government science funding as we know it began in the mid-twentieth century. Before World War II, she said, research money at universities came primarily from donors and private foundations; but during the war, the US Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) began funding research aimed at gaining military advantage. The development of the atomic bomb, known as the Manhattan Project, in which Columbia physicists played a key role, was one major investment.

After the war, Vannevar Bush ’47HON, the former dean of MIT’s engineering school and the head of OSRD, called on the US to fund basic research in the physical and medical sciences in order to ensure American strength and progress. “There was a realization that there was no going back to the previous model,” said Steingart. “The debate was whether federal funds should be used for basic science or applied science. Many scientists felt that developing science around particular goals was limiting, and Bush successfully made the case that it was basic research that led to discoveries and applications that would help the country.” Bush’s advocacy led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950.

Then, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. “That was a critical moment,” said Steingart. Within a year, the NSF budget more than tripled, from $40 million to $134 million. Meanwhile, other government agencies, such as the Atomic Energy Commission and the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, noting that basic science was already being funded, began to direct money toward applied research.

“With the Cold War came the idea that you needed an army of engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and chemists in order to keep pace with the Soviet Union,” Steingart said. “Remember, the NSF doesn’t just fund research. It also funds postdoctoral fellowships and PhD fellowships. And so in the 1960s, the number of PhDs greatly expanded — which meant that universities expanded, and so did their expenditures.”…

History of Federal Science Funding – AHA (American Historical Association)

About the Briefing

This handout was created for the AHA’s December 11, 2025, Congressional Briefing on the history of federal science funding. Panelists Melinda Baldwin (Univ. of Maryland), Arthur Daemmrich (Arizona State Univ.), and Bhaven Sampat (Johns Hopkins Univ.) discussed the history of the federal government’s approach toward science in public policy, and how the government has supported and funded scientific research and innovation over time.

1790–1900: Building Practical Science and National Capacity

1790 – Congress passes the first US patent act, encouraging invention and creating a new system of intellectual property.

1803 – Congress funds the Lewis & Clark expedition, which maps the West, identifies plant and animal species, and describes unique geologic formations.

1807 – The US Coast Survey becomes the first civilian scientific agency, supporting navigation and defense.

1843 – Congress funds Samuel Morse’s telegraph demonstration line through a $30,000 appropriation, helping launch US telecommunications.

1846 – Congress establishes the Smithsonian Institution as a public-private partnership. It quickly becomes a center for research and public science and later evolves into a museum complex.

1840s–90s – Scientific associations including the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Chemical Society (ACS), and the Geological Society of American (GSA) are founded, strengthening the nation’s scientific community… [Continues with a long list –GC]

Note during the early years it is CONGRESS funding specific projects. Now that duty is handed off to bureaucrats along with buckets of cash.

American Historical Association Congressional Briefing: History of Federal Science Funding (1 hour)

…

Sep 24, 2019

“Evidence-based medicine is actually so corrupt as to be useless or harmful,” Marcia Angell wrote in 2009. The statement was less a revelation than something many already knew, but it made waves because of its source. Angell, a medical insider, had spent two decades as the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Jason Fung is also a medical insider who has become wary of scientific research that purports to be “evidence based.” A well-known nephrologist and author, Fung often speaks about Type-2 diabetes reversal and the metabolic effects of intermittent fasting, but in this presentation from Dec. 15, 2018, he turns his focus toward the many ways the foundations of evidence-based medicine have become corrupted by financial conflicts of interest. The first conflicts of interest he highlights pertain to the corruption of doctors. Practicing physicians who accept gifts from Big Pharma are 225-335% more likely to prescribe drugs from the gift-giving company than those who do not, Fung explains.

The corruption of doctors in prestigious universities is even worse, he claims. “There’s a clear correlation: The more prestigious a doctor, the more money they’re getting from the pharmaceutical.” Anecdotally, he says, this means you may be better off seeking medical advice from a family physician than from a Harvard professor; the former probably just accepted a $10 pen from Big Pharma while the latter is on the take for $500,000. “It just is a terrible system,” he says. “Yet, these people are the people that are in the newspaper. They’re the ones that are teaching medical students, are the ones who are teaching the — the dietitians, the pharmacist — everybody.” The most insidious corruption affects the published research on particular drugs. Fung highlights the influence industry can have when it finds a medical journal editor willing to take its money. Another problem arises in the form of industry-funded medical research.

This conflict of interest leads to the selective publication of positive trials, which can skew the science on particular drugs and lead to unnecessary or even dangerous overprescription. Fung notes how statin prescriptions illustrate the scope of this particular problem. “We accept this of drug companies … but the problem is that people die,” Fung says. He later adds: “You can make arguments that sugar is a health food, that opioids are good for you … but it harms patients, and we always have to remember that at the end of the day, this is not why we became doctors. The reason we became doctors was to help people, but we’re not until we kind of set those same rules as everybody else.” (49 minute video)

America’s Main Problem: Corruption

Posted on May 6, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog

Preface: Sadly, in the month since we last posted on this topic, many new examples of corruption have arisen.

The Cop Is On the Take

Government corruption has become rampant:

And it goes on and on. This is the cesspool President Trump waded into in 2017. With that type of bureaucrat in charge of handing out grants, is it any wonder US science is riddled with fraud?

KMAG DAILY THREAD 20260903 & Scientific Fraud part 1

Site rules stolen from our good friend PAVACA

There are Important Notifications from our host, Wolf Moon; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here. Note: Yours Truly has checked today’s post for any AI-generated content. To the best of her knowledge and belief, there is none. If readers wish to post any AI-generated content in the discussion thread for today’s post, they must cite their source. Thank you.

Do not forget to LABEL AI articles, video and such.

In talking about scientific fraud, I want to start with a comment made by TheseTruths LINK.

Dr. Fauci’s Disturbing CIA Connection Revealed

If you didn’t already have enough reasons to distrust Dr. Anthony Fauci, here’s a new one, and it’s a doozy.

Newly disclosed documents reveal that Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had a formal institutional partnership with the CIA, one that provided cover for the agency’s biological-threat research. This goes well beyond the previously known off-the-books meetings tied to the Wuhan lab origins controversy. Fauci’s ties to American intelligence run far deeper than anyone outside a handful of investigators realized….


Anthony Fauci – Wikipedia


Anthony Stephen Fauci (born December 24, 1940) is an American physician-scientist and immunologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022 and as Chief Medical Advisor to the President from 2021 to 2022. He was one of the world’s most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals from 1983 to 2002.

In 1984 Ronald Reagan was re-elected and his VP was George H. W. Bush of the CIA.

Since the FDA, USDA, EPA and other bureaucracies use ‘The Science ™‘ to validate their regulations I wanted to look at the history of the destruction of science over the last century.

1964 — The Problem-Solving Method They Removed From Every Textbook


In 1964, Richard Feynman was the only person on California’s textbook commission who actually read the textbooks. What he found should have ended careers — publishers sending blank books that still received ratings, first-grade science texts teaching children nothing but empty vocabulary, and an entire system designed to reward memorization over real understanding.This video breaks down Feynman’s forgotten problem-solving framework — the same approach he used to win the Nobel Prize, expose broken education systems from California to Brazil, and coin the term “Cargo Cult Science” in his legendary 1974 Caltech commencement speech.You’ll learn his 12 favorite problems technique (explained by mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota), why estimating before calculating is the single most underrated thinking skill, and how to tell the difference between someone who memorized the answer and someone who actually understands the problem — a distinction that matters more now than ever, because AI can memorize everything, but it can’t think from scratch.

If you’ve ever felt out of step with the system — at school, at work, in a meeting where nobody could answer the question that wasn’t on the slides — this video explains why. And it gives you a method to fix it tonight.🔹 Drop your own “label instead of an explanation” moment in the comments.——————————————————📖

Sources & Further Reading:

“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” — Chapters: “Judging Books by Their Covers” & “O Americano, Outra Vez!” (W.W. Norton, 1985) “What is Science?” — Feynman’s Address to the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 “Cargo Cult Science” — Caltech Commencement Address, 1974 “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman” — James Gleick (Pantheon, 1992) Gian-Carlo Rota — “Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught,” Lecture, 1996

I cut the most useful part of Feynman’s method out of this video — it needed pages, not minutes. It’s the test he used to check whether he actually understood something or had only learned its name. Three questions, about 90 seconds, and it fails almost everything most people think they know. That, plus the full 12 Favorite Problems system, is in The Feynman Field Guide to Clear Thinking: https://feynmanarchives.com/

Disclaimer: This video is for educational and informational purposes only. The views expressed are based on publicly available historical sources and the creator’s interpretation. This content does not constitute professional advice in education, career development, or any other field. Always conduct your own research and consult qualified professionals for specific decisions.


Part of the Transcript:

16:37

The reason you always felt out of step with the system is because the system was designed to produce the opposite of you. It produces people who follow the process perfectly right up until reality changes and then they freeze. You’ve seen it in hiring. The candidate with the perfect resume who can’t answer a simple what-if question in the interview. You’ve seen it in leadership. The director who can quote the strategy deck word for word but goes blank when a client throws a curveball.

The system trained them to memorize the runway, not to fly the plane.

Feynman left behind the method the system tried to bury.

— 12 problems always alive.

— Strip every claim down to what you can check.

— Estimate before you calculate.

— Test your understanding by rephrasing the question.

— If you can’t answer it in different words, you never understood it in the first place.

That’s it. That’s what they removed. And now you have it back.

But Feynman’s war on the textbooks exposed something bigger than bad education. He found the same pattern in science, in hiring, in way entire industries collapse when nobody inside them can think from scratch. And when he called it out by name, in front of the most powerful people in the room, they didn’t thank him. [Managed decline anyone? -GC]

….

ROBERT MAXWELL

Which specific U.S. school textbook companies were owned by Robert Maxwell or his companies?

The Deal That Reshaped the Market: Maxwell Buys Macmillan and Joins McGraw‑Hill

Robert Maxwell purchased Macmillan Inc. in the late 1980s, a transaction that positioned him as owner of one of the United States’ largest textbook publishers at the time; reporting from the period documents the acquisition and the creation of a joint venture combining Macmillan’s school publishing units with McGraw‑Hill’s to form Macmillan/McGraw‑Hill School Publishing Co. in 1989, a company that became the second‑largest U.S. textbook publisher [1] [2]. The joint venture pooled Macmillan imprints like Glencoe and units such as Science Research Associates (SRA) into a single school publishing operation, reflecting Maxwell’s strategy of consolidating academic and educational assets under his Maxwell Communication Corporation umbrella, and contemporary sources note that McGraw‑Hill assumed sole ownership of the joint operation by 1993 after Maxwell’s death, indicating the Maxwell family no longer retained operational control

𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝗠𝗮𝘅𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹, [𝗚𝗵𝗶𝘀𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗠𝗮𝘅𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹’𝘀 𝗗𝗮𝗱] 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗱 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲, 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝘁 AND DESTROYED IT.

Eye of the Storm Ep. 138 (Badlands)

1:04:20: They show a clip from The Joe Rogan Experience (3 min clip)

The guy talking is Eric Weinstein: The Mathematician turned Physicist & Economist (It is an interesting article about Dr Weinstein.)

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT

ERIC: … Maxwell figured out how to DESTROY SCIENCE and MAKE A FORTUNE. So he diluted the quality of the editorship of the leading journals. This was a high quality informal enterprise. Now most of the destruction of science in terms of how high quality it used to be, has taken place relatively recently. POST ROBERT MAXWELL. Because we now have an enormous number of journals staffed by people who can’t spot publication cartels, where we agree to cite each others work and we agree to publish stuff, you know Pay for Play. ALL the nonsense you see with irreproducible research…

The peer review thing got woven in so that people think that the scientific method and peer review ARE THE SAME THING. Where ONE IS THE UNWANTED INFECTION FROM THE BIOLOGICAL BIOMEDICAL UNIVERSE, which had peer review much longer than anything else…”

From the article:

One of these ideas is what he calls👉the DISC (Distributed Idea Suppression Complex) which explains how disruptive and innovative ideas that challenge the status quo are suppressed.👈 Keeping institutions safe from individuals who create change….

Pergamon Press – Wikipedia

Pergamon Press was an Oxford-based publishing house, founded by Paul Rosbaud and Robert Maxwell, that published scientific and medical books and journals. Originally called Butterworth-Springer, it is now an imprint of Elsevier.

History

The core company, Butterworth-Springer, started in 1948 to bring the “Springer know-how and techniques of aggressive publishing in science”[1] to Britain. Paul Rosbaud was the man with the knowledge. When Maxwell acquired the company in 1951, Rosbaud held a one-quarter share.[1] They changed the house name to Pergamon Press, using a logo that was a reproduction of a Greek coin from Pergamon. Maxwell and Rosbaud worked together growing the company until May 1956, when, according to Joe Haines, Rosbaud was sacked….


This illustrates the larg problem we now have.


Barkerjim  May 25, 2024 07:38

So much for “peer review” — Wiley shuts down 19 science journals and retracts 11,000 gobbledygook papers

By Jo Nova

Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry. Naked “gobbledygook sandwiches” got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink.

Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it. The more money they pour in, the worse it gets. John Wiley and Sons is a US $2 billion dollar machine, but they got used by criminal gangs to launder fake “science” as something real.

Things are so bad, fake scientists pay professional cheating services who use AI to create papers and torture the words so they look “original”. Thus a paper on ‘breast cancer’ becomes a discovery about “bosom peril” and a ‘naïve Bayes’ classifier became a ‘gullible Bayes’. An ant colony was labeled an ‘underground creepy crawly state’.

And what do we make of the flag to clamor ratio? Well, old fashioned scientists might call it ‘signal to noise’. The nonsense never ends….


Bring Them All To Justice – Market Ticker

Yes, that’s a strong headline.

But this is not really about the recent virus; it goes back a very long time.  Scientific fraud — not accident, not error,  intentional misrepresentation — has been all over medicine and specifically pharmaceutical trials for decades.

Cuppa

November 2020 — External peer review of the RTPCR test to detect SARS-CoV-2 reveals 10 major scientific flaws at the molecular and methodological level: consequences for false positive results

URL = Researchgate Pub

[I get access denied due to rapid clicks…?? So here is the archived version LINK – GC]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Here are ‘Peer-Reviewed” studies and comments from medical journal editors. My list is so long I am going to cut it in half and put the rest in my next article. However since this type of information has a tendency to disappear, I want it documented.

August 30, 2005 — Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

Source: BMJ-British Medical Journal

US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, finds a trawl of officially withdrawn (retracted) studies. Fraudsters are also more likely to be “repeat offenders,” the study shows.

Summary

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false.The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. 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…..


May 29, 2009 — How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data

ABSTRACT

….A pooled weighted average of 1.97% (N = 7, 95%CI: 0.86–4.45) of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified dataor results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12%< (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91–19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Meta-regression showed that self reports surveys, surveys using the words “falsification” or “fabrication”, and mailed surveys yielded lower percentages of misconduct. When these factors were controlled for, misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others.

Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct.


March 20, 2012 — Former NEJM editors on the corruption of American medicine (NY Times) from https://participatorymedicine.org/

As we said in December, an e-patient essential is sorting out what writings to trust, whether we find them online or in print. There’s an important update on this in the New York Times today, an interview with Marcia Angell MD, an author we’ve quoted before, and her husband Dr. Arnold Relman – both long-time editors of one of the world’s top journals, the New England Journal of Medicine. It contains some eye-poppers.

In 2009, as I was just starting to get educated about healthcare, I posted A Quote I Won’t Soon Forget, which began:

Marcia Angell MD is a well-known, respected physician, long-time editor of NEJM. So it was a bit of a shock today when Amy Romano, blogger for Lamaze International, sent me this quote:

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

It was from Dr. Angell’s review Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption. It continued:

Dana Blankenhorn of the ZDNet health blog called it “a bombshell.” I couldn’t agree more. And I must say, with all the smart people in this community, why on earth haven’t we heard more about this??

And how on earth are we supposed to be empowered participatory patients if we can’t trust the world’s leading journal?

It echoed Richard Smith, 25 year editor of another top-tier journal (the British Medical Journal), in the first issue of our Journal of Participatory Medicine:

…most of what appears in peer-reviewed journals is scientifically weak.

This is no small issue in the life of an engaged patient. e-Patients who bring googled articles to their office visits are often lambasted or subjected to eye-rolls by clinicians who say that we should only trust academic medical journals. But can we trust them??

We got a rude update on why published science is shaky in our January 2011 post The Decline Effect: most published studies are never replicated by another lab! That’s absurd – heck, in high school I couldn’t get a science experiment passed if it wasn’t reproducible, but our journals do that??….

April 2015 — JAMA Intern Med Research Misconduct Identified by the US Food and Drug Administration: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Every year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspects several hundred clinical sites performing biomedical research on human participants and occasionally finds evidence of substantial departures from good clinical practice and research misconduct. However, the FDA has no systematic method of communicating these findings to the scientific community, leaving open the possibility that research misconduct detected by a government agency goes unremarked in the peer-reviewed literature….

Objectives

To identify published clinical trials in which an FDA inspection found significant evidence of objectionable conditions or practices, to describe violations, and to determine whether the violations are mentioned in the peer-reviewed literature.

Design and Setting

Cross-sectional analysis of publicly available documents, dated from January 1, 1998, to September 30, 2013, describing FDA inspections of clinical trial sites in which significant evidence of objectionable conditions or practices was found.

Results: Fifty-seven published clinical trials were identified for which an FDA inspection of a trial site had found significant evidence of 1 or more of the following problems:

falsification or submission of false information, 22 trials (39%);

problems with adverse events reporting, 14 trials (25%);

protocol violations, 42 trials (74%);

inadequate or inaccurate recordkeeping, 35 trials (61%);

failure to protect the safety of patients and/or issues with oversight or informed consent, 30 trials (53%);

and violations not otherwise categorized, 20 trials (35%).

Only 3 of the 78 publications (4%) that resulted from trials in which the FDA found significant violations mentioned the objectionable conditions or practices found during the inspection. No corrections, retractions, expressions of concern, or other comments acknowledging the key issues identified by the inspection were subsequently published.

Conclusions and Relevance

When the FDA finds significant departures from good clinical practice, those findings are seldom reflected in the peer-reviewed literature, even when there is evidence of data fabrication or other forms of research misconduct.

A decade ago, I wrote in another blog “Blogs are now performing the important tasks of scrutinizing papers and conclusions often finding gross mistakes.” That is probably one of the reasons we were shut up during Covid.


June 1, 2015 — Editors In Chief of World’s Most Prestigious Medical Journals: “Much of the Scientific Literature, Perhaps HALF, May Simply Be Untrue”

… “It Is Simply No Longer Possible To Believe Much of the Clinical Research That Is Published”

Posted on June 1, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog

Corruption Is Destroying Basic Science

“Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine are the two most prestigious medical journals in the world.

It is therefore striking that their chief editors have both publicly written that corruption is undermining science.

The editor in chief of Lancet, Richard Horton, wrote:

*http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1.pdf

Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity [i.e. pervasiveness within the scientific culture] of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale….

Similarly, the editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell, wrote in 2009:

“We can no longer trust Drug company clinical trials”

(Original Article I quote below has vanished… imagine that!)

….It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine….

In fact, in October 2017, Angell went further – she published an article in the New York Review of books entitled, ‘Drug Companies and Doctors: A Story of Corruption.’ 

“Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption”

Date Published:

Jan 14, 2009 07:00 PM

Author: Marcia Angell

Source: New York Review of Books

This article in The New York Review of Books, by Marcia  Angell, details the growing concern over the colonization of the medical profession by pharmaceutical companies

The NY Review article is paywalled. Archived Version can be read.

That article points to this:

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs

Another article similar to the NY Review article

Marcia Angell: Drug Co & Doctors: A Story of Corruption

I am going to stop here and continue next week so you focus on reading the last 3 articles. They are DAMNING especially since Angell, spent two decades as the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Fact Checker Lies – Disproving Phony (and Possibly Planted) Evidence to Discredit The Whole

I have made it a minor hobby to study the Soviet methodology of “fact checkers”, who have raised political lying to a fine art. I even now use the word “snopesing” for one such technique, which I discussed long ago on my old personal blog.

Anatomy of a False Snopes Debunking

Today I was happy to discover a textbook Google/Snopes false debunking, yet also with some interesting new elaborations that made it…

https://wolfmoon1776.wordpress.com/2017/02/18/anatomy-of-a-false-snopes-debunking/

That post was actually a fun re-read right now. I encourage you to check it out. Snopes basically took a huge victory for our side, and reframed it as “untrue” by using a misleading strawman.

REALLY. Y’all are so obvious, Snopes. “Nopes, Snopes.”

Basically the “Snopes” technique amounts to “disproof of an adjacent strawman”. In that technique, a FALSE COPY of what is to be disproved, is either found or constructed and then disproved. The disproof is headlined OVER-BROADLY, so as to appear to show that the truth was “debunked”. It leaves the liars’ enemy – truth-tellers – babbling “Bu-bu-bu-but that’s not the actual case – THIS OTHER THING is the real story.” Maybe so, but the truth didn’t get out ahead of the LIARS – nor did it come back FAST and EFFECTIVELY, making the liars “bleed from their eyes like furies”. The technique puts the truth on DEFENSE, even in the case of a WIN, like the example I gave.

Today we look at something similar in principle but different in what is lied about, which involves disproving not a similar strawman scenario, but instead a conveniently accusatory piece of fake evidence, in such a way that it looks like the larger thing which was supported is what is disproved.

In the same way that we condensed the Snopes example to “disproof of an adjacent strawman”, we can call this one “disproof of false shilled evidence”.

One could likewise call today’s technique “disproof of Judas facts”.

Getting the “Judas facts” picked up by a MARK for the other side is KEY. I’ve watched this in action before, so I know what to look for.

Here is today’s example.

LINK: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/aug/08/viral-image/photo-claiming-massive-crowd-trumps-aug-5-wisconsi/

ARCHIVE: https://archive.ph/Y3l8s

This technique is actually a GREAT WAY of not just taking something down, but of negating something on its strongest point.

Allow me to explain how this works, from the Donkey Com perspective.

  • you are confronted with a Trump rally which was arranged fairly quickly, and was extremely well-attended. People are noticing. How do you get the Dem base not to notice that their peers are turning out for Trump, and to make sure they sneer at the NEXT Trump rally? How do you keep MAGA voters thinking THEY are a minority? How do you actually turn the facts around?
  • using different mechanisms and compartmentalization, you do the following
  • you have somebody tweet an even larger photo of a DIFFERENT rally, and have them claim it’s this rally. This is most likely a “fake MAGA” shill on Twitter. The best technique is to feed the fake photo to somebody like – OH – maybe a conservative commentator who is known to “borrow” and re-post photos without checking too closely. (This is a bit like “entrapment”, which we know the left never does.)
  • you request, call out, or perform a “fact check” on the photo, perhaps using a reliable “blue-check” on Twitter, or you feed it to your own “fact checkers” on Facebook
  • you “debunk the photo” in a misleading way, that makes it look like the Trump rally was actually small – not that one photo of it was too large and from a different rally
  • you make sure that the “mark” is sufficiently embarrassed and chooses to “go silent”, rather than to admit to the con job (which would enable crowdsource forensics) – then you go forward with the “fact check”

See how that works? It’s like a “debunking gun”.

Go back to the title above. What does it say?

Photo shows a “massive” crowd at a Trump rally in Wisconsin on Aug. 5, 2022.

What is next to the title?

So what EXACTLY is “false” here?

Now, the important MISTAKE that you are SUPPOSED to make here, when you don’t click the link, is to think that the Wisconsin Trump rally was not well-attended, and that “MAGA” had to resort to “fake pictures” to pretend that it was well-attended.

You’re supposed to put THAT fear-based or schadenfreude-gifting story into your brain, and just move on – don’t click on it. It’s PSYCHOLOGY.

The TRUTH is simply that the picture is of a DIFFERENT Trump rally, in Pensacola, Florida.

Here is the complete crux of the issue, which is admitted deep in the core of the “fact check”.

“But recent social media posts used an outdated photo to tout the size of the crowd.”

That’s it. It’s ALMOST the same “nothingburger” of BAD JOURNALISM that the left does all the time, and forgives itself for, routinely.

But don’t think I’m defending bad journalism – as you will see.

Thankfully, we can still see the DELETED TWEET where conservative talk show host Benny Johnson EXCITEDLY shared the image on Twitter.

BAD MOVE, BENNY. But good that somebody saved it.

LINK: https://www.truthorfiction.com/benny-johnsons-trumps-enthusiasm-is-bigger-than-in-2016-deleted-tweet/

ARCHIVE: https://archive.ph/ldRqq

This analysis is from “Truth or Fiction” – a MUCH better “fact checker” site. As you can see, they are “showing their work”, so we can do some forensics.

Ask yourself – do you really think this Benny Johnson would tweet an easily confirmed “wrong picture” of the event if he KNEW it was a bogus picture? No. He’s not that stupid. But he WAS as stupid as I have been, sometimes, and forwarded a picture from a “surely reliable source” that turned out not to have been reliable.

If you remember TEN-GOP, then you know how easily people can be fooled on sources.

In my opinion, after looking over Benny Johnson’s Twitter, and reading this tweet, I think he really believed he was forwarding a picture of the rally. THEN, he was embarrassed by his own lazy image “borrowing”, and lack of fact-checking. In my opinion, it is likely that he was the victim of a rather smart discreditation operation, and is NOT simply a bald-faced and stupid liar. Loath to admit that he grabbed somebody’s photo off the internet and assumed it was real without checking or doing BASIC JOURNALISM, he just deleted the tweet and moved on, cutting his losses.

Could have even been an intern, for all we know. If so, TRAINING is needed (ask Wray!!!).

SO – bad journalist or both a bald-faced liar and stupid as hell? I’m going with bad journalist. At least for now. This seems confirmed by the opinion that Benny Johnson rarely deletes stuff that offends leftist sensibilities.

Normally, things would end there. Dude made a mistake. But that’s not what the left wants.

They want an ISSUE that they can exploit for MILLIONS of impressions.

So what they do is take the error and REFRAME IT exactly as you see.

They likewise use this for clickbait elsewhere, as a “FEATURED FACT-CHECK”, on OTHER “fact checks”. That is, in fact (cough), how I found this one – while looking at a NASA conspiracy theory debunking (which STILL does not work for me, but that’s A DIFFERENT STORY with far more troubling implications).

FALSE. That’s it. FALSE.

But let’s call the left on this a little bit.

Why didn’t the “fact checkers” call this MOSTLY TRUE? Why didn’t they call it “PARTIALLY TRUE”? Why did they not, at the least, call it “SOMEWHAT TRUE”?

They would CERTAINLY do that for a Biden rally or an Obama rally – AM I RIGHT?

A picture from a DIFFERENT Biden rally with 24 people instead of 12? Would that not get a pass? Maybe 120 instead of 12?

Let me speak for them. They would have been more honest.

“So while the photo is NOT a photo of the Biden rally in question, it is in fact a photo of a different Biden rally, taken during the 2020 election campaign.”

MOSTLY TRUE.

Here is how “PolitiFact” takes their carefully misleading question and goes from there to calling a well-attended Trump rally “false”, while pretending to just be honing in on an evidence problem.

PolitiFact conducted a reverse image search of the photo and found Trump’s son, Eric Trump, shared it on Twitter in November 2020. At the time, he used the image of a large, apparently pro-Trump crowd to push the false claim that the presidential election was rigged.

Molly Beck, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, quote-tweeted Johnson’s now-deleted tweet and said the photo in question was not from the Aug. 5 rally. She also pointed to Eric Trump’s tweet as the source of the photo.

The scene depicted in this older photo does not match photos shared by reporters who were on site at the Aug. 5 Wisconsin rally. Media photos show a smaller crowd and a different event layout.

In the older photo, two large screens that read, “The best is yet to come!” can be seen. This was a slogan often used by Donald Trump during his 2020 campaign.

Meanwhile, media photos from the recent rally show two screens displaying the event’s speakers, including Trump, as well as a large, blue sign that said, “Save America!”

Additionally, photos from reporters show there were three bleachers of roughly the same size behind the stage at the event. But in the 2020 campaign photo, there is one large set of bleachers in the center and two smaller sets to the left and right.

Our ruling

Social media posts shared a photo from Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign and claimed it was of an Aug. 5, 2022, rally in Wisconsin.

The photo in question does not show the Aug. 5 rally and can be traced back to a November 2020 tweet from Eric Trump. It also conflicts with several photos taken by reporters on site at the Aug. 5 Wisconsin rally.

We rate this claim False.

Whatever.

Conclusion

Now you know why it is IMPERATIVE to confirm materials from our sources. The left will ABUSE any error on our part.

AND – if it turns out that the source is suddenly dubious, you really need to DIG INTO the error, rather than running away.

BURN THE SOURCE TO GET TO THE TRUTH.

For me, the classic example of digging into a bogus meme and finding shocking truth was the ZIM shipping meme that Valerie brought here. I will not lie – Val brings an enormous amount of disinformation and CRAP here – but it was all worth it, to reset my thinking on how many of the elite skated on 9/11. She found some of the best circumstantial evidence, outside of convenient stock moves in the days preceding 9/11, that many top people knew the operation was coming. Whether these people were conspirators or just high-level would-be victims who got tipped, people knew the op was coming and did a GTFO.

Technically, the meme (which I cannot find now – it’s on Gab) was wrong on the length of ZIM’s lease at WTC, using waffly language to make 30 years of separate leases ending in a 10 year lease, into what was easily misconstrued as a 30-year lease. Likewise, it personified ZIM as the Rothschild family, who may or may not have been the controlling financial interest in the Israeli firm at the time. WHATEVER. Other than that, the meme was shockingly accurate in throwing 4 Suspicious Cats at ZIM’s ridiculously convenient and hasty move – despite a world of fact-checkers and “crusaders against antisemitism” waving their hands and saying “don’t look here”.

HA. The CHUTZPAH. It BURNS.

Closer to the current example, I watched a Breitbart journalist get set up with bogus information on Loretta Lynch – basically identifying the WRONG Loretta Lynch (a Clinton associate) as being Obama’s corrupt nomination to replace Eric Holder. This resulted in a defamatory article and a STEALTH RETRACTION BY BREITBART (“what article?”) – which was then (apparently) used to silence Breitbart completely on one of the most corrupt nominations in this nation’s history, since Loretta Lynch was a SORORITY SISTER of Eric Holder’s wife. Not a WORD followed on the REAL SCANDAL, after Breitbart was misled by SOMEBODY into publishing an ERROR.

Face the facts. CORRUPTION IS RAMPANT.

And they will say and do almost ANYTHING to cover it up.

We have ALWAYS got to be prepared for DISCREDITATION – but in my opinion, if you PUSH BACK on the discreditation and ADMIT YOUR ERROR – whatever it was – you automatically level up as a TRUTH WARRIOR. You will OFTEN find that the other side did something to entrap you.

Why?

Because WE value the truth and THEY do not.

PUT ON YOUR BELT, to hold up the PANTS OF CREDIBILITY.

Stick with the truth. No matter how unexpected, embarrassing, or unbelievable. At the same time, be BOLD in pointing out likely malfeasance, and MAKE THEM ANSWER OR RUN AWAY.

W