JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
Think it has been debunked? See here.
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Easy Money Begats Easy Billionaires, who build Easy Foundations, which are easily captured. And before you know it, the apolitical becomes political, and the political becomes a lobbying machine. Big Money becomes Huge Money and Huge Money wields power.
And a perfectly good civilization goes to waste.
h/t Scott of the Pacific
How Charity Foundations Damage Western Societies
by John Smoke, im1776
by Freestocks-photos
Charities are as large as the entire University sector.
Charitable foundations, and the specific charities they fund, are the single most important force in modern Western societies. They complete a triumvirate of the “journalism plus academia” shorthand of the Cathedral as Curtis Yarvin sees it. The amount of money sloshing around these organisations is simply mind-boggling. The latter is hard to reliably quantify, but in the UK, the charity ‘industry’ apparently registered £45 billion in revenues in 2021 alone. Compare this to the £40.5 billion total income in the UK higher education sector a couple of years ago and you get the idea.
John Smoke adroitly connects the dots and draws the spiral vortex that draws most charities in.
It starts so gently:
Imagine a billionaire. He’s an […]
Nature and Elsevier are agog and aghast that hundreds of junk papers filled with random word salad have been published in their esteemed journals.
It’s as bad as it sounds — one retracted title was: “‘Sea level height based on big data of Internet of Things and aerobics teaching in coastal areas’. “
They are shocked that scammers who were “organised” and “sophisticated” found tricks to get published — wait for it — not just by hyping up, adjusting and exaggerating their cherry-picked papers and incompetent models, but with nothing more than fake e-mails “with ‘univ’ instead of ‘uni’ and ‘-ac.uk’ instead of ‘.ac.uk’”. That’s right, the highest and most intellectual “peer review” journals in the world have such inadequate, nonexistent standards, that not only do they fail to weed out weak papers, they couldn’t even defend themselves against randomized nonsense coming from fake professors with dodgy emails.
In other words, no one who matters even reads the papers before they are published.
Indeed, no one even read the titles…
Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published
Nature
Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for […]
The new Climate Consensus is just a junk keyword survey.
Climate change is a branch of science that’s immature, complex, and has error bars a hundred miles wide. If 99% of scientists say the same thing, it’s a cult, not a science. The climate is not man-made but the irrelevant consensus surely is.
By studying words in industry publications, Mark Lynas thinks he’s discovered a scientific truth. Instead he has just shown that skeptics get purged from peer review. It’s official now, 99% of peer reviewed articles have to say they believe in order to get published.
He thought he was doing climate science but instead he studied sociology. If Mark Lynas proved anything it’s that he doesn’t know what science is, and only unskeptical papers pass peer review. It’s a sad sad statement about the state of the scientific-industry.
Hypothetically, if we cared at all about unscientific opinion-polling of climate scientists, we’d just opinion-poll them. He could run up a survey and email it out. It’d still be a fallacy, but at least it would tell us what scientists thought. Instead, Mark Lynas and co have taken a long roundabout route to poll them by proxy. It’s the oddly […]
James Cook University won a Pyrrhic victory at the High Court today. By spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars (how many exactly?), all they have proven is that we can’t trust any research done by that university.
Even if the professors there are being sincere and honest, we will never know whether they are only telling us what their Vice Chancellor, Supreme Ruler Sandra Harding, wants them to say. The government should not be funding this sort of institution. It serves its administration, not the Australian taxpayer.
Two years ago, JCU had already spent $600,000 to make sure all their staff know they can’t criticize the uni.
Peter Ridd was JCU’s best asset until they sacked him. He helped expose manipulated photos of reef fish by a JCU researcher, Oona Lönnstedt, who had already been caught fabricating data in Sweden. Yet JCU “investigated” and sacked Ridd faster than it investigated her suspicious lionfish shots.
Every JCU employee’s work is tainted by this. We will never know what any JCU researcher really thinks, or which results were dropped in the bin, no matter what they say, because we know employees of JCU will be afraid to report bad behaviour, fraud, […]
Even the former Head of MI-6 was warned to say nothing about the origins of Covid. The Swamp is so deep, and the corruption or infiltration of the West is so complete, that even at the highest levels in both government advice and in science, people were being censored.
Notice how the collectivists have changed the meaning of the word “conspiracy”. How do we discuss “a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.” when even the word we most want to use is now used as a namecalling label, the implies the user is delusional. The derision is now automatically assumed. Who does that serve?
Even Sharri Markson uses the term “conspiracy” with the new definition.
Our language is being destroyed. Gradually key words are weaponised against free thinkers.
….
The paper by Piplani et al (including Professor Petrosky) that was repeatedly rejected without the paper even being looked at. The authors expected a very different response when they submitted it. Normally, this kind of topical controversial paper would have been accepted quickly by journals wanting to grab the limelight and headlines.
It was eventually published in Nature in 2021. The paper showed that SARS-2 […]
Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland State University for ten years and he has just quit in protest.
Peter Boghossian
He fought against Woke ideology. He helped write hoax papers to expose how meaningless peer review is and exposed students to politically incorrect speakers to hone their powers of reasoning. For that he has been subject to extraordinary vilification, inquisitions, and a campaign of disruption. His students were interviewed to find instances of “discrimination” and the investigators even asked them if they knew anything about him “beating his wife and children”, fueling rumors that he was a violent misogynist. He was given no right of reply. It’s character assassination by any means possible. The University did nothing to stop it.
Even petty methods were used to silence and intimidate him. Fire alarms interrupted an interview, bags of faeces were delivered, and speaker wires were pulled out during a live panel discussion. This reminds me of stories of how the Chinese Communist Party targets dissidents overseas with petty disruptions like having minions bang pots and pans in alleys to wake them in the dead of night.
It’s almost like the CCP runs the universities of the West.
My […]
A postmodern coal-powered Cockatoo is larger, meaner and nastier than any bird photographed in the paleolithic. | Photo by Photoholgic on Unsplash
It’s a new horror to scare the kiddies:
Animals ‘shape-shifting’ as climate warms: study
Paris: Some animals are “shape-shifting” and have developed bigger tails, beaks and ears to regulate their body temperatures as the planet warms, according to a new study.
The Australian parrot, for example, had shown an average 4-10 per cent increase in the size of its bill since 1871 and the authors said this positively correlated with the summer temperature each year.
For one, do bird-bills cool birds? For two, how many parrot bills were measured in 1871 in Australia and do we think we would know if their bills got 10% bigger? For three, there is no “Australian parrot”, there are 56 different species. And fourthly, even if they had got bigger, and we could measure that, which we probably can’t, how do we know it’s not due to “something else” that changed in the last 150 years, like all the orchards, crops, trees and other things we planted? According to some botanists, there are more foreign plants […]
What is informed consent if your doctor is not allowed to inform you?
Even if Dr Oosterhuis is allowed to keep his license after being grilled today, the NSW Medical Board will have succeeded in scaring many doctors into silence. If our medical agencies were corrupt, the first people to point that out would be doctors who could speak freely. The gross overreaction of the NSW Medical Board tells us all that they don’t have solid evidence, and they might be covering up either their incompetence or something worse.
What are they hiding?
NSW Medical Board to grill anti-vax doctor
The Australian
A Sydney doctor has been hauled before the NSW Medical Board after he questioned evidence behind Covid-19 vaccines and promoted unapproved treatments, including Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, in a case that will test the limits of what medical professionals can say publicly.
Anaesthetist Paul Oosterhuis, who has practised in NSW’s public hospital system for more than 30 years, will front the board at a hearing on Friday, where he could be stripped of his licence after he made Facebook posts more than two weeks ago.
“AHPRA has said you can only […]
Tony Thomas has been reading academic papers so you don’t have to. Dr Blanche Verlie at the Uni of Sydney explores “the affective geographies of eco-anxiety” and seems to help create victims to study at the same time. A good business model maybe, but at the expense of mental health.
The more young people suffer, the more useful they are as political activists:
Getting Kids’ Climate Misery Just Right
Tony Thomas, Quadrant
Dr Blanche Verlie,Uni Sydney
Verlie correctly concedes that “climate anxiety can intersect with and contribute to clinically diagnosable mental illness” born of “hopelessness, disillusionment or apathy”. But she explains helpfully (if I might paraphrase) that the more kids suffer the better chance they’ll become green activists. In her own words,
climate anxiety is not an illness or disorder, but an appropriate and even valuable source of discomfort that can provide an important lens to help people re-evaluate what is important to them and find meaningful ways to inhabit the world. Education’s remit for cultivating critical thinking and empowerment thus makes it an exciting realm for supporting young people to contribute to what Verlie (2019a) [she is speaking of herself in […]
Lithuania, 1955
There are almost no brave people left in academia, or sport, or the land of celebrity. When one of their own faces the axe for some random transgression of an invisible rule book on political niceties, their colleagues abandon them.
In academia, they’re supposed to be the intellectual cream of the crop –the individual giants who fought their way to the top. But it’s like we’ve selected for wary herding people instead. And perhaps that’s the point. When universities were turned into schools and businesses, and quirky philanthropist funding became predictable Big-Government largess, the mavericks and rebels didn’t fit and one by one were expelled, sacked — or just pushed sideways til they fell out. What’s left in the wasteland of academia, apparently, are the mid-wit networking climbers. The middling Ordinaires rose into positions above their due and became afraid of losing the sweeter deal than they deserved. If they were the top dogs in their field, and if that mattered, they could speak their mind, get sacked, and still be offered a new position at a competing institution. But second rung players don’t have that option. They won’t put their head above the parapet and […]
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