Tag: pseudoscience
Predatory publishers gain foothold in Indian academia’s upper echelon
BENGALURU, INDIA—India is home to a flourishing community of predatory journals: outlets that masquerade as legitimate scientific publications but publish papers with little or no peer review while charging authors hefty fees. Many observers assumed that such bottom feeders were mostly attracting papers of dubious scientific value, if not plagiarized or fraudulent reports, from institutions in academia’s outer orbits. But a new analysis has found that many of the weak papers in predatory journals are coming from top-flight Indian research institutions.
The finding has turned the spotlight on an academic culture in India that tends to prize quantity of publications over quality when evaluating researchers. This is an especially big problem in the life sciences, and it will take time to fix, says K. Vijayraghavan, the secretary of India’s Department of Biotechnology (DBT) in New Delhi, which funded some of the research that ended up in predatory journals. “Biology, in general, has become ghastly, in that people are chasing the metrics,” he says. “If you chase these surrogate markers of success instead of science, we have a problem.”
Recent revelations have pointed to a symbiotic relationship in India between questionable publishers and mediocre researchers. In 2013, a Science investigation traced the publishers and editors of scores of predatory journals to India. And last year, a team reported in BMC Medicine that of a selection of 262 authors published in predatory journals, 35% were Indian.
The Forgotten Dangers of Ultrasound
Story at a Glance:
•The medical field has had a long history of exposing mothers to “treatments” that harm their infants. After decades of work to stop the routine x-raying of fetuses, the “safe and effective” practice of prenatal ultrasound (US) was adopted in its place.•While US is thought to be safe, there are decades of research showing it can harm tissues. Initially, this was well recognized, but as the ultrasound industry took off, it became a forgotten side of medicine, and research in this area became almost impossible to conduct.
• There is a large body of evidence showing fetuses are particularly vulnerable to US. Most concerningly, dozens of trials were conducted in China immediately prior to mothers planning to have abortions, which showed giving an US beforehand clearly damaged fetal tissues.
•The harms of US are dose dependent. Unfortunately, in 1992, despite widespread concerns about the safety of prenatal US (e.g., CNN did a program on it) the FDA chose to raise the permissible US levels 8-fold (and often more). Given that the studies showing the dangers of US were conducted at levels far below the original threshold, this increase is quite concerning, and may have played a pivotal role in the outbreak of chronic childhood illnesses that occurred around this time.
•Conversely, the benefits of prenatal US are often vastly overstated, and in many cases put mothers on unnecessary “treatment” plans which harm them and their infants.
There is a LOT in common between the lockdown policies and the assisted dying bill — Dr Clare Craig
Let’s start with them both centring on the fear of death and both leveraging emotional appeals to justify extreme measures.
But there’s much more…🧵
Lockdowns crossed a Rubicon in terms of civil rights – overturning the social contract.
Euthanasia crosses a Rubicon in terms of moral norms – again overturning the social contract.
Support and opposition to both policies has come from across traditional party lines.
In both cases government did not provide a risk benefit analysis.
In both cases government has not had input from ethics advisors.
Lockdown legislation was imposed rapidly with no public debate, insufficient public debate and the excuse of following international precendents.
Same for the euthanasia bill.
Lockdown was backed with a hugely expensive media campaign and independent opposing voices were drowned out.
Same for the euthanasia bill.
At their core, both policies reflect a fantasy of control: control over a virus that spreads invisibly and uncontrollably, and control over death.
The reality of the process is not what people might expect (see oregon data below – range column showed how long death took).
RFK on Big Pharma advertising, making public the LOCKED CDC medical database, and exposing the medical journal SYNDICATE
Why the ‘Still Face’ Experiment by Ed Tronick sucks
I find this experiment very disturbing because: 1) it intentionally upsets the baby; 2) it’s the mother doing it; 3) the mother is deliberately lying, deliberately manipulating her child; 4) the mother was taught to do this or told to do this or paid to do this by a researcher and she obeyed. Thus, both the baby and the mother are harmed by the researcher who should have known better. This experiment violates the Nuremberg Code by experimenting on a human being without their consent. I am sure some good has come from this experiment and the work of Ed Tronick, but I still don’t like it. I posted this because it came up this morning during a conversation with my partner. I do wonder what kind of mother would do this to her baby? And what kind of researcher would entice a mother to do this? It’s good information to have the baby’s distress confirmed, but not at the cost of several layers of inhumane deception. How many times was this done to how many babies? ABN
FLASHBACK, ONE YEAR AGO: President Trump on ‘Gender-affirming care’
Megyn Kelly telling the truth about transgender madness
Much like covid, this issue is top-down, coming from professional organizations and government. It is not only madness on the ground, it also has the very strong appearance of being an act of asymmetric warfare against the American people. Mass immigration also has this appearance, as do many other US policies or allowances like the opium massacre which has transmogrified into the Fentanyl massacre. I am resigned to us having an elite but not a dirty, smelly, vicious and nasty elite full of cabalistic shitheads and perverts. ABN
Climate Change in one image
Solar Panels are a Scam — Ashton Forbes
Solar panels only convert 6-20% of the energy they absorb into electricity. The rest is converted to heat. The heat radiates back out into the environment and rises into the atmosphere. Theoretically, this could impact the weather.
Solar panels require toxic chemicals such as Lead, Cadmium, Arsenic, Hexafluoroethane, Polyvinyl fluoride to produce. Some panels release Nitrogen trifluoride which is magnitudes worse for atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
Toxic solar ewaste represents a growing problem. Only about 10% of solar panels are being recycled. It is estimated 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life by 2050.
The only thing green about solar is the money being used to line corrupt pockets.
IRELAND: Enoch Burke’s father on transgenderism and his situation
The Great Cholesterol Scam and The Dangers of Statins
Story at a Glance:
•There is a widespread belief that elevated cholesterol is the “cause” of cardiovascular disease. However, a large body of evidence shows that there is no association between the two and that lower cholesterol significantly increases one’s risk of death.
•An alternative model (which the medical industry buried) proposes that the blood clots the body uses to heal arterial damage, once healed, create the characteristic atherosclerotic lesions associated with heart disease. The evidence for this model, in turn, is much stronger than the cholesterol hypothesis and provides many important insights for treating heart disease.
•The primary approach to treating heart disease is to prescribe cholesterol lowering statin drugs (to the point, over a trillion dollars have now been spent on them). Unfortunately, the benefits of these highly toxic drugs are minuscule (e.g., at best taking them for years extends your life by a few days) and the harms are vast (statins are one of the most common pharmaceuticals that severely injure patients).
•In this article we will explore the specific injuries caused by statin drugs, the forgotten causes of cardiovascular disease, and our preferred treatments for heart and vascular diseases.
American Buddhist Net 