Brian Lauer of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association debated Mark Reid on the topic of creation vs. evolution and Reid slapped him down hard. I came on for a second round and tore up Lauer’s arguments further. Now there’s blood in the water: Mark Reid is coming back to mutilate the corpse yet further on Wednesday evening.
This should be fun. I’ll be watching and making comments in the chat. Join in! Maybe Lauer will show up to defend himself, adding to the hilarity.
And they’re no better than creationists elsewhere. I felt compelled to critique a bad creationist debate sponsored by the Twin Cities Creation Science Association.
Sorry, no transcript, I was just winging it.
If you follow RetractionWatch, you know that there a lot of bad papers published in the scientific literature. But there you just see the steady drip, drip, drip of bad research getting exposed, a paper at a time. If you step back and look at the overall picture, you begin to see the source. A lot of it comes from paper mills and bad actors conspiring to allow their pals to publish trash.
(PubPeer is a site that allows post-publication peer review and catches many examples of bad science.)
Nature jumped on an analysis of the people behind swarms of retracted papers on PLoS One, and exposed some of the editors. The problem can be pinned on a surprisingly small number of researchers/editors.
Nearly one-third of all retracted papers at PLoS ONE can be traced back to just 45 researchers who served as editors at the journal, an analysis of its publication records has found.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on 4 August, found that 45 editors handled only 1.3% of all articles published by PLoS ONE from 2006 to 2023, but that the papers they accepted accounted for more than 30% of the 702 retractions that the journal issued by early 2024. Twenty-five of these editors also authored papers in PLoS ONE that were later retracted.
The PNAS authors did not disclose the names of any of the 45 editors. But, by independently analysing publicly available data from PLoS ONE and the Retraction Watch database, Nature’s news team has identified five of the editors who handled the highest number of papers that were subsequently retracted by the journal. Together, those editors accepted about 15% of PLoS ONE’s retracted papers up to 14 July.
Wow. These are people who betrayed the responsibilities of a professional scientist. They need to be exposed and rooted out…but they also reflect a systemic issue.
The study reveals how individuals can form coordinated networks and work under the guise of editorial duty to push large amounts of problematic research into the scientific literature, in some cases with links to paper mills — businesses that churn out fake papers and sell authorship slots.
Yeah, it’s all about money. And also about the use of publications for professional advancement.
So, about the individuals who are committing these perfidious activities…Nature identified many, but I’ll just single out one as an example.
In their analysis of PLoS ONE’s publication records, Richardson and his colleagues identified 19 researchers — based in 4 countries — who served as academic editors between 2020 and 2023, and repeatedly handled each other’s submissions. More than half of the papers they accepted were later retracted, with nearly identical notices citing concerns about authorship, peer review and competing interests.
Nature’s analysis identified 3 of those 19 editors. Shahid Farooq, a plant biologist at Harran University in Şanlıurfa, Turkey, topped the list of PLoS ONE editors ordered by the number of retracted papers that they handled. Between 2019 and 2023, Farooq was responsible for editing 79 articles, 52 of which were subsequently retracted. All of the retraction notices stated that the papers were “identified as one of a series of submissions” for which the journal had concerns about authorship, competing interests and peer review. Farooq also co-authored seven articles in PLoS ONE that were later retracted with identical retraction notices.
That’s a batting record that ought to discredit all of Farooq’s work, and ought to taint all of his coauthors and the researchers who had their work “reviewed” by him. Fortunately for all of us, he has lost all of his editorial duties.
Farooq says that PLoS ONE removed him from the editorial board in 2022, and that he subsequently resigned from his editorial positions in other journals, including Frontiers in Agronomy and BMC Plant Biology.
My editing experience has changed to not editing any paper for any publisher, as the publishers become innocent once any issues are raised on the published papers,he added.
That’s a remarkable excuse: he got caught, so it’s all the publishers’ fault.
Purging a few bad apples isn’t going to fix the issues, because the problem is only getting worse.
In the PNAS paper, Richardson and his colleagues compiled a list of 32,786 papers that they and other sleuths flagged for bearing hallmarks of paper-mill production, such as duplicated images, tortured phrases and whole copied sentences. Only 8,589 of these papers have been retracted. They report that the number of suspected paper-mill articles is doubling every 1.5 years — outpacing the number of retractions, which is doubling every 3.3 years.
Hey, you know, this is where AI could be really useful — I think a lot of these fraudsters are using AI to generate the AI-slop papers, but we could turn it around and use AI to detect the conspiratorial web of collaborating authors as well as the bad writing in these papers.
I’d begun to forget that Jordan Peterson exists — does anyone still find him credible? — when potholer54 comes out with a new video demonstrating that he’s a pretentious fool who doesn’t understand basic science, and that he contradicts himself all the time.
It’s amazing how nonsical Peterson is and has always been.
This is a photo of the gravitational lensing caused by a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy.
The cosmic behemoth is close to the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the universe and is 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.
It exists in one of the most massive galaxies ever observed – the Cosmic Horseshoe – which is so big it distorts spacetime and warps the passing light of a background galaxy into a giant horseshoe-shaped Einstein ring.
Such is the enormousness of the ultramassive black hole’s size, it equates to 36 billion solar masses, according to a new paper published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Meanwhile, here on the Planet of the Dumbasses, in a country renowned for its dumbassery, a dumbass religious fanatic has convened a conference featuring three dumbass astronaut-apologists to argue that the entire universe is only 6000 years old, and that only the Planet of Dumbasses is populated by dumbasses who are able to look up into the sky and appreciate astronomy. You can read a long and thorough review of this dumbass conference, but the comment that jumped out a me was this one:
Ham went on to discuss the cosmos, naming various constellations and nebulae and demonstrating his familiarity with astronomy. He explained his belief that God had created the universe to showcase His power to human beings; as Psalm 19 says,
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.The universe, Ham claimed, has no other purpose than to impress us here on Earth with God’s capacity for creation.
So, apparently, a god assembled this gigantic black hole, 36 billion solar masses in size, unobservable until now, in 2025, just to show off. You’d think he could have done a better job of this one planet full of his dumbass worshippers with all the energy and power he used to construct an impossibly distant sphere of death, that we can’t visit and most of us can’t even see. However, the narcissism of this Christian god is far greater than 36 billion stars, I guess, which is why we’re supposed to worship his bloated ego.
To treat science as merely one belief system among many is to misrepresent what science is and why it matters. Claims that science is merely a tool to promote a certain political perspective (whether accusing climate researchers of fabrication or reducing medical research to “Big Pharma” profiteering) are rhetorically powerful because they reframe empirical findings as mere opinion. But while no human endeavor is untouched by ideology, the strength of science lies precisely in its effort to weed ideology out. NASA’s science missions must be protected, not despite the fact that their findings may challenge deeply held beliefs or even particular political goals, but precisely because they do. In an era when the authority of evidence is often undermined or dismissed, defending the integrity of empirical discovery is essential – not only for the future of space science, but for the very idea that reality can be investigated and understood without fear of the consequences of challenging dogma, whether religious or political.
The reviewer is too nice to say it, but I’m not nice. Fuck Charlie Duke. Fuck Jeffrey N. Williams. Fuck Barry “Butch” Wilmore. They are people who have betrayed truth for a religious lie.
Don’t you know? RFK jr is not anti-vax. He supports safe vaccines.
News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither. I am pro-safety,Kennedy said in his opening statement before the Senate Committee on Finance, prompting a protester to shout, “He lies!” Kennedy added that all of his children are vaccinated—a decision he has previously said he regrets—and said vaccinesplay a critical role in health care.
He lies! Those two words need to be written on his tombstone, preferably sooner than later.
We know he lies because he just slashed half a billion dollars from the budget of the department specifically tasked with developing and testing new vaccines.
The US Department of Health and Human Services said on Tuesday it would terminate 22 federal contracts for mRNA-based vaccines, questioning the safety of a technology credited with helping end the Covid pandemic and saving millions of lives.
The unit, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, helps companies develop medical supplies to address public health threats, and had provided billions of dollars for development of vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic.
HHS said the wind-down includes cancellation of a contract awarded to Moderna for the late-stage development of its bird flu vaccine for humans and the right to purchase the shots, as previously reported in May.
He basically wants to kill mRNA vaccine development, the technology that saved millions of lives in the recent pandemic. His excuse? In addition to his usual claim that the vaccines contain fetal tissue and DNA fragments — all false, and even if it were true, what does he think is present in the roadkill he eats? — he claims that mRNA vaccines are ineffective against viruses that affect the upper respiratory tract.
Kennedy said the HHS is terminating these programs because data show these vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu”, but did not offer scientific evidence.
“We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate,” Kennedy said.
COVID was an upper respiratory infection, and the mRNA vaccines seem to have helped protect millions of people against that, but RatFucker Jr is going to just ignore that. He lies, and is wrong.
KENNEDY: “As the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.”
THE FACTS: His claim is contradicted by scientific evidence. Countless studies show that vaccinated individuals fare far better against COVID-19 infections than those who are unvaccinated, while others have estimated that COVID-19 vaccines prevented millions of deaths during the global pandemic. The mRNA vaccines do not prevent respiratory diseases entirely, experts say. Rather, they can prevent more serious illness that leads to complications and death. For example, an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 may prevent an infection in the upper respiratory tract that feels like a bad cold from spreading to the lower respiratory tract, where it could affect one’s ability to breathe.
While he’s cutting the budget for specious reasons, he’s also telling the scientists he doesn’t want to pay to pursue a new/old line of research.
He has also ordered a sweeping new study on the long-debunked link between vaccines and autism.
There is no link between vaccines and autism. There is a link between mRNA vaccines and preventing death.
He lies.
3I/ATLAS
Avi Loeb, the ridiculous Harvard astronomer who claimed that the interstellar object ʻOumuamua was a technological artifact, has battened on a different rock that was discovered in July called 3I/ATLAS as the object of his alien fantasies. He’s published his explanation in an in-house journal (which is not peer-reviewed) in a paper titled Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?. The answer is “no”, but Avi really wants it to be “yes.” To give him a chance to make his argument, here’s the abstract.
At this early stage of its passage through our Solar System, 3I/ATLAS, the recently discovered interstellar interloper, has displayed various anomalous characteristics, determined from photometric and astrometric observations. As largely a pedagogical exercise, in this paper we present additional analysis into the astrodynamics of 3I/ATLAS, and hypothesize that this object could be technological, and possibly hostile as would be expected from the ’Dark Forest’ resolution to the ’Fermi Paradox’. We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability of ≲ 0.005%. Furthermore the low retrograde tilt of 3I/ATLAS’s orbital plane to the ecliptic offers various benefits to an Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (ETI), since it allows the object access to our planet with relative impunity. The eclipse by the Sun from Earth of 3I/ATLAS at perihelion, would allow it to conduct a clandestine reverse Solar Oberth Manoeuvre, an optimal high-thrust strategy for interstellar spacecraft to brake and stay bound to the Sun. An optimal intercept of Earth would entail an arrival in late November/early December of 2025, and also, a non-gravitational acceleration of ∼ 5.9 × 10−5 au day−2, normalized at 1 au from the Sun, would indicate an intent to intercept the planet Jupiter, not far off its path, and a strategy to rendezvous with it after perihelion.
The paper is full of the technical details about the orbital mechanics of this object. It’s unpleasantly dry and boring, with occasional insertions of his wild speculations. Fortunately, he also has a blog post titled Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology? which is enriched for the Loeb lunacy, so I’ll mainly write about that.
Finding a big rock or comet of interstellar origin is not a revolutionary discovery — it’s interesting, but not something that is necessarily indicative that aliens are hitching a ride on it. His justification for suggesting that it’s an alien artifact are tenuous and based entirely on speculations about its trajectory. For instance, it’s approaching on roughly the ecliptic plane.
The retrograde orbital plane (defined by the orbital angular momentum vector) of 3I/ATLAS around the Sun lies within 5 degrees of that of Earth — the so-called ecliptic plane. The likelihood for that coincidence out of all random orientations is 0.2%.
So it’s unlikely that a rock flying through interstellar space would have the particular approach angle that this one has. But wouldn’t any specific trajectory be unlikely? So what?
Another coincidence is that it’s going to pass sorta close to Venus, Mars, and Jupiter.
For its orbital parameters, 3I/ATLAS is synchronized to approach unusually close to Venus (0.65au where 1au is the Earth-Sun separation), Mars (0.19au) and Jupiter (0.36au), with a cumulative probability of 0.005% relative to orbits with the same orbital parameters but a random arrival time.
Therefore it might be a probe that’s sent here to inspect the planets. It’s checking us out!
You might be thinking that zooming by Venus, Mars, and Jupiter is fine, but what about Earth? It’s not coming anywhere near us, which is evidence that it is a probe.
3I/ATLAS achieves perihelion on the opposite side of the Sun relative to Earth. This could be intentional to avoid detailed observations from Earth-based telescopes when the object is brightest or when gadgets are sent to Earth from that hidden vantage point.
So it’s checking us out, but specifically avoiding being detected by us. Convenient.
But the aliens must be fascinated by us! So he postulates that 3I/ATLAS will fire up its engines and change its trajectory out of our sight, on the other side of the sun, so it can intercept the Earth.
The near alignment of the retrograde trajectory of 3I/ATLAS with the ecliptic plane offers various benefits to an extraterrestrial intelligence, since it allows a spacecraft to access Earth with relative impunity. The eclipse of 3I/ATLAS by the Sun at perihelion for observers at Earth, would allow a spacecraft to conduct a clandestine reverse Solar Oberth maneuver, an optimal high-thrust strategy for interstellar spacecraft to brake and stay bound to the Sun. An optimal intercept of Earth would entail an arrival in late November or early December of 2025. Detection of a non-gravitational acceleration could also indicate an intent to intercept Jupiter, not far off the path of 3I/ATLAS, and a strategy to rendezvous with it after perihelion.
Note that this kind of maneuvering would suggest that 3I/ATLAS is an alien artifact, but it has not been observed. He can’t use a hypothetical motion that has not been seen as evidence that the object is capable of maneuvering. All of his evidence that 3I/ATLAS is an artifact is about remarkable changes in trajectory that have not been observed.
He has NOTHING to support his hypothesis that 3I/ATLAS is alien technology! The idea is that if it suddenly changes its path and approaches Earth, then it must be driven by some novel propulsive force. And, yeah, if a bunch of little green men pop out of it and use flying saucers to visit us, then at last Avi Loeb will be vindicated.
But of course, he does not predict that.
Our paper is contingent on a remarkable but testable hypothesis that 3I/ATLAS is a functioning technological artifact, to which I and my two co-authors do not necessarily ascribe.
So he does not predict that, but if it happens, he’s staking his claim on it. Very cheesy. He’s going to have a future as a television psychic, vague and making predictions so broad that they can cover all eventualities.
But there’s more! He wants us to prepare for the alien invasion!
1. The consequences, should the hypothesis turn out to be correct, could potentially be dire for humanity, and would possibly require defensive measures to be undertaken (though these might prove futile).
2. The hypothesis is an interesting exercise in its own right, and is fun to explore, irrespective of its likely validity.
He doesn’t actually believe 3I/ATLAS is an alien artifact, but we’d better start preparing defensive measures
(what would those be, I wonder? Like maybe back in the 15th century someone should have suggested to the native Americans to prepare defensive measures
.)
And no, it’s not an interesting
exercise. He also admits that his speculation are a pedagogical exercise
, and that it is probably just a comet.
Our paper is largely a pedagogical exercise, with interesting realizations worthy of a record in the scientific literature. By far, the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and we await the astronomical data to support this likely origin.
He went ahead and spread his unfounded hyperbole, though. The story has made it to the NY Post, and you can guess what the headline was: ‘Possibly hostile’ alien threat detected in unknown interstellar object, a shocking new study claims.
I have to give some credit to the NY Post, though — they actually talked to real astronomers and got their opinion of Loeb’s hypothesis.
“All evidence points to this being an ordinary comet that was ejected from another solar system, just as countless billions of comets have been ejected from our own solar system,” added Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Canada who studies solar system dynamics, Live Science reported.
“Astronomers all around the world have been thrilled at the arrival of 3I/ATLAS, collaborating to use advanced telescopes to learn about this visitor,” Chris Lintott, an astronomer at the University of Oxford who helped simulate 3I/ATLAS’s galactic origins, told Live Science. “Any suggestion that it’s artificial is nonsense on stilts, and is an insult to the exciting work going on to understand this object.”
That ought to be the take-away on this story, that it’s “nonsense on stilts,” and it ought to diminish Avi Loeb’s already tattered reputation.
It’s more of a pathetic squeak.
Dave Futrelle found something provocative: a new type of guy (and he has lots of opinions about breeding). It’s an out-and-proud eugenicist, one who doesn’t seem to know very much about genetics, but he has written an unfinished app called Seekia, a genetics aware mate discovery network
with the goal to help humanity mate in a genetics aware manner
. It makes many grand claims about being able to compare your genetic constitution to that of a potential mate, and calculate the likelihood of healthy offspring. It is not at all clear where it’s getting genetic information from, so the premise is dubious, but also the app announces that it is incomplete, and cannot actually connect to the internet, so its conclusions are entirely imaginary. Furthermore, you can’t directly download the silly thing: you have to download the source code, and compile it for yourself.
No, I’m not going to do that.
Anyway, Futrelle had many examples of claims made by the creator of Seekia on Bluesky that were entertainingly demented, but Bluesky’s censorship police seems to have deleted them. Damn you, Bluesky! No, wait, that’s actually one of the good features of Bluesky, that weird stupid racist garbage is less likely to survive. Maybe he should use Twitter.
Do not be dismayed by all the “Post not found, it may have been deleted” announcements all over the We Hunted the Mammoth article. The creator of Seekia, Simon Sarasova, has helpfully archived his posts on his own web page, so you can still be entertained by his stupid thoughts. What would you do without this insight?
Obesity is an enormous problem which harms billions of people.
Obesity causes people to be uglier, less mobile, less healthy, less capable of having sex, and less able to enact virtue in the world.
Humanity should use eugenic techniques to reduce the prevalence of obesity.
The world would be a better place without obesity.
The answer is eugenics. Or what about this problem?
Stupid people are worse at driving cars.
Humanity should use eugenic techniques to make people more intelligent and better at driving cars.
The world would be a better place with fewer car accidents.
Cool. Instead of traffic tickets, the police will just send a medical team to your house to sterilize your children, I guess. They’ll also check those children to enforce gender norms.
Humanity should use eugenic techniques to reduce the prevalence of gender dysphoria disorder.
The world would be a better place without gender dysphoria disorder.
He’s also fond of quoting the Unabomber and Stefan Molyneux. But those are all short, social media style posts — to really see deeply into his shallow thoughts, you have to read his blog. Here’s an excerpt from one of his articles, Why Race Extinction Matters, so you can better understand why maybe responsible social networks are undermining his ability to spread his message.
Modern transportation technology has facilitated the spread of all human races to all regions of the world. This has accelerated the rate of interracial breeding, and has thus accelerated the rate of change in humanity’s appearance. I posit that global population growth and modern widespread human race mixing have both increased the total quantity of races. Novel combinations of races are being bred into existence.
Many modern human races are at risk of going extinct. Both the increased prevalence of interracial breeding and global fertility collapse are contributing to the risk of race extinction. Without intervention, all modern human races will eventually go extinct due to evolution, which gradually changes each race until their old traits disappear. For example, modern humans look very different from humans who lived 100,000 years ago.
Seekia is a race aware mate discovery network I created. Users can share their racial information in their profiles and filter prospective mates based on their race and the calculated race of their offspring.
One of Seekia’s goals is to help prevent race extinctions by helping members of modern endangered human races to meet and have children.
I don’t think he understands the terms “race,” “extinction,” or “genetics,” while simultaneously being obsessed with race, extinction, and genetics. Also with beauty, circumcision, acne, driving, baldness, female body hair, penis size, and obesity.
He fits right into the Manosphere. Although…does the manosphere still exist? You don’t hear much about it anymore.
Any time the various creationist organizations — AiG, ICR, CMI, DI, etc. — start getting excited and claiming that genetics supports creationism, it usually seems to trace back to Jeffrey Tomkins, the one guy who knows a little genetics and molecular biology, and most importantly, knows how to distort the scientific literature. A new paper in Nature, the complete sequencing of ape genomes, does a detailed and thorough comparison of great ape genomic data, and Tomkins does his usual thing and butchers it.
Tomkins is known for his usage of “ungapped” comparisons to depress the percentage similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes. This method relies on aligning the beginnings of two DNA sequences, and measuring whether subsequent base pairs at corresponding positions match one another. The flaw in this method is that insertions, duplications or deletions in either sequence may cause parts of it to be shifted forward or backward relative to the other, so that equivalent sets of base pairs are not precisely aligned with one another in the comparison. Ungapped comparisons interpret those parts of the two sequences as entirely mismatched even if there are no other differences between them.
If you see any creationist now claiming that humans and chimpanzees are 15% different, rather than the number reported in scientific journals of 1.5%, it’s all coming from the mangled misinterpretations of Tomkins, who really is obsessed with the idea that humans can’t possibly be at all related to other apes. Casey Luskin accepts the distortion and is stating that scientists have been hiding the magnitude of the differences.
They haven’t. The root of the problem is that there are multiple ways to compare sequences of 3 billion nucleotides. One way is to compare aligned sequences, that is, the genes and regulatory stuff that makes up the functional bits of the genome, and there you find about 98.5% similarity between chimps and humans. Another approach is to tally up all of the sequence differences, whether they have any phenotype or not, and there you can find all kinds of repetitive, noisy stuff in the genome. You can find that a human parent is 10% different from their own child! Here’s a good explanation of the whole data set, rather than a Tompkins-ish cherry-picked mess of lies.
Not mentioned, unfortunately, is the ultimate key to explaining these differences: the differences are in the genetic junk. I guess it’s fair to not bring that up, since creationists do not believe in that anyway.
It does expose the fact that ultimately, all the creationist organizations, including the Intelligent Design wackos at the Discovery Institute, do believe that humans were separately created by a deity/aliens. If that wasn’t their endgame they wouldn’t be paying any attention to Tomkins’ nonsense.
I can’t let this pass. Casey Luskin is particularly egregious in claiming that scientists are lying.
These are all groundbreaking findings — and it’s a shame that Nature would not report the data clearly and would make all of this so hard to find — using jargon that most non-experts won’t understand. Why did they do this? It’s important to realize that publishing scientific papers can be a bit like sausage-making: it’s often messy, and the final form that you read usually represents compromise language that all of the authors, reviewers, and editors were willing to publish — and may not represent precisely how every author of a paper feels. So perhaps some authors of this study would have preferred to state the implications more plainly. But we can still ask, Why didn’t Nature state the results clearly and let the chips fall where they may?
Note that this is a response to Nature publishing the complete and detailed results of a complex genetic comparison — they did state the results clearly, and published all of the data. None of the creationist critics have added any new information, every complaint they’ve made is the product of extracting bits and pieces from the Nature paper. It’s not their fault that the paper doesn’t state the implications more plainly
because the creationist implications are not there.
It annoys the hell out of me that Nature can publish a 28 page paper with 82 tables of data in the supplementary information, and Luskin can whine that they didn’t dumb it down enough that a lying creationist can find the part where real scientists say god did it
.
It’s because the data don’t support your claim, you ass.
Scientific publishing has some serious problems: we’ve outsourced the publication of science to for-profit publishers, it relies on it’s ‘customers’ to do peer-review for free, it has no incentive to provide open access to the research that is largely supported by government funding. The system could use a major overhaul. However, this is not the answer.
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he will ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and proposed creating an “in-house” publication by the department.
“We are probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they are all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an episode of “The Ultimate Human” podcast.
Kennedy said such publications are “vessels” for pharmaceutical companies.
The top three journals are the top three because scientists world-wide publish in them — they are popular prestige journals, and scientists prefer to publish in them because these are the sources their peers will read. They are the product of contingent historical processes, not capture by pharmaceutical companies.
Right-wingers are used to relying on billionaires buying “think-tanks” that artificially prop up their bad ideas. That would be a bad model for a scientific journal, which should be a neutral agency. RFK Jr is proposing to build a fake journal that would be under the control of the ideologues who have been appointed for political reasons.
I have questions. Why would anyone want to publish in this hypothetical journal? Why would anyone want to read it? Who’s going to pay for it? The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA have international popularity, both for submissions and subscriptions — how would a journal in the pocket of American conservatives replace that? Are they going to allow publication of data on vaccines, epidemics, trans issues, or anything that RFK Jr doesn’t like?
To be honest, I don’t read The Lancet, NEJM, or JAMA, because those are medical journals. Imagine, though, that the government announced that they were not going to allow American scientists to publish in Nature or Science because they were “vessels” for climatologists or evolutionary biologists or epidemiologists, or that they were going to create their own edited propaganda journal to block those ideas. You can deplore the flaws in those journals, but you can’t just rip them away and erect a fake journal in their place.
