I was listening to the latest Serious Inquiries Only podcast, on the Boghossian affair, while I was pumpin’ iron down at the gym, and Eli Bosnick made a really, really good point. After reading these various serious statements of support for Boghossian from people like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker — they’re piously declaring that demanding he follow IRB requirements is a threat to academic freedom — he mentioned a curious omission. While they rush to the defense of their alt-right, Intellectual Dork Web colleague who has violated university policy and faces a rebuke from the university administration, they’ve never said a word about…Turning Point USA.

You know TPUSA is a Koch-funded far-right organization that trains students to incidents at universities so they can get left-leaning professors fired. They’re kind of incompetent at it — wearing diapers to show that left-wingers are babies isn’t very impressive — but you still don’t get to accuse universities of Orwellian behavior when right there, right in front of their faces, with no apologies and forthright insistence, TPUSA is maintaining an Orwellian Professor Watchlist (fair notice: I’m on it).

On the one hand, you’ve got a university calling in bigoted anti-feminist employee to a meeting (oh god, that’s torture!) because he violated university policy; on the other, a well-funded right-wing organization making an enemies list of professors and encouraging action against them. Which one do you side with? It says a lot about you.

You all know the story of the Douglas Adams’ ‘B’ Ark, I’m sure. It’s about a planet that packed up a bunch of people into a spaceship and sent them off to “colonize” a new planet.

“Yes, so anyway,” he resumed, “the idea was that into the first ship, the ‘A’ ship, would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; and into the third, or ‘C’ ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things, and then into the `B’ ship – that’s us – would go everyone else, the middlemen you see.”

The subset of the population loaded up unto the ship were telephone sanitizers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants. It seemed a bit overzealous — hairdressers and security guards at least are quite useful. Especially since I’ve discovered people who are far more useless than that lot. You see, I watched two documentaries about the Fyre Festival last night. Two of them — one on Netflix, another on Hulu — so you can just grovel in schadenfreude all night long.

You quickly learn that the most useless people on Planet Earth are ‘social media influencers’, people with the job of promoting ‘social media influencers’, and people who pay ‘social media influencers’ for doing nothing but looking pretty and posing. The guy who set up the grift called the Fyre Festival, Billy McFarland, is a compulsive liar who embodied many of the same shallow values as the people he bilked, but the difference was that he avidly ripped into the populace. He was like an animated gummi bear falling upon a bowl of barely set jello and devouring everything in front of him. He’s a terrible, awful, weak person who found his niche and then fouled it so badly that he is currently serving a 6 year sentence in prison.

Of the two, I thought Hulu’s Fyre Fraud was better at exposing the phony promoters, like FuckJerry (how edgy!), a company whose sole business is pumping out sophomoric memes and promoting self-promoters. Fuck FuckJerry. Netflix’s Fyre, though, goes deeper into the harm McFarland caused to good people with real productive jobs, like all the Bahamians who were lied to and tricked into working long hours of manual labor, scrambling to try and get this trash ‘festival’ assembled, and were then never paid.

And then the whole thing collapsed so quickly, as all the trust-fund babies and pretty people spilled onto the sand on the day of and discovered it was all lies.

I now know how easy it would be to fill up the ‘B’ Ark. All we need to do is pay Kendall Jenner $250,000 to tell the kinds of people who think she has anything to say to climb the boarding plank, and they’ll go, guzzling champagne and taking smirking selfies as they scurry aboard. Good riddance.

My wife and I have been watching this show, The Final Plate, on NetFlix. It features these talented chefs competing against each other for something or other — they basically ripped off Iron Chef. It started off interestingly, but is turning into a bit of a slog, and jeez, I’m really disliking the emcee and those obnoxious, pointless pauses (“and now … … … … … begin!”). I’ve developed a few other gripes, as well. But this isn’t about the show!

Fortunately, before I began to sour on it, one of the early episodes featured the cuisine of Mexico, and oh man, I started pining to visit Mexico again. If nothing else, just for the food. I still dream about real Mexican food.

Then I saw this video.

It is silly — I don’t know how you would test for Mexican ancestry, since the people there are such a melange of different origins. Spanish? Native American? Black? All those other Europeans who have migrated there? I don’t think any test is going to find that I have much in the way of Mexican ancestry — I’m a blinding white mixture of Scandinavian and English (although 23andMe does say I’m 0.6% Spanish), so I’m not going to get any discount from AeroMexico. Unless loving the place would give me some honorary, spiritual association. Or the test is only a random number generator, which wouldn’t surprise me.

The video ends with some guy saying, I’d go to Mexico, if they had Taco Bells on the street corners down there. He would be disappointed. Taco Bell is terrible greasy cheesy glop — real Mexican food is diverse and complex and wonderful and the kind of thing I would dream about. Maybe more Americans should visit the country and learn more about it.

Not very. The problem is that while the majority of science journals are legit and at least try to be honest, there are some that simply rubber-stamp submissions…and then charge a fee, of course.

Experts debate how many journals falsely claim to engage in peer review. Cabells, an analytics firm in Texas, has compiled a blacklist of those which it believes are guilty. According to Kathleen Berryman, who is in charge of this list, the firm employs 65 criteria to determine whether a journal should go on it—though she is reluctant to go into details. Cabells’ list now totals around 8,700 journals, up from a bit over 4,000 a year ago. Another list, which grew to around 12,000 journals, was compiled until recently by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado. Using Mr Beall’s list, Bo-Christer Björk, an information scientist at the Hanken School of Economics, in Helsinki, estimates that the number of articles published in questionable journals has ballooned from about 53,000 a year in 2010 to more than 400,000 today. He estimates that 6% of academic papers by researchers in America appear in such journals.

If 6% of papers in shoddy journals is 400,000 papers, that implies that almost 7 million papers are published each year. No wonder I can’t keep up. But still, 6% is a fairly low percentage, and as the article says, there are tools to evaluate journals. Cabell’s blacklist seems to require payment to access — and a rather hefty payment at that — so it’s only going to be accessible if you have an institutional subscription. Anyone can browse Beall’s list of predatory journals. All of these lists have pitfalls, some of them discussed in this review of Cabell’s.

Both sides profit from these unscrupulous journals — the publishers get money, and the academics get to pad their CVs, and you’re punished if you point that out.

But one academic has been prepared to stick his neck out and investigate his own institution. Last year Derek Pyne, an economist at Thompson Rivers University’s business school, in British Columbia, published a paper in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, itself published by the University of Toronto Press. In it, he reported that many of the business school’s administrators, and most of its economics and business faculty with research responsibilities, had published in journals on Mr Beall’s blacklist. Dr Pyne also claimed that these papers seemed to further their authors’ careers. Of the professors who had published in the blacklisted journals, 56% had subsequently won at least one research award from the school. All ten instructors promoted to full professor during the study period had published in a journal on Mr Beall’s list.

By the way, Beall of Beall’s blacklist faced all kinds of pressure to stop, and the list is now maintained by someone who demands anonymity; Pyne also got in trouble.

Subsequently, Dr Pyne told school officials that an administrator up for promotion had published widely in blacklisted journals. This earned Dr Pyne an e-mail from the university’s human-resources department on June 15th, threatening him with disciplinary action for “defamatory language and accusations”. When asked, the university declined to comment.

So, apparently, if you’ve got a goofy pile of crap you want published as peer-reviewed science, there’s somebody somewhere who will oblige you. That makes an ‘experiment’ in which someone wants to discredit an entire academic field by getting garbage papers published somewhere rather pointless and inconclusive, don’t you think? You have to wonder what kind of twit would consider such an exercise meaningful.

Vyckie Garrison is an awesome person who managed to extract herself from the Quiverfull movement — that ghastly Christian cult that insisted that women must be continuously pregnant in order to spawn hordes of children. She got out of that, remarried, and then discovered that her new husband was an abusive, controlling, and gaslighting slimeball. If you’ve ever wondered why she wasn’t writing for the blog she founded, No Longer Quivering, it’s because her husband made her give it up, and give up her writing career in general, to increase her dependency on him. There are other ugly details that I won’t share here. She has once again fled an untenable situation, hastily packing up a few belongings and her family while he was off at work, and driving off to an undisclosed location. Her family was broken up while she is in hiding, as well.

Now she’s desperate and alone. If you can, make a donation to help her out.

At 7:30 Central time, I’ll be having a conversation with Chrisiousity about “Grievance studies” and Ethics Violations. Tune in!

That trick of using your beard to recharge your phone is the best idea in here — only I can’t make it work. Maybe I need to stop trimming it? But then I get mistaken for Santa Claus when I walk down the street.