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A federal judge ordered the FBI to release the writings of the transgender woman who shot and killed six people at a Christian school in Nashville on March 27, 2023. In the hours after the shooting, Breitbart News noted that police indicated Audrey Hale identified as transgender. Less than a month after the shooting, Breitbart News pointed out that Hale left behind a suicide note, 19 journals, and other items, and all of them have been kept from the public since the attack occurred. (The exception was a November 2023 leak of three pages, purportedly from the shooter’s writings. Seven...

More than 300 COVID-19-related articles have been retracted — long after they’d done their damage — due to a lack of scientific truthfulness and ethical guidelines, according to Retraction Watch, a website that monitors retractions of science-related articles.A total of 330 COVID-related papers have been retracted thus far.According to Gunnveig Grødeland, a senior researcher at the Institute of Immunology at the University of Oslo, many researchers took ethical shortcuts when writing their essays.“It will, of course, be withdrawn when it is found that ethical guidelines have been breached,” Grødeland quipped to Khrono, an academic news publication.Grødeland states that there were...

But new tools show promise in tackling growing symptom of academia’s “publish or perish” culture When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report. “It is just...

From the start of the COVID pandemic, China's government has ruthlessly censored doctors and researchers who tried to tell the truth about the origin and early spread of the novel coronavirus. This has long been known. But a New York Times report suggests Western institutions, particularly medical and scientific journals, also helped the Chinese obscure anything that might lead researchers and scientists to the truth. The Chinese government bullied scientific journals into retracting research papers from within China about "early cases, conditions for medical workers, and how widely the virus had spread." They got the Lancet Global Health to retract...

It has been almost three weeks since trans shooter Audrey Hale gunned down and murdered six innocent Christians, three of them very small children. At the time of the mass killing, police mentioned a manifesto along with a bunch of other guns … And as of now, they have yet to release the manifesto. Huh. Not to mention they’re still claiming Hale’s motive is ‘unclear,’ even with everything she left behind. Check this out from Byron York: Nashville mass killer Audrey Hale left behind 'cellphones and laptops, as well as a suicide note, three folders and 19 journals.' Instead of...

The 28-year-old transgender attacker who shot and killed six in a Nashville Christian school March 27, 2023, left behind a suicide note, 19 journals, and other items, all of which have been kept from the public. Breitbart News reported that the transgender shooter carried legally purchased firearms into the school, where she walked the halls with a pistol caliber carbine looking for victims. She was shot and killed on the second floor of the school by Metropolitan Nashville Police Department officers. The attacker left behind “cellphones and laptops, as well as a suicide note, three folders and 19 journals,” NBC...

AbstractMajor benefits of ivermectin (IVM) treatment for COVID-19 have been known since the results of 20 such randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were reported, as compiled in January 2021. Of the eight of these RCTs that tracked mortality or morbidity in patients with serious cases, seven showed statistically significant clinical improvements. The pooled mortality reduction in these eight RCTs was 78% in the treatment vs. controls groups, and the RCT that used the highest dose of IVM reported a 92% reduction in mortality (p < 0.001). Three RCTs for IVM prevention of COVID-19 and two animal studies of IVM at low...

Poking back at the wokesters. I heard of these people, but did not know who they were until now. These people were in academia and were disgusted with the woke culture and crazy new fields of study they were seeing. They decided to make fun of this by learning the terminology and writing crazy "scholarly" papers that were submitted to the leading publications in the woke fields of study. But, the papers got accepted, some were published and one got an award. During the peer reviews some of the comments were even crazier than what they tried to slip through...

If you are an American college professor, the way you get a raise or tenure is by getting papers published in "academic journals." The stupidity of these journals says a lot about what's taught at colleges today. Recently, three people sent in intentionally ridiculous "research" to prominent journals of women studies, gender studies, race studies, sexuality studies, obesity studies and queer studies. "The scholarship in these disciplines is utterly corrupted," says Dr. Peter Boghossian of Portland State University. "They have placed an agenda before the truth." To show that, hoaxer and mathematician James Lindsay says, "We rewrote a section of...

You have GOT to read this, from Quillette! It starts with this editor’s note: Editor’s note: For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.” To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in...

If you rewrote a chapter from Hitler’s Mein Kampf using current feminist jargon and submitted it to a respected feminist journal, would they agree to publish it? How about a paper suggesting dog parks are rampant sites for canine rape culture? Or one that explores the threat of “metasexual violence” from (private) masturbation? You can probably guess the answer but read on for the details. A trio of academics decided to explore the current state of peer-reviewed publishing in the humanities by writing bogus papers to see if there were any limits to what was acceptable. Helen Pluckrose, James A....

Three academics spent more than a year submitting absurd “hoax” papers to the preeminent journals focusing on race, gender, sexuality and other politically fraught disciplines that fall into what the perpetrators of the scheme call “grievance studies.” The self-identified “left-leaning liberal” academics, told the Wall Street Journal they undertook the project out of concern “that certain aspects of knowledge production in the United States have been corrupted” by a hesitance among academics to question research based on privilege and identity for fear of accusations of bigotry. Since August, 2017 the academics — James Lindsay, a math doctorate, Peter Boghossian, an...

OLLIE is in many ways a typical dog. She likes going for walks and chasing birds, and is especially fond of having her tummy rubbed. But in one respect, the Staffordshire Terrier differs radically from her canine peers: she has a burgeoning academic career, and sits on the editorial boards of seven medical journals. As you may have guessed, the journals on whose boards Ollie sits are of the predatory variety. These are shadowy, online publications that mimic legitimate journals, but are prepared to publish anything in exchange for a fee that can run into thousands of dollars. Predatory journals...

Do Creation Scientists Publish in Mainstream Journals? by Brian Thomas, M.S. * If ICR scientists are “real” scientists, then they should publish in respected, peer-reviewed, mainstream journals, right? In fact, many have.1 But mainstream journal editors’ zeal for naturalism can keep them from fairly analyzing contrasting views on origins—leading them to say “no” to quality creation science. Science reviewers and journal editors serve as gatekeepers, closing the gate to prevent bad science from reaching the printed page. For example, they are right to reject a submitted article if its conclusions rest more on speculation than on results.2 But they can...

Is fraud on the rise in peer reviewed scientific journals? PJ Media contributor Theodore Dalrymple points to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that reveals some alarming facts about papers submitted to prestigious publications in the medical field. Peer review is time consuming and it is often difficult for the editors of general journals, such as the Lancet, the New England Journal and so forth, to be familiar with the experts in all fields. The editors of smaller journals do not have resources of their more eminent confrères necessary to find them, and they, the editors, are frequently judged...

Evidence is accumulating that quality control is a serious issue in academic publishing, which is the key to career advancement for scientists and other scholars. In an age when appeals to "peer reviewed" "settled science" have become standard operating procedure in efforts to impose radical increases in government control over our lives, corruption in the mechanisms for reviewing  scientific publications has very real consequences for all of us. Nature magazine tells us: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Richard Van Noorden writes: The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after...

City Journal's Steve Malanga offers the most detailed and succinct history yet on how public sector unions grew from being toothless employee associations to having a virtually lock on all of the key power levers in California and how they've used that power to enrich themselves while all but ruining a once-goldern state. As Malanga explains, what has already happened in California is well underway across the rest of the nation and in Washington, D.C.: "The story starts half a century ago, when California public workers won bargaining rights and quickly learned how to elect their own bosses—that is,

OK everyone, it's time for my quarterly "What Are You Reading Now" post. I like to get a feel for what Freepers are reading these days. It can be anything...a best seller, a literary classic, a trashy pulp novel, a scientific journal, etc. Do not demean this thread with posts like "I'm reading this Thread right now". It became un-funny a long time ago. I'll start. I've just started "One Square Mile Of Hell: The Battle For Tarawa" by John Wukovitz. Rather than a minute by minute account of the battle, it takes a more personalized view of the battle...

I've searched the forums for conservative academic journals and the suggestions tended to have a domestic focus. Can anyone recommend a research based conservative journal that focuses on US foriegn policy, international relations, etc.