Considering how dirty the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is, this appears to be yet another defeat for transparency. Let’s not forget my post from last summer The FDA is Caught Spying on its Employees and Creating an “Enemies List” in order to recognize the importance of whistleblowing in the era of peak corruption we live in. From Forbes:
Those of us concerned about the decaying credibility of Big Science were dismayed to learn that the whistleblower site Science Fraud has been shut down due to a barrage of legal threats against its operator.
Operated as a crowdsourced reference site much like Wikipedia, Science Fraud, in its six months of operation, documented egregiously suspicious research results published in over 300 peer reviewed publications. Many were subsequently retracted, including a paper by an author whose lawyer sent Science Fraud a cease and desist letter.
Fraud, plagiarism, cherry-picked results, poor or non-existent controls, confirmation bias, opaque, missing, or unavailable data, and stonewalling when questioned have gone from being rare to being everyday occurrences. Just look at the soaring retraction level across multiple scientific publications and the increasingly vocal hand wringing of science vigilantes.
When I first began looking into the increasingly vexing problem of irreproducible scientific research I assumed that the bulk of the problem was caused by sloppy science. Not so, says a National Academy of Sciences study that attributes two thirds of the retractions in the biomedical and life-sciences to scientific misconduct. And remember, these are only the people that have gotten caught.
Conspiracy theory? I have personally spoken to young graduate students asked to review papers on behalf of their PIs who detected falsified data, usually by noticing identical noise floors in two different readings – a statistical impossibility. They were told to keep quiet about it. These fraudulent results are now part of the scientific literature.
We need more sites like this not less.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike
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Dear Mike,
Please take care of yourself. This all makes my own heart heavy just reading what is happening in America today. Your heart must just be totally stressed posting on the atrocities of American freedom, liberties, etc.
You still feel the same as before: that you’re going to stick it out here no matter what and fight? I’m gettting the sense that I need to find a place in the world far off the map…..
Given the pathetic turn-out for the independent vote, I’m losing all confidence and like I’ve said many times to you: we are getting close to hyperinflation IMO. I actually believe its already started.
Yours, (Hopefully we’ll see ya in Colorado again this summer).
I read somewhere that the future new gov will be located in Colorado. If that’s true, they won’t be pissing in their own backyard. Colorado is probably one of the safest places to be.
This is an astoundingly important catch on your part, Michael. Please follow this story, if it has legs. This site hit the Fraud Regime where they live. Unfortunately no individual can withstand a pissed-off lawyered up rival…even when he’s lying.
The site as described in the Forbes article can be a template for a generic anti-fraud tool. Clearly, the professor who created it should have sought hosting on a server in a foreign jurisdiction. Frankly, anyone wishing to tell the truth ought to; that includes you, Michael.
In a parallel theme: it’s been some frustration to me that we all rely on Mega-Global corporations to stay in contact. While I have some skeptical admiration for Anonymous, it seems to me their expertise might be of utility in the cause of freedom by creating youtube-like, open-source video and content platforms in safe places for caching the columns, videos, documents and broadcasts TPTB spend so much time and money suing or memory-holing.