March-April 2018 (Vol. 14, No. 2)
“Superlative Fiction”—Indie Shaman Magazine Reviews the Award-winning Snooze: A Story of Awakening!
Reviewed by June Kent for Indie Shaman Magazine
Superlative fiction! Snooze tells the captivating “coming-of-age” tale of Max Diver (aka “Snooze”) as he accepts and explores his ability to travel in his dreams and ventures on a quest to rescue his astronaut father.
Engrossing, entertaining and occasionally humorous, Snooze also takes a look at a wide range of subjects including levitation, telepathy, lucid dreaming, spirit animals, parallel universes and shamanic-like journeying, giving a wide range of information effortlessly absorbed as you enjoy the story as well as much food for thought should you want it. Fortunately it’s a fair size book, larger than the average paperback at 486 pages—although time certainly “flew by” for me when reading it.
Author Sol Luckman says that (like me) his earliest dreams were lucid ones of flying and these exhilarating dreams still occur for him today. The writing in Snooze is equally animated and I enjoyed every minute of Max’s adventure as, with the support of friends, he “awakens” to the life-changing reality of his dreams and accepts who he is.
The book says it’s aimed at “Teen and up” agewise but I’m 58 and enjoyed every minute of it—it’s written in a highly accessible style but sufficiently articulate to keep the most discriminating reader engrossed.
Highly original fiction with more than a dash of the otherworld; well-developed characters, both male and female; excellent adventures; heartwarming conclusion and lots of wonderful ideas—what is there not to like? Highly recommended, a must-read. I’m definitely going to look out for more from this author!
• Read an excerpt and request your review copy here.
FEATURED IN THE MARCH-APRIL 2018 ISSUE OF DNA MONTHLY
1. “Unlocking the Mysteries of Healing & Perhaps Life Itself with the Science of Sound” by John Stuart Reid
2. “The Mental & Physical Benefits of Singing” by Michelle Simmons
3. “Why Scientific Peer Review Is a Sham—Especially in Medicine” by Brendan D. Murphy
4. “Basic Vaccine Lies in the World of Fake News” by Jon Rappoport
5. “Smashing the Cult of Celebrity & the Disempowerment Game” by Dylan Charles
Featured Videos ... The Failure of Peer Review (Especially in Medicine) with Brendan D. Murphy & Alternative Math Short Film
1. Unlocking the Mysteries of Healing & Perhaps Life Itself with the Science of Sound
John Stuart Reid, GreenMedInfo
Could the science of sound unlock some of the most ancient secrets of biology and medicine? We believe so. Here’s the why and the how …
Vibration exists at the heart of all matter in the universe. Every raindrop, crystal, rock, star, cell, plant, tree and creature is formed from matter that vibrates. Humans, therefore, are vibrational organisms and our flesh and blood consists of a delicate tracery of electromagnetic frequencies that harmonize with each other and manifest as the biological matter that comprises the components of our bodies. And like an orchestra in which the players tune their instruments to align with each other, living tissue, too, is held in an exquisitely harmonious balance. However, when disease or illness occurs it creates an imbalance in which one or more of the “players” in our cellular orchestra create discord and generate vibrations that are unnatural to our organism. This simple allegorical model contains important truths that we will discuss in detail in later articles on this subject.
Before discussing the scientific underpinnings of this concept it is worth remembering that Pythagoras of Samos, the genius who gave the world his beautiful theorem—the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides—also believed that music could be used as medicine. One of his biographers, Iamblichus, writes, “Pythagoras was of the opinion that music contributed greatly to health, if used in an appropriate manner … [by using] music in the place of medicine.”1 Today, music therapy is an established clinical discipline, widely used to assist people to overcome physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual challenges. Music therapy only partially validates Pythagoras’ belief because, returning to our orchestral model, what is less well known is that the individual frequencies within music can also support healing of the body.2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Studies of the mechanisms by which music, and the individual frequencies within music, act as a form of medicine and are in their infancy, which is why we think it is important to put Pythagoras’ 2500-year old hypothesis to the test. The first step is to implement a series of experiments in which we will endeavor to reveal the validity of Pythagoras’ important premise.
The biological mechanism in our hypothesis concerns the Primary Cilia that are a vital feature of almost all cells.7 On the surface of most cells in our bodies are many projections known as Integral Membrane Proteins (IMP).8 They have many functions, including the transport of food into the cell and the excretion of waste, but one class of IMP’s, known as the Primary Cilia, are antenna-like structures that respond to infrared light as well as specific frequencies of sound. In a sense they act similar to tuning forks that have a particular resonant frequency and are maximally excited only at that specific frequency. In some categories of illness the cells of a particular bodily system become quiescent, for example, due to physical trauma, the invasion of a pathogen or the presence of a toxic substance. This quiescent state is known as the G-0 phase of the cell cycle in which the cells of a particular bodily system are effectively asleep and not replicating, which throws the body out of balance and therefore creates illness. Cells that are in this deep sleep condition can exist in that state for very long periods. To awaken the cells, sparking them into the G-1 phase in which the cell prepares for replication, the medical literature suggests that either time (that is, more sleep) or nutrition is the required stimulus.
The stylized cell on the left is asleep while on the right the cell has been awoken by an external stimulus—that is, sound in our hypothetical model. The legends illustrate the stages to replication.
However, in our hypothesis, sound of a specific frequency is able to energize the cell via the Primary Cilia. When sound enters tissue, a pattern of acoustic energy manifests on the surface membrane of every cell, known as a “cymatic pattern” or “Faraday Wave” pattern. In our studies we are beginning to reveal these patterns, which act on the IMP’s and in particular the Primary Cilia, stimulating the cells to support them to move from the G-0 phase to the G-1 phase and ultimately back to a healthy state.
We filmed sound manifesting as cymatic patterns on the surface of microscopic water droplets, which can be viewed in this video below. Whenever we are immersed in sound the membranes of our cells and visceral waters receive beautiful patterns, provided the sound is harmonious to our ears. Loud and dissonant sounds create skewed, subjectively ugly patterns within our bodies. This raises the question: how do our cells respond to beautiful versus ugly sounds and their respective patterns?
Of particular note is that although the droplets are in very close proximity to each other (the entire field is only 4mm or 0.16 inch across) you will see that various sizes of droplets respond to the sound differently, suggesting that resonance may play a major role in the ability of cells to absorb acoustic energy. Therefore, with Primary Cilia we expect the same laws of resonance to apply: it will be important to inject the correct acoustic frequency to promote cellular division and stimulate a therapeutic effect. In our proposed experiment with blood we plan to test a wide range of frequencies and genres of music, to see which promote longevity.
Setting up a sessile drop resonance experiment in the CymaScope laboratory
Other studies that point to the role of high frequency sound—ultrasound—in stimulating cellular division, concern “organogenesis,” the name given to the creation of new leaves, flowers and stems in plants. In the presence of low ultrasound the rate of growth can be several times greater than without sound. 9, 10 An interesting aside to plant growth stimulated by sound is that of bird song and “psithurism,” the sound of wind in the trees. Many birds sing in low ultrasound ranges, typically up to 60 kHz, which is more than three times higher than the highest frequency that humans can hear.
Many birds sing up to the low ultrasound ranges, typically up to 60 kHz.
The sound of the wind in the trees is a form of noise that also contains low ultrasound. We wonder if a latent ecosystem exists between bird song, psithurism and plant growth? An interesting hypothesis that we believe is worthy of future research.
In conclusion, with your help, testing a 2,500-year old Pythagorean hypothesis could lead to a bright future for sound and music therapy, a future that could alleviate many illnesses without ingesting substances that are foreign to our bodies.
References
1. Iamblichus’ LIFE OF PYTHAGORAS. Inner Traditions International Ltd, page 59.
2. http://cymatechnologies.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/PVD-Success.pdf
3. http://cymatechnologies.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Tendon-Lesion-Repair.pdf
4. http://www.medsonix.com/assets/unlv_-pilot_study-peripheral-vascular-disease.pdf
5. http://www.medsonix.com/assets/unlv_-pilot_study-osteoarthritis.pdf
6. http://www.kktspine.com
7. jcs.biologists.org/content/123/4/499
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_membrane_protein
9. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11240-014-0429-0
10. https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ast/36/2/36_E1453/_pdf
Copyright © [12/27/17] GreenMedInfo LLC. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of GreenMedInfo LLC. Want to learn more from GreenMedInfo? Sign up for the newsletter at http://www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of GreenMedInfo or its staff.
John Stuart Reid is an English acoustic-physics researcher and inventor of the CymaScope, an instrument that makes sound visible. He has studied the world of sound for over 40 years and is one of only two men to conduct an acoustics study of the Great Pyramid. His primary interests are developing cymatics into a new science of visible sound and developing applications for the CymaScope, including the CymaScope app, which reveals cymatic energy patterns in real time from voice or music. He authored the first chapter to approach cymatics from a scientific perspective in The Mereon Matrix, published by Elsevier. He is engaged in pioneering research to decipher dolphin language and co-authored a paper with SpeakDolphin.com titled “A Phenomenon Discovered while Imaging Dolphin Echolocation Sounds” in the Journal of Marine Science. He lectures at conferences in Europe and the USA.
2. The Mental & Physical Benefits of Singing
Michelle Simmons, NaturalNews
One way to improve your overall health is by just simply singing—and you don’t even have to be a good singer to reap its benefits. Research suggests that singing in a choir not only benefits your physical well-being, but also your mental health.
Singing is a physical activity because when you sing, you have to sit or stand straight, breathe deeply from your diaphragm, and present your voice using the upper body, neck, jaw, and face muscles. Through these actions, your physical health is improved. This is because these actions improve posture and release tension in the body. In addition, singing strengthens the muscles in the roof of the mouth or palate as well as the throat. In turn, this reduce snoring and sleep apnea.
Singing also involves deep, rhythmical breathing. This action can strengthen the lungs, thus oxygen will flow more in the circulatory system and the brain. A better oxygen flow leads to a more regulated heart rate, lower blood pressure, and better mental alertness and cognition. A 2014 retrospective review of studies analyzed the effectiveness of music therapy in people with asthma. The study researchers reviewed more than 800 studies and found that music therapy may help relieve symptoms of asthma.
Moreover, singing stimulates the production of beneficial hormone and neurochemical changes in the body. One of the hormones released when singing is dopamine, which is a hormone associated with pleasure and reward in the brain. Singing reduces stress hormones, increases antibodies which strengthen the immune system, boosts endorphins, which are natural pain relievers and antidepressants, and ups oxytocin that helps reduce anxiety and stress.
How Singing Improves Your Mental Health
Some of the mental health benefits of singing are because of the physical changes that singing causes, like the reduction and release of some hormones, as mentioned above. Research indicates that singing enhances mental health as it improves mood and decreases depression and anxiety. This makes it a good replacement for pharmaceutical drugs for mood changes. Furthermore, singing can help improve communication, participation, and social engagement of people with psychosis, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
In a study, it was revealed that people participating in group activities had more sense of well-being compared to those who did not participate in group activities. An example of a good group activity is choral singing, which is said to boost self-esteem and confidence, increase sense of community, and improve social life and social skills. (Related: Singing in the Shower Every Morning Will Make You Happy, Experts Say.)
In a study of singers involved in free weekly workshops, it was revealed that singing in groups can help improve mood and social skills. The weekly singing workshops called Sing Your Heart Out (SYHO) is targeted to the general public, but more specifically people with mental health conditions. Before moving into the community in Norfolk, England, it started at a psychiatric hospital in Norwich in 2005.
Researchers from the University of East Anglia carried out a study of 20 members of the group for six months. The findings of the study revealed that singing together with socializing helped improve the lives of people with severe mental health problems. In addition, the researchers said that the project prevented some people from relapsing. They also said that this approach was a low-commitment, low-cost approach for mental health recovery. Moreover, the workshops did not add pressure to its participants because no one was required to discuss their condition.
“That means you don’t know who you’re sitting next to. You don’t have to tell anyone about yourself,” Tom Shakespeare, lead researcher, told the BBC.
Read more stories on improving health and living longer at Longevity.news.
Sources include:
AllinaHealth.org
GoodHouseKeeping.com
BBC.com
Non-commercial use OK, cite NaturalNews.com with clickable link.
Disclaimer: This information is provided for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional advice of any kind.
Michelle Simmons is a writer for NaturalNews.com, where this article originally appeared.
Featured Video ... The Failure of Peer Review (Especially in Medicine) with Brendan D. Murphy
3. Why Scientific Peer Review Is a Sham—Especially in Medicine
Brenden D. Murphy
“Today Science is up on a pedestal. A new god has appeared; his high priests conduct the rituals, with nuclear reactors, moon-probing rocket ships, cathode tubes and laser beams. And their territory is sacrosanct; laymen are denied entry.” —Bruce Cathie
In recent years the defects in the peer review system have been the subject of a profusion of critical editorials and studies in the literature. It is high time that the world took heed of what the critics are saying, not least of all because of the medical and health ramifications.
The notion of peer review has long occupied special territory in the world of science. However, investigation of suppressed innovations, inventions, treatments, cures, and so on rapidly reveals that the peer review system is arguably better at one thing above all others: censorship. This can mean censorship of everything from contrarian viewpoints to innovations that render favored dogmas, products, or services obsolete (economic threats).
The problem is endemic, as many scientists have learned the hard way.
In truth, the systemic failure of peer review is one of science’s major, embarrassing open secrets.
As Dr. David Kaplan tells us, “[P]eer review is known to engender bias, incompetence, excessive expense, ineffectiveness, and corruption. A surfeit of publications has documented the deficiencies of this system.”[1]
Australian physicist Brian Martin elaborates in his excellent article “Strategies for Dissenting Scientists”:
Certain sorts of innovation are welcome in science, when they fall within established frameworks and do not threaten vested interests. But aside from this sort of routine innovation, science has many similarities to systems of dogma. Dissenters are not welcome. They are ignored, rejected, and sometimes attacked.[2]
Electric universe researcher and Big Bang critic Wal Thornhill (a REAL scientist) stated plainly in our GFM Media interview that the peer review system amounts to censorship. Fellow independent scientist Gary Novak agrees scathingly:
“Peer review is a form of censorship, which is tyranny over the mind. Censorship does not purify; it corrupts … There is a lot of junk science and trash that goes through the peer review process.”[3]
Brian Martin asks us rhetorically:
What do [scientists] have to gain by spending time helping an outsider? Most likely, the alleged discovery will turn out to be pointless or wrong from the standard point of view. If the outsider has made a genuine discovery, that means the outsider would win rewards at the expense of those already in the field who have invested years of effort in the conventional ideas.[4]
Herein lies the problem in moving science forward and shifting paradigms. A paradigm is only as malleable (or mutable) as the minds and egos invested in it.
The Problem of “Experts”
The reality is (as any real scientist will tell you) that scientists are prone — just like lay people — to being cathected to their pet theories and opinions, especially if they have been visibly rewarded or publicly obtained accolades or financial remuneration as a result. Scientists, like laypeople, have susceptible emotional bodies and often fairly hefty egos — partially due to their “expertise” and academic titles, qualifications, theories, etc.
Once those hefty egos — belonging to people generally known as “experts” — rise to positions of power and/or influence, they can calcify the flow of scientific progress as well as the understanding of new discoveries or theories — particularly if they end up acting as “peer reviewers” at high levels in prestigious publications. In that capacity, too many become mere gatekeepers and seek not to facilitate innovation or vital new Copernican-scale revelations, but to maintain the status quo which got them there in the first place.
Dr. Malcolm Kendrick comments in his excellent book Doctoring Data that “by definition, anyone who is an ‘expert’ in an area of medicine will be a supporter of whatever dogma holds sway.”[5] Close study of power dynamics in medicine bears this out. The players with the deepest pockets have the funds to buy all of the “experts” they need to sell a bogus product or ideology to an unsuspecting public.
Consider the following words from The Lancet’s editor Richard Horton:
The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding … We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.[6] (emphasis added)
Peer review, as a “quasi-sacred” process that somehow supposedly transcends the foibles and follies human nature has taken on sacred ritual status. Has the paper been blessed by the Peer Review Priest? Peer review is held to be more than just pragmatically useful and functional (which clearly it is not, generally speaking) — it is held as a transcendent, almost magical, organizing force occurring in the heavenly ivory towers of Science, which somehow avoids falling prey to human weaknesses by virtue of those humans’ lofty qualifications as “scientists” or “experts.”
Scientists, of course, aren’t quite human — they are something more, something pure, something that the layman can never be. Students undergo a magical alchemical process as they proceed through educational institutions and emerge transformed from their chrysalis with their doctorates, masters, stethoscopes and equations. They are the Chosen Ones, the purified, the holy, the redeemed, the righteous. They do not have to answer to the lowly non-scientific peasantry—let alone unbelieving heretics.
It is clear, however, that not only is the popular view of peer review misleading, but the most prestigious publications are some of the very worst offenders. Significant scientific publications — for example, the journal Nature— have a well-documented history of prejudice against findings or hypotheses that run contrary to established scientific dogma.
Writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in May 2000, Canadian-based researcher David Sackett said that he would “never again lecture, write, or referee anything to do with evidence based clinical practice” over his concern that “experts” are stifling new ideas. He wants the retirement of experts to be made compulsory and I think it’s a brilliant proposition.
Sackett says that “progress towards the truth is impaired in the presence of an expert.”[7]
Trusting “experts” in oncology, for example, is generally a very good way to artificially speed one’s trip to the grave, particularly if one has metastatic cancer (allopathic medicine is notoriously ineffective in that realm). And yet “experts” are now on a rarified level that perhaps only popes and celebrities can understand — they are virtually demigods today.
In the main, “experts” are those people in the establishment who espouse the mainstream dogma and reify the politically correct belief structures. “Experts” are lionized because the world that made them experts promotes and validates them when they affirm the already established (and profitable) beliefs — and the media is complicit in this. If you want to be horribly misled on any number of important issues, just head straight to just about any mainstream news media outlet and listen to the establishment’s “experts.”
Is it not time to get the crusty, rigidified, and corrupt Old Guard out of the way so we can let science move forward?
Is Most Research Just Bullshit?
Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Marcia Angell is the former Editor-in-Chief at the New England Journal of Medicine, where she spent twenty years poring over scientific papers, saturated in the dubious practices that pervade the world of medical research. She states bluntly:
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of THE NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE.[8]
Most “experts” in medicine are, psychologically speaking, simply engaged in well-paid groupthink and confirmation bias exercises, vigorously affirming and defending their ego’s (lucrative) construction of the world. To paraphrase physicist Max Planck, medicine, like science, “advances one funeral at a time.”
Once the public has accepted the scientific establishment’s truths, narratives, and designated “experts,” then researchers who yield findings deviating from the accepted norm can be immediately branded as crackpots, lunatics, fringe nuts, pseudo-scientists and so on, regardless of how meticulous their methods, and irrefutable their results.
The media is crucial in this control dynamic because it sells the establishment’s reality.
Thus is the politically correct status quo maintained.
Peer Review Lets Garbage through—& Lots of It
“Peer review” censorship exemplifies the neophobia in the world of science which serves to protect the status quo rather than improve knowledge by weeding out dubious epistemologies and results, as it is meant to. This supposed mechanism of “quality control” has resulted not only in the dismissal of much important and credible research, but it has also let fraudulent research –and lots of it! — be published at the same time. Papers that appear to support fashionable ideas or entrenched dogmas are likely to fare well, even if they are badly flawed — or outright rubbish!
David Kaplan, a professor of pathology at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, has stated that,
Peer review is broken. It needs to be overhauled, not just tinkered with. The incentives should be changed so that: authors are more satisfied and more likely to produce better work, the reviewing is more transparent and honest, and journals do not have to manage an unwieldy and corrupt system that produces disaffection and misses out on innovation.[9]
Is it any wonder that John Ionnidis reported in his famous 2005 paper that, “Most research findings are false for most research designs and for most fields”? Given the already outlined problems, is it really surprising that, in Ionnidis words, “Claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias”?[10]
Dr. Marc Girard, a mathematician and physician who serves on the editorial board of Medical Veritas (The Journal of Medical Truth), has written,
The reason for this disaster is too clear: the power of money. In academic institutions, the current dynamics of research is more favourable to the ability of getting grants — collecting money and spending it — than to scientific imagination or creativity.[11]
In general, peer reviewers — generally not time-rich — don’t try to replicate experiments and rarely even request the raw data supporting a paper’s conclusions. Who has the time for all that? Thus, peer review is, according to Richard Smith writing in Peer Review in Health Sciences,
thought to be slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, prone to bias, easily abused, poor at detecting gross defects, and almost useless for detecting fraud.[12] (emphasis added)
What about fake peer review? This is where the corrupt and abysmal becomes the theatre of the absurd. For example, Berlin-based Springer Nature, who publishes the aforementioned Nature journal, announced the retraction of 64 articles in 10 journals in an August 18th statement in 2015. This followed an internal investigation which found fabricated peer-review write-ups linked to the articles.
The purge followed
similar discoveries of “fake peer review” by several other major publishers, including London-based BioMed Central, an arm of Springer, which began retracting 43 articles in March citing “reviews from fabricated reviewers”.[13]
Yes, that means reviewers that don’t exist — recommended as “reviewers” by the people submitting their work for review. Imagine writing a paper and being able to nominate a nonexistent person to review your work, and the contact email supplied to the publisher for this purpose is actually one you made up, which routes the paper back to you (unbeknownst to the publisher), so that you can then secretly carry out a (favorable) review of your own work under a pseudonym!
It’s being done, folks, this is not a joke.
In response to fake peer review some publishers have actually ended the practice of author-suggested reviewers.[14]
And Now for the Conceptual Penis …
Recently two scientists performed a brilliant Sokal-style hoax on the journal Cogent Social Sciences. Under the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay wrote a deliberately absurd paper loosely composed in the style of “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” — what exactly that is they made no attempt to find out.
The authors tell us:
The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions …We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal. [15] (emphasis added)
And they did. After completing the paper, and being unable to identify what it was actually about, it was deemed a success and ready for submission, which went ahead in April 2017. It was published the next month after some editorial feedback and additional tweaking. To illustrate how deliberately absurd the paper is, a quote is in order:
We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations … and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.[16]
In plain English, they (seemingly) argued here that a penis is not a male sexual organ but a social construct; the “conceptual penis” is problematic for “gender (and reproductive) identity,” as well as being the “conceptual” driver of climate change. No, really. How this ever got published is something to ponder. The paper is filled with meaningless jargon, arrant nonsense, and references to fake papers and authors.
As part of the hoax, none of the sources that were cited were even read by the hoaxers. As Boghossian and Lindsay point out, it never should have been published. No one — not even Boghossian and Lindsay — knows what it is actually saying.
Almost a third of the sources cited in the original version of the paper point to fake sources, such as created by Postmodern Generator, making mock of how absurdly easy it is to execute this kind of hoax, especially, the authors add, in “‘academic’ fields corrupted by postmodernism.”[17] (emphasis added)
The Spectacular Success of Hoax Papers & Nonexistent Authors
In April 2010, Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, used a computer program called SCIgen to create 102 fake papers under the pseudonym of Ike Antkare. SCIgen was created in 2005 by researchers at MIT in Cambridge in order to demonstrate that conferences would accept such nonsense … as well as to amuse themselves.
Labbé added the bogus papers to the Google Scholar database, which boosted Ike Antkare’s h-index, a measure of published output, to 94 — at the time, making Antkare the world’s 21st most highly cited scientist.[18] (emphasis added)
So a nonexistent scientist has achieved the distinction of being one of the world’s most highly cited authors — while “authoring” papers consisting of utter gibberish. Congratulations are certainly in order. In February 2014 it was reported that Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), were removing over 120 such bogus papers from their subscription services after Labbé identified them using his own software.
Going back at least as far as 1996 journalists and researchers have been getting spoof papers published in conferences or journals to deliberately expose weaknesses in academic quality controls. “Physicist Alan Sokal (of the famous Sokal Affair) succeeded in the journal Social Text in 1996,” while Harvard science journalist John Bohannon revealed in a 2013 issue of Science that he had duped over 150 open-access journals into publishing “a deliberately flawed study.”[19] Bohannon organized submission of the flawed study (technically, many different but very similar variations of the study) to 304 open-access journals worldwide over a period of 10 months. Two hundred and fifty-five went through the whole editing process to the point of either acceptance or rejection.
He wrote:
Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s shortcomings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.[20]
The hoax paper was accepted by a whopping 157 of the journals and rejected by only 98. Of the 106 journals that did conduct “peer review,” fully 70% accepted the paper.[21]
If peer review was a transparent and accountable process, according to Gary Novak,
there might be a small chance of correcting some of the corruptions through truth and criticism; but the process is cloaked in the darkness of anonymity …Due to the exploitive and corrupt process, nearly everything in science has official errors within it …[A] culture of protecting and exploiting the errors creates an official reality which cannot be opposed.[22]
Returning specifically to the arena of (mainstream) medicine, a quote in Plos Medicine states:
“Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry,” wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, in March 2004. In the same year, Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, lambasted the industry for becoming “primarily a marketing machine” and co-opting “every institution that might stand in its way”… Jerry Kassirer, another former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, argues that the industry has deflected the moral compasses of many physicians, and the editors of Plos Medicine have declared that they will not become “part of the cycle of dependency … between journals and the pharmaceutical industry.”[23]
In the words of John Ionnidis, “Most scientific studies are wrong, and they are wrong because scientists are interested in funding and careers rather than truth.”[24]
If most studies are wrong, and most scientists are more interested in their own careers and funding than getting at the truth — while journals daily allow bogus and flawed pharmaceutical research to be published and promoted — then why would anyone in their right mind believe the claims made by doctors about the efficacy of products based upon “peer review” or pharmaceutical “studies”? What does a term like “safe and effective” even mean in this world of deception and subterfuge?
Clearly the problem of corruption and conflicts of interest have been increasingly on the radar of professional academics for some time now, so much so that it has been the subject of an increasing number of harshly critical articles and editorials. Conveying the depth and breadth of deception to the “uninitiated,” however, presents a unique challenge. And it isn’t just conflict of interest and corruption to blame for the failure of peer review, there is human bias, shoddy review work, fake reviewers and fraud, and varying other human interests to factor in.
At the very least we need to cease indoctrinating students into the dogma that all good things have been peer reviewed, and the converse: anything that has not been peer reviewed is clearly blasphemous and crafted by the unholy hands of sinners. In the meantime, the public needs to be warned: peer review is largely a sham and will not protect you or your family from medical pseudo-science or dangerous pharmaceutical products. Your doctor’s word should not be blindly trusted, especially when we know that doctors rely absurdly heavily on information (read: propaganda) provided by the pharmaceutical industry itself (can you say “conflicted”?!) in developing their views and opinions.
I can’t help but cringe when I hear people ask if a study has been “peer-reviewed.” The response this question most often deserves is simply, “Who cares?”
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” — Richard Horton, “Offline: What Is Medicine’s 5 Sigma?” The Lancet, 11 April 2015, thelancet.com (Horton is editor of The Lancet)
Sources:
Click here for a complete list of sources for this article.
This article was first published and is copyrighted by Global Freedom Movement. It is republished here with permission.
Co-founder of Global Freedom Movement and host of GFM Radio, Brendan D. Murphy is a leading Australian author, researcher, activist, and musician. His acclaimed nonfiction epic, The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science & Spirituality, is out now! Come and get your mind blown at www.brendandmurphy.net.
4. Basic Vaccine Lies in the World of Fake News
Jon Rappoport
“The combined death rate from scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough and measles among children up to fifteen shows that nearly 90 percent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread immunization. In part, this recession may be attributed to improved housing and to a decrease in the virulence of micro-organisms, but by far the most important factor was a higher host-resistance due to better nutrition.” (Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis, Bantam Books, 1977)
In many previous articles, I’ve rejected, with evidence, a whole host of false claims about vaccine safety and efficacy. Here I want to look at basic flaws in the rationale for vaccination.
First of all, a child with a strong immune system will exile illnesses like measles or flu without incident. If he does become sick, his immune defense system will swing into high gear, mount a full inflammatory response, and the acute phase of illness will fade away. There are millions of such examples throughout recent history.
If a person has a weak and compromised immune system, vaccination is not going to cure that fact.
In the best presentation of conventional vaccine theory, a shot in the arm brings on antibodies, which are scouts for the immune system. They broadcast alerts: “Invaders detected.” But if the rest of the “immune army” is weak, what good are alerts? No good at all. Thus, a compromised immune system is a problem that can’t be solved by vaccination.
These are simple and basic realities—once you clear away pseudoscientific hocus-pocus.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed a number of people who grew up with no vaccinations. They were fed good clean food. They exercised. They had loving strong parents. They thrived. They rarely got sick, and when they did, the bout was over quickly. To them the idea of vaccination was a bizarre illusion. They never needed it. Period.
And as I say, the people with weak and compromised immune systems, who are basically unhealthy, are NOT going to be cured or protected by vaccination.
Many doctors know these facts, but are afraid to speak out. They also know about the dangers of vaccines, because they’ve seen children, whom they just vaccinated, fold up with devastating neurological injuries—but the doctors are silent about that, too.
The mainstream press, with non-stop pro-vaccination propaganda, is colluding with the medical establishment and governments to silence critics.
The press is fake news. We who point out fatal flaws in vaccination are actual news.
For example, now that the CDC schedule of “necessary” vaccines has greatly expanded, where are the proper studies proving that this increased load of chemicals and germs (in the vaccines) is safe? Where? Nowhere. Does that sound acceptable? “Previously, we said X amount of chemicals and germs in vaccines was safe. Now that we’re piling on more of these substances, there is no need to prove safety. We just assume it.”
Can you name a single large mainstream news outlet that has devoted time and space to a complete and rational debate about vaccine safety and efficacy, representing both sides of the issue fairly? Can you? Of course not. Does this seem reasonable? “The science is settled.” Only fools and unthinking minds would accept that position.
Who is the culprit here? Critics of vaccination, or the delinquent imperious press?
99.9% of mainstream reporters, news anchors, and medical bureaucrats know nothing about vaccine safety or efficacy. Their skill, such as it is, consists of pretending they have acquired knowledge.
In other words, if you were watching the evening news, and a parrot in a tree kept repeating, “Get your vaccinations, get your vaccinations,” would you trust the source?
Instead of treating mainstream news as a reliable fount of information, back up a step and realize this operation has been a heavily funded and protected monopoly—and all monopolies commit egregious acts to sustain their position. They cooperate with other would-be monopolies (e.g., the medical cartel) to improve their power.
By “egregious acts,” of course, I mean: crimes. Any criminal who is in the public spotlight, day in and day out, will bend, distort, fabricate, and concoct more lies to cover up his past offenses. This is common sense. Face this fact head-on. Don’t avoid it.
The horrendous SB277 bill was passed by the California legislation, in 2015, and signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown. It mandated an array of vaccines for all schoolchildren. During debate on the bill, did the legislature permit extended discussion about the dangers and ineffectiveness of vaccines? No. Why not? Were these issues somehow automatically censor-able? Sweeping them into a garbage can is called a CLUE. Major players didn’t want certain information to see the light of day. Otherwise, why not turn on the light?
Let me explain how the game works with an example. In the mid-1990s, I sat in a courtroom in Los Angeles and watched the opening of a grotesque trial, in which the federal government was prosecuting a young man for selling a nutritional supplement. The man had made health claims for the product. He told the judge he wanted to present evidence that a) the substance was produced naturally by the body, and b) it had provably beneficial effects. The judge refused to allow the defendant to present any evidence along these lines. No, the judge said. The only question was: had the defendant violated a federal rule about selling supplements? If so, he was guilty. Period.
And that was the verdict. The young man went to prison.
Evidence be damned.
Who, in his right mind, would support such a ruling?
A monopoly. That’s who.
Truth, validity, facts? Out of bounds.
This is the same approach of the mainstream news establishment, when it comes to vaccination.
It is the approach of inveterate liars.
For many reasons, a few of which I’ve listed here, the whole vaccination system is crashing. The oceanic sound of that crash hasn’t yet reached many ears tuned to the evening news.
But it’s coming.
Copyright © Jon Rappoport. All Rights Reserved.
The author of three explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed, Exit from the Matrix and Power Outside the Matrix, Jon Rappoport was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for thirty years, writing articles on politics, medicine and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, SPIN Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com. To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit from the Matrix, click here.
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5. Smashing the Cult of Celebrity & the Disempowerment Game
Dylan Charles, Waking Times
At the dark heart of corporate consumer culture lie the social programs that mass-produce conformity, obedience, acquiescence and consent for the matrix.
The cult of celebrity is the royal monarch of these schemes, the ace in the hole for mass mind control and the disempowerment of the individual. This is the anointed paradigm of idol worship and idol sacrifice, a vampire’s feast on our individual and collective dreams. Who do you love? Who do you hate? Who do want to be like?
Combine this paradigm with the technology of social media, and the individual is flung into oblivion, never fully understanding the importance and value of their own life, instead always comparing themselves to phony ideals and well-designed, well-funded marketing campaigns.
“The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge—broadband tipping the Web from text to image; social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider—the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on SURVIVOR or OPRAH, then hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves—by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity.” —William Deresiewicz
Marketeers and propagandists are skilled at leveraging human psychology to exploit human nature. They utilize the study of the psyche to gain inroads into your behavior, and they employ this science as a tool for stoking insecurities and triggering urges.
They may be selling an idea, a lifestyle, a product, or a war, but, the pitch is the same: a false idol rises from the wastelands of the American dream, and is presented to the hordes as a well-packaged product. The celebrity’s life is a projection of a niche fantasy, and a following is built up around this fantasy, and the cult followers are steered toward whatever point of purchase.
And that’s what a cult is: “a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.”
This kind of externalized validation serves as a power transfer. Your personal power is extracted and foisted onto a manufactured image in the matrix, and without realizing it, you’ve forfeited your power to influence the direction of your own life.
“The Fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to drain us emotionally, confuse us about our identity, make us blame ourselves for our predicament, condition us to chase illusions of fame and happiness, and keep us from fighting back.” —Chris Hedges
This is about usurping individuality in order to foster groupthink and hive consciousness. It’s also about creating a barrier between what you believe is possible for yourself and what chances you are willing to take in order to manifest a unique vision for your life.
You see, human beings are energetic creations, partly made of matter and partly made of spirit, but wholly malleable to the direction of the mind. We are affected by subtle energies, body language, electromagnetic energy, frequencies of light that we cannot see, sounds that we cannot hear, and a thousand other hidden cues. We are beings of energy, and much like a battery, we can can give or receive energy.
But the mind is at the center of it all. Whatever the mind entertains, the being creates.
When the mind fixes on an external idol, this innate power to form ourselves is transferred outside of our own locus of control, and where the mind could be centered on creating and expanding the self, it is instead focused on the fantasy of achieving an impossible ideal.
As journalist Jon Rappoport notes:
“If perception and thought can be channeled, directed, reduced, and weakened, then it doesn’t matter what humans do to resist other types of control. They will always go down the wrong path. They will always operate within limited and bounded territory. They will always ignore their own authentic power.”
The end game here is to keep us from accepting ourselves as worthy and perfect divine beings, and to disconnect us from our own potential. This is deep stuff, reaching far beyond the push to convert us into greedy, materialistic consumers. In a metaphysical sense it is a transfer of energy, and where once we were strong and full of promise, we are now helpless and content to observe as the world flits by.
What’s most dangerous to any system of control is for the individual to know their own strength and to speak their own language, as Chris Hedges puts it:
“That’s why I don’t own a television … and I work as hard as I can to distance myself from popular culture so that I can speak in my own language, not the one they give me.”
This article (Smashing the Cult of Celebrity & the Disempowerment Game) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.
Dylan Charles is the editor of Waking Times and co-host of Redesigning Reality, both dedicated to ideas of personal transformation, societal awakening, and planetary renewal. His personal journey is deeply inspired by shamanic plant medicines and the arts of Kung Fu, Qi Gong and Yoga. After seven years of living in Costa Rica, he now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he practices Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and enjoys spending time with family. He has written hundreds of articles, reaching and inspiring millions of people around the world.
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