Rep. Ilhan Omar equivocally-unequivocally apologized for tweeting that Zionist power was “all about the Benjamins.” A few weeks later, she didn’t apologize at all for suggesting that American congressional representatives shouldn’t have to swear loyalty oaths to Israel.
But Rep. Omar did in fact issue one genuinely unequivocal apology. It involved this 2012 tweet:
“It’s now apparent to me that I spent lots of energy putting my 2012 tweet in context and little energy is disavowing the anti-semitic trope I unknowingly used, which is unfortunate and offensive,” Omar tweeted on January 21 in response to an attack from New York Times op-ed writer Bari Weiss.
As I recently wrote, Ilhan Omar’s other two “anti-Semitic tropes”—that the US supports Israel due to Jewish-Zionist money power, and that Congress has a dual-loyalty problem—are all-too-obviously true. But what about Israel hypnotizing the world? Is that a fair statement? An exaggeration? A racist calumny?
Actually, in some ways it is an understatement. Jewish tribal power has been “hypnotizing the world” in various ways since long before the modern nation state (or settler colony of genocidal squatters, if you will) called “Israel” was founded in 1948.
I put the expression “hypnotize the world” in quotes not only because it was Omar who said it, but because it is obviously a figure of speech, not a literal statement. But as figures of speech go, this one is unusually accurate and revealing.
Literal hypnosis, of course, involves inducing a trance state during which the hypnotized subject becomes highly suggestible. The hypnotist can not only elicit amazing feats of rote obedience, but can also implant post-hypnotic suggestions in the subject’s mind which can influence, or even completely control, subsequent behavior.
An intergenerational Jewish tribal elite has spent the past 2500 years perfecting ways to bypass the rational faculties of their victims (the first of whom are non-elite Jews) while inculcating irrational beliefs and behaviors that bring wealth and power to that same elite. Many of their control techniques are reminiscent of hypnotism.
Laurent Guyénot’s magisterial From Yahweh to Zion “unveils the process by which Yahweh, through the voices of his priests, prophets, and scribes (the ‘cognitive elite’) shaped the vision and collective psychology of his chosen people” (p.18). That voice of the Jewish cognitive elite, masquerading as the voice of God, wielded the same kind of charismatic, irrational authority over its victims as the voice of the hypnotist wields over his hypnotic subjects.
The original victims of this “hypnosis” were non-elite Jews. Entranced by the masterful storytelling of the cognitive elite, they submitted to the authority of their priests, rabbis, and scribes in the same way a hypnotic subject submits to the hypnotist. And just as the hypnotist verifies and deepens the trance by commanding the subject to do something ridiculous—for example, by handing the subject an onion and saying “bite into this delicious juicy apple”—the Jewish cognitive elite ordered their subjects to obey all sorts of bizarre rules, from the Levitical to the downright Talmudic. And just as cult leaders “hypnotize” their followers into happily drinking the Kool Aid en masse by demonizing outsiders and fostering groupthink, the Jewish tribal elite created “A People That Shall Dwell Alone” by isolating their subjects, encouraging endogamy, and terrorizing the Tribe into separation from the goyim.
As Guyénot shows in From Yahweh to Zion, the Jewish cognitive elite hypnotized much of the world into believing that their tribal god Yahweh—a stand-in for the authority and interests of that same elite—was Lord and Creator of the entire universe. The ancient Jewish elite’s self-interested equivocation between presenting Yahweh as a tribal god on one hand, and the universal God on the other, resembles today’s Jewish elite’s equivocal presentation of Jewishness sometimes as a religion, sometimes as an ethnicity (depending on which version best serves Jewish elite interests). Both goyim and non-elite Jews accept such contradictions as unquestioningly as hypnotic subjects accept the commands of a master hypnotist.
Apocalyptic War: A Post-Hypnotic Suggestion?
The endgame of a certain Jewish elite’s effort to hypnotize the world into submission became apparent by around 1500, when the messianic-yet-worldly Zionism of Isaac Abarbanel drew the blueprint for the creation of the state of Israel more than four centuries later—and the apocalyptic war between Muslims and Christians it would instigate. To understand the significance of Abarbanel, we must remember that Jewish messianic thought has always awaited the coming of the Messiah, viewed as a king and warlord who will lead the Jews to a military triumph over all other tribes (the goyim) and institute 1000 years of pax Judaica. (Obviously this involves a severe rejection of the Christian and Muslim doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah.)
Abarbanel was a key figure in the heretical, Satanic turn in Jewish millenarianism: The transition between traditional orthodoxy, which held that God alone would institute the messianic age without human help, to the Zionist doctrine that Jews should “force God’s hand” by taking over Jerusalem, and the world, themselves—even if the price involved kabbalistic black magic, devious conspiracies, big lies, mass murder, weaponized usury, and other abominations. Today, Naturei Karta and other genuinely orthodox traditional Jews correctly view Zionism as a Satanic heresy. But most of the world’s Jewish communities, and the populations whose media they dominate, have been hypnotized into biting into the reeking rotten onion of Zionism and insisting it is a fresh, delicious apple.
Abarbanel’s plan for Jewish-triggered apocalypse, though produced five centuries ago, is as fresh as tomorrow’s headlines. The good rabbi recommended that Jews return en masse to the Holy Land and orchestrate an apocalyptic war between Christians and Muslims. After the Christians and Muslims had finished destroying each other, Abarbanel prophecied, the Jews—under the command of their Messiah—would rule the world from Jerusalem.
It is telling that Benjamin Netanyahu’s father Benzion wrote a book about Abarbanel highlighting the plan to trigger an apocalyptic Christian-vs.-Muslim war to usher in a one-world state ruled by the Jewish Messiah (who would of course be called Antichrist by Christians and Muslims). Indeed, the plan to trick (post)Christian civilization into launching a global war against Muslim civilization, rolled out on 9/11/2001, is something of a Netanyahu family business.
More than a century after Abarbanel laid the groundwork for the Clash of Civilizations, the famous false messiah Sabbatai Zevi—whose career peaked in the numerologically significant year 1666—led the first wave of Zionism by convincing large numbers of Jews to emigrate to the Holy Land. Zevi’s thought was taken up in the next century by Jacob Frank (1726-1791) who codified Zevi’s madness into the doctrine of “purification through transgression”: the notion that individuals and communities should “religiously” commit sex crimes and other abominations. Rumors of kabbalistic black magic, human sacrifice, and bizarre sexual practices have attended the Frankists, who—according to such Jewish scholars as investigative journalist Barry Chamish and Rabbi Marvin Antelman—were behind both the fiat money magic of the Rothschilds and its seeming opposite, Communism. Taken together, Rothschild capitalism and Marxian communism form a sort of Hegelian dialectical one-two punch in service to the larger project of secularized, materialist Jewish millenarianism.
Even as they “hypnotized the world” into dividing into capitalist and communist camps, heretical Jewish elites were setting the stage for Zionism…and Abarbanel’s eventual Christian-vs.-Muslim apocalypse leading to the Messiah/Antichrists’s one-world planetary dictatorship. Though Albert Pike’s alleged late 19th century prophecy of three Zionist-freemasonry-orchestrated World Wars may be apocryphal, the Frankist-Jewish elite’s hand in World War I, World War II, and the current Clash of Civilizations is convincingly documented in the last four chapters of Guyénot’s From Yahweh to Zion.
Techniques of Hypnotism
Getting back to the question of hypnotism, it is obvious that Jewish elites have played an outsize role in the discovery and manipulation the unconscious mind. Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was weaponized by his nephew Edward Bernays and transformed into what is euphemistically known as “public relations,” many aspects of which involve the direct manipulation of the unconscious in a process reminiscent of mass hypnosis.
In reality, Bernay’s (and Freud’s) contributions were not original. They are best viewed as modern versions of centuries-old mind control techniques based on Kabbalistic “magic” as described in Ioan Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. (Couliano’s spilling of cabalistic secrets may have led to the spilling of his blood: he was murdered in a rest room at that neocon Mecca, the University of Chicago.)
Hypnosis is based on repetition: You gaze at the watch swinging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, or the spoon clinking round and round and round the teacup, and sink into a suggestible trance. The verbal equivalent of this kind of hypnotic repetition was admirably summarized by Lewis Carroll as: “What I tell you three times is true.” That is why the mass television audience on 9/11/2001, blasted into an awestruck trance by traumatic images, was treated to hundreds of replays of planes into buildings, planes into buildings, planes into buildings, then buildings exploding into pyroclastic clouds, buildings exploding into pyroclastic clouds, buildings exploding into pyroclastic clouds, as an endless parade of talking heads chanted “Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor” and “Bin Laden Bin Laden Bin Laden.” One cannot imagine a more shamelessly obvious example of a pre-scripted mass hypnosis operation.
Often the real point of inducing hypnotic trance is not anything that happens during the hypnotism session itself, but behavioral changes induced by post-hypnotic suggestion: The smoker quits smoking, that fat person loses weight, or the MK Ultra subject fires a gun at Robert Kennedy without the slightest inkling of what he is doing or why. The 9/11 mass hypnosis operation, which I have analyzed with the help of the wonderful Douglas Rushkoff (my kind of Jewish utopian) as a classic example of Coercion—was designed to implant Islamophobia as its primary post-hypnotic suggestion, in service to a Clash of Civilizations agenda whose primary beneficiary is Zionism. (I do hope that certain Unz readers will notice that they are still operating under that baleful post-hypnotic influence, and go about the business of deprogramming themselves.)
When someone like Ilhan Omar—who suffered horrific trauma as a result of the 9/11-triggered Zionist plan to destroy “seven countries in five years” one of which was Somalia—looks at the United States, a nation of 300 million people, obediently laboring for tiny Israel like some sort of zombie golem, it is understandable why the word hypnosis would enter her mind and her Twitter stream. As I have shown, and could show in a book-length or even encyclopedic treatise given world enough and time, her hypnosis metaphor is illuminating and apropos.
In conclusion, I offer an obligatory disclaimer that should go without saying: Obviously Jewish elites are not the only people in the mass hypnosis business. All governments and corporations hypnotize their subjects and personnel into loyal obedience. All religion involves a degree of mass hypnosis; and mysticism, the heart of religion, involves a degree of self-hypnosis. And even parents routinely hypnotize their children to sleep with repetitious storytelling. Some of this, perhaps much of this, is normal and healthy. My point is that Jewish elites have been unusually successful in employing hypnotic mass manipulation for self-aggrandizing purposes, and that today’s Zionist elites are doing so in strikingly immoral and destructive ways.
TRANSCRIPT: The first person to stand up to any great evil is always the most courageous. To be the first one to call out any great injustice is to invite ridicule, scorn, even persecution. It is difficult to imagine today just how brave were the first slave owners to call for the abolition of slavery, the first men and women to advocate women’s suffrage, the first activists to call for the end of Apartheid. In the end, their cause is recognized as just and these brave souls are lauded, often posthumously, as heroes. But in the beginning, no one wants to admit that they are a party, even unwittingly, to a great evil. The wildest injustices can be legitimized simply because they are popular.
Today, just such a popular injustice exists. It has been infused into our culture and taken up as a cause. It is fervently believed in and advocated with great passion and force, and to speak out against it is to risk persecution and scorn. But speak out against it we must.
The terrible injustice of our age has its roots in a most unlikely place: in the quaint villages and manicured gardens of the 19th century British gentry. Amongst that set lived one Francis Galton, a gentleman scientist who had investigated everything from meterorology to statistics. Shortly after his cousin, Charles Darwin, published his Origin of Species, Galton became fascinated with the idea that the “survival of the fittest” did not just take place between species, but within them. This idea became a pseudo-science, a study of the presumed racial characteristics of this group or that group with an aim to explaining why the various peoples of the world occupy the positions they do.
In order to confirm their pre-conceived notions of their own self-worth, Galton and his friends started a new field of inquiry called eugenics. Unsurprisingly, it concluded that the rich and powerful were rich and powerful because they were genetically superior, and it offered a simple solution for improving the lot of humanity: make sure that the affluent upper classes breed as much as possible (preferably within their own families, in order to preserve their superior stock), and make sure the lower classes breed as little as possible.
This junk science, pandering as it did to the most rabid the most racist the most elitist interests of the moneyed class, became universally accepted in the Western world within a generation. Soon, country after country had implemented laws to allow the government to sterilize those citizens it deemed to be “unfit.”
The true horrors of this strain of thought came to light when the German eugenicists, based at the Rockefeller-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute , gave the Nazi regime an ideological excuse to take the idea to its logical conclusion. Many of the Germans who went along with the holocaust did so because they genuinely believed the scientists who were telling them that the Jews and Gypsies, the communists and homosexuals were genetically inferior and needed to be eliminated from the gene pool.
After World War II, when the full magnitude of the slaughter that had taken place in the name of eugenics began to become apparent, the eugenicist pseudoscientists scrambled to find a way to re-legitimize their racist and classist drivel. They wrote openly in the journals of their once-esteemed eugenics societies that they would now have to continue their studies and practices in a more covert fashion. Eugenics had to become crypto-eugenics.
This was accomplished in a number of ways. The British Eugenics Society, for one, merely changed its name to The Galton Institute. The American Eugenics Society morphed into the Population Council, a group set up by John D. Rockefeller III, where members continued to advocate the same policies for reducing the population of third world countries as they always had, only now they did so in the name of fighting “overpopulation” rather than fighting “bad genes.”
Julian Huxley, brother of the famous writer, helped organize UNESCO in 1945. In the founding document of UNESCO entitled UNESCO: its philosophy and its purpose, he argues that one of the key aims of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization would be the re-legitimization of eugenics so the idea would once again become thinkable. He also went on to co-found the World Wildlife Fund with Nazi SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.
Within a generation, science was once again ready to tell us why the only way to save humanity was to stop people from breeding: this time, the public was whipped into a furor not about Jews and Gypsies, but about carbon dioxide and environmental sustainability. The cover had changed, but the racist eugenicist text remained the same.
In the logic of the eugenicists, the meaning of human life is itself transformed. Instead of something valuable, something precious, something to be desired and nurtured, fought for and celebrated, humanity is re-imagined as a cancer, something inherently evil, the mere existence of which is a burden on the world. This, unsurprisingly, encapsulates the modern environmental movement’s position almost perfectly: human life is no longer something to be treasured, but something to be measured in carbon and then reduced.
In the manmade global warming myth, humans are merely an obstacle to the proper functioning of nature. In the eugenicist fantasy, the earth is saved when people die. In both ideologies (if they really are separate) the ultimate genocide becomes thinkable.
Now the “leaders of the world” are meeting in Copenhagen to decide on the future of your world, of my world, of the world of our children and grandchildren. They are proposing a reorganization of the world economy. Punishing austerity is being urged in all corners. Groups of population control eugenicists are now arguing for carbon offsets to be used to stop the developing world from having children. The choir of madness is growing by the day and everything seems set to reach an intolerable crescendo.
And then, in the darkest hour, just as it seems the eugenicists are about to take over, along comes an insider—a hero—at the University of East Anglia to leak the emails and documents with which the entire manmade global warming myth is exposed and the carbon reduction agenda is deligitimized.
It is not always popular to stand against great injustice, but it is always right.
California parents are demanding an elementary school remove their on-campus cell tower after four students and three teachers were diagnosed with cancer in just three years.
Some students at the Weston Elementary School in Ripon, San Joaquin County, California have been pulled from attending the school over the spike in cancer cases, reports the Sacramento Bee.
On Monday evening about 200 angered parents attended a Ripon school board meeting to demand action. The kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school has about 400 students.
The Ripon Unified School District said tests carried out on the cell tower showed it is working normally and within safety standards, but the board are talking with the telecommunications company about moving the tower.
Four students have been diagnosed with cancer since the controversy first erupted in 2016. Monica Ferrulli, a parent of one of the students who was treated for brain cancer in 2017, claimed the RUSD is in “denial” and citing an obsolete American Cancer Society study to justify the tower’s placement.
“We had a doctor tell us that it’s 100 percent environmental, the kind of tumor that he has,” said Ferrulli to CBS Sacramento, and added that an inspection of the tower arranged by parents showed much higher readings than the RUSD-hired engineers found in 2018.
The school district, who reportedly receives $2,000 per month for the tower, has said while they empathize with families, they have no out clause in their 25-year lease contract with Spirit – the company that owns the tower – meaning both the school district and Spirit will have to mutually agree on a relocation.
The propagandists are in overdrive shoving “climate grief” down our collective throats. And the next step in that indoctrination, the acceptance of climate eugenics to atone for our climate sins, is almost here. Join James for this week’s important edition of #PropagandaWatch dissecting the dangerous lies that are being pushed in the name of the environment.
1 hour, abridged version of censored Al Jazeera documentary exposing the Israel lobby in the U.S.
The documentary was never broadcast by Al Jazeera due to pressure from some Jewish groups and individuals. It was eventually leaked to a few groups, which posted some short clips. On November 2nd the first two parts finally became available to the public.
Check out this video of Emmanuel Macron at the biggest Zionist event of the year in France, the infamous “CRIF dinner”. If you don’t now what the CRIF is, do not bother with the Wikipedia article – it’s all sanitized – but think of the French CRIF like (AIPAC+JINSA+ADL+B’nai B’rith)2: all the power of the Israel Lobby in the USA, but squared (yeah, I know, hard to imagine, but true).
(FYI – the guy holding Macron’s wrist is the CRIF’s President)
Sana’a – While the world focuses on Venezuela to validate coup threats, the manmade humanitarian situation in Yemen continues deteriorating. In fact, the very country claiming to help alleviate Venezuelan suffering, the United States, has played an active and intentional role in creating the crisis in Yemen.
According to a recent report from ReliefWeb, 80% of Yemen’s entire population require urgent humanitarian assistance. This figure is up 30% from last year. That means out of an estimated population of 30.5 million, 24.1 million require immediate aid for survival.
Facing starvation and famine due to the blockade, 20.1 million need urgent food assistance. Healthcare is also a vital concern. 19.7 million Yemenis lack basic access to doctors and lifesaving medicines. To top it off, 17.8 million don’t even have proper water, sanitation, and other supplies for keeping up with basic hygiene. By looking at these numbers, it’s easy to see that a majority of Yemenis need urgent assistance in all three areas.
This is a major problem because the lack of access to clean water and sanitation equipment is directly responsible for the fatal spread of cholera. The UN expects to record up to 350,000 cases of cholera in 2019. In 2017, one million were infected with the preventable illness while several thousand died.
Instead of putting forth any efforts to lift the US-enforced and Saudi-led blockade and siege of Yemen, the UN has appealed for $4.2 billion to meet humanitarian needs.
Famine and Disease as a Weapon of War
The blockade, which is technically illegal under international law, restricts all land, sea, and air imports and exports. It also prohibits the free flow of human movement — which has effectively turned Yemen into an open-air prison. This travel ban, combined with the country’s failing healthcare system, had contributed to the death of over 27 thousand civilians as of August of 2018. It has also caused the death of over 247,000 children who are particularly vulnerable to starvation and disease.
But the starvation, disease, and crumbling healthcare system aren’t merely a byproduct of the blockade: they’re an intentional consequence.
According to a report Geopolitics Alert received from the Republic of Yemen, the US-backed Saudi-led coalition has continued targeting civilian infrastructure vital for sustaining life.
During the month of December alone, Saudi coalition warplanes attacked 68 water tanks and pumps, 222 agricultural fields, four markets, 132 livestock, four food warehouses, and much more. To top it off, coalition airstrikes also targeted 190 businesses and factories as well as airports, seaports, boats, and gas stations.
These are direct attacks on Yemen’s food and water supply.
The report also states that hundreds of workers such as fishermen, farmers, and factory workers in Hodeidah province have become unemployed during the month of December due to such attacks on their source of income. The Saudi coalition also detonates cluster munitions and chemical weapons over agricultural fields to further contaminate the land.
The coalition airstrikes on vital civilian infrastructure make it clear that starvation and disease from the blockade are intended weapons of war.
This MintPress documentary examines the gruesome attacks on fishermen who recall horrors of rape and torture after being captured by Saudi coalition warships.
In recent years, the public has gradually discovered that there is a crisis in science. But what is the problem? And how bad is it, really? Today on The Corbett Report we shine a spotlight on the series of interrelated crises that are exposing the way institutional science is practiced today, and what it means for an increasingly science-dependent society.
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TRANSCRIPT
In 2015 a study from the Institute of Diet and Health with some surprising results launched a slew of click bait articles with explosive headlines:
“Chocolate accelerates weight loss” insisted one such headline.
“Scientists say eating chocolate can help you lose weight” declared another.
“Lose 10% More Weight By Eating A Chocolate Bar Every Day… No Joke!” promised yet another.
There was just one problem: This was a joke.
The head researcher of the study, “Johannes Bohannon,” took to io9 in May of that year to reveal that his name was actually John Bohannon, the “Institute of Diet and Health” was in fact nothing more than a website, and the study showing the magical weight loss effects of chocolate consumption was bogus. The hoax was the brainchild of a German television reporter who wanted to “demonstrate just how easy it is to turn bad science into the big headlines behind diet fads.”
Given how widely the study’s surprising conclusion was publicized—from the pages of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper to the TV sets of viewers in Texas and Australia—that demonstration was remarkably successful. But although it’s tempting to write this story off as a demonstration about gullible journalists and the scientific illiteracy of the press, the hoax serves as a window into a much larger, much more troubling story.
What makes the chocolate weight loss study so revealing isn’t that it was completely fake; it’s that in an important sense it wasn’t fake. Bohannes really did conduct a weight loss study and the data really does support the conclusion that subjects who ate chocolate on a low-carb diet lose weight faster than those on a non-chocolate diet. In fact, the chocolate dieters even had better cholesterol readings. The trick was all in how the data was interpreted and reported.
As Bohannes explained in his post-hoax confession:
“Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a ‘statistically significant’ result. Our study included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.”
You see, finding a “statistically significant result” sounds impressive and helps scientists to get their paper published in high-impact journals, but “statistical significance” is in fact easy to fake. If, like Bohannes, you use a small sample size and measure for 18 different variables, it’s almost impossible not to find some “statistically significant” result. Scientists know this, and the process of sifting through data to find “statistically significant” (but ultimately meaningless) results is so common that it has its own name: “p-hacking” or “data dredging.”
But p-hacking only scrapes the surface of the problem. From confounding factors to normalcy bias to publication pressures to outright fraud, the once-pristine image of science and scientists as an impartial font of knowledge about the world has been seriously undermined over the past decade.
Although these types of problems are by no means new, they came into vogue when John Ioannidis, a physician, researcher and writer at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, rocked the scientific community with his landmark paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” The 2005 paper addresses head on the concern that “most current published research findings are false,” asserting that “for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” The paper has achieved iconic status, becoming the most downloaded paper in the Public Library of Science and launching a conversation about false results, fake data, bias, manipulation and fraud in science that continues to this day.
JOHN IOANNIDIS: This is a paper that is practically presenting a mathematical modeling of what are the chances that a research finding that is published in the literature would be true. And it uses different parameters, different aspects, in terms of: What we know before; how likely it is for something to be true in a field; how much bias are maybe in the field; what kind of results we get; and what are the statistics that are presented for the specific result.
I have been humbled that this work has drawn so much attention and people from very different scientific fields—ranging not just bio-medicine, but also psychological science, social science, even astrophysics and the other more remote disciplines—have been attracted to what that paper was trying to do.
So what is the problem? And how bad is it, really? And what does it mean for an increasingly tech-dependent society that something is rotten in the state of science?
To get a handle on the scope of this dilemma, we have to realize that the “crisis” of science isn’t a crisis at all, but a series of interrelated crises that get to the heart of the way institutional science is practiced today.
First, there is the Replication Crisis.
This is the canary in the coalmine of the scientific crisis in general because it tells us that a surprising percentage of scientific studies, even ones published in top-tier academic journals that are often thought of as the gold standard for experimental research, cannot be reliably reproduced. This is a symptom of a larger crisis because reproducibility is considered to be a bedrock of the scientific process.
In a nutshell, an experiment is reproducible if independent researchers can run the same experiment and get the same results at a later date. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why this is important. If an experiment is truly revealing some fundamental truth about the world then that experiment should yield the same results under the same conditions anywhere and at any time (all other things being equal).
Well, not all things are equal.
In the opening years of this decade, the Center for Open Science led a team of 240 volunteer researchers in a quest to reproduce the results of 100 psychological experiments. These experiments had all been published in three of the most prestigious psychology journals. The results of this attempt to replicate these experiments, published in 2015 in a paper on “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science,” were abysmal. Only 39 of the experimental results could be reproduced.
Worse yet for those who would defend institutional science from its critics, these results are not confined to the realm of psychology. In 2011, Nature published a paper showing that researchers were only able to reproduce between 20 and 25 per cent of 67 published preclinical drug studies. They published another paper the next year with an even worse result: researchers could only reproduce six of a total of 53 “landmark” cancer studies. That’s a reproducibility rate of 11%.
These studies alone are persuasive, but the cherry on top came in May 2016 when Naturepublished the results of a survey of over 1,500 scientists finding fully 70% of them had tried and failed to reproduce published experimental results at some point. The poll covered researchers from a range of disciplines, from physicists and chemists to earth and environmental scientists to medical researchers and assorted others.
So why is there such a widespread inability to reproduce experimental results? There are a number of reasons, each of which give us another window into the greater crisis of science.
The simplest answer is the one that most fundamentally shakes the widespread belief that scientists are disinterested truthseekers who would never dream of publishing a false result or deliberately mislead others.
JAMES EVAN PILATO: Survey sheds light on the ‘crisis’ rocking research.
More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature’s survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research.
The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproducibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant ‘crisis’ of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature.
Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak. The best-known analyses, from psychology1 and cancer biology2, found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively.
SOURCE: Scientists Say Fraud Causing Crisis of Science – #NewWorldNextWeek
In fact, the data shows that the Crisis of Fraud in scientific circles is even worse than scientists will admit. A study published in 2012 found that fraud or suspected fraud was responsible for 43% of scientific paper retractions, by far the single leading cause of retraction. The study demonstrated a 1000% increase in (reported) scientific fraud since 1975. Together with “duplicate publication” and “plagiarism,” misconduct of one form or another accounted for two-thirds of all retractions.
So much for scientists as disinterested truth-tellers.
Indeed, instances of scientific fraud are cropping up more and more in the headlines these days.
Last year, Kohei Yamamizu of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application was found to have completely fabricated the data for his 2017 paper in the journal Stem Cell Reports, and earlier this year it was found that Yamamizu’s data fabrication was more extensive than previously thought, with a paper from 2012 also being retracted due to doubtful data.
Another Japanese researcher, Haruko Obokata, was found to have manipulated images to get her landmark study on stem cell creation published in Nature. The study was retracted and one of Obokata’s co-authors committed suicide when the fraud was discovered.
Similar stories of fraud behind retracted stem cell papers, molecular-scale transistor breakthroughs, psychological studies and a host of other research calls into question the very foundations of the modern system of peer-reviewed, reproducible science, which is supposed to mitigate fraudulent activity by carefully checking and, where appropriate, repeating important research.
There are a number of reasons why fraud and misconduct is on the rise, and these relate to more structural problems that unveil yet more crises in science.
Like the Crisis of Publication.
We’ve all heard of “publish or perish” by now. It means that only researchers who have a steady flow of published papers to their name are considered for the plush positions in modern-day academia.
This pressure isn’t some abstract or unstated force; it is direct and explicit. Until recently the medical department at London’s Imperial College told researchers that their target was to “publish three papers per annum including one in a prestigious journal with an impact factor of at least five.” Similar guidelines and quotas are enacted in departments throughout academia.
And so, like any quota-based system, people will find a way to cheat their way to the goal. Some attach their names to work they have little to do with. Others publish in pay-to-play journals that will publish anything for a small fee. And others simply fudge their data until they get a result that will grab headlines and earn a spot in a high-profile journal.
It’s easy to see how fraudulent or irreproducible data results from this pressure. The pressure to publish in turn puts pressure on researchers to produce data that will be “new” and “unexpected.” A study finding that drinking 5 cups of coffee a day increases your chance of urinary tract cancer (or decreases your chance of stroke) is infinitely more interesting (and thus publishable) than a study finding mixed results, or no discernible effect. So studies finding a surprising result (or ones that can be manipulated into showing surprising results) will be published and those with negative results will not. This makes it much harder for future scientists to get an accurate assessment of the state of research in any given field, since untold numbers of experiments with negative results never get published, and thus never see the light of day.
But the pressure to publish in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals itself raises the specter of another crisis: The Crisis of Peer Review.
The peer review process is designed as a check against fraud, sloppy research and other problems that arise when journal editors are determining whether to publish a paper. In theory, the editor of the journal passes the paper to another researcher in the same field who can then check that the research is factual, relevant, novel and sufficient for publication.
In practice, the process is never quite so straightforward.
The peer review system is in fact rife with abuse, but few cases are as flagrant as that of Hyung-In Moon. Moon was a medicinal-plant researcher at Dongguk University in Gyeongju, South Korea, who aroused suspicions by the ease with which his papers were reviewed. Most researchers are too busy to review other papers at all, but the editor of The Journal of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry noticed that the reviewers for Moon’s papers were not only always available, but that they usually submitted their review notes within 24 hours. When confronted by the editor about this suspiciously quick work, Moon admitted that he had written most of the reviews himself. He had simply gamed the system, where most journals ask researchers to submit names of potential reviewers for their papers, by creating fake names and email addresses and then submitting “reviews” of his own work.
Beyond the incentivization of fraud and opportunities for gaming the system, however, the peer review process has other, more structural problems. In certain specialized fields there are only a handful of scientists qualified to review new research in the discipline, meaning that this clique effectively forms a team of gatekeepers over an entire branch of science. They often know each other personally, meaning any new research they conduct is certain to be reviewed by one of their close associates (or their direct rivals). This “pal review” system also helps to solidify dogma in echo chambers where the same few people who go to the same conferences and pursue research along the same lines can prevent outsiders with novel approaches from entering the field of study.
In the most egregious cases, as with researchers in the orbit of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, groups of scientists have been caught conspiring to oust an editor from a journal that published papers that challenged their own research and even conspiring to “redefine what the peer-review literature is” in order to stop rival researchers from being published at all.
So, in short: Yes, there is a Replication Crisis in science. And yes, it is caused by a Crisis of Fraud. And yes, the fraud is motivated by a Crisis of Publication. And yes, those crises are further compounded by a Crisis of Peer Review.
But what creates this environment in the first place? What is the driving factor that keeps this whole system going in the face of all these crises? The answer isn’t difficult to understand. It’s the same thing that puts pressure on every other aspect of the economy: funding.
Modern laboratories investigating cutting edge questions involve expensive technology and large teams of researchers. The types of labs producing truly breakthrough results in today’s environment are the ones that are well funded. And there are only two ways for scientists to get big grants in our current system: big business or big government. So it should be no surprise that “scientific” results, so suspectible to the biases, frauds and manipulations that constitute the crises of science, are up for sale by scientists who are willing to provide dodgy data for dirty dollars to large corporations and politically-motivated government agencies.
RFK JR.: “Simpsonwood” was the transcripts of a secret meeting that was held between CDC and 75 representatives of the vaccine industry in which they reviewed a report that CDC had ordered—the Verstraeten study—of a hundred thousand children in the United States vaccine safety database. And when they looked at it themselves, they said, quote: “It is impossible to massage this data to make the signal go away. There is no denying that there is a connection between autism and thimerosal in the vaccines.” And this is what they said. I didn’t say this. This is what their own scientists [said] and their own conclusion of the best doctors, the top people at CDC, the top people at the pharmaceutical injury industry.
And you know, when they had this meeting they had it not in Atlanta—which was the headquarters of the CDC—but in Simpsonwood at a private conference center, because they believed that that would make them able to insulate themselves from a court request under the Freedom of Information Law and they would not have to disclose the transcripts of these meetings to the public. Somebody transcribed the meetings and we were able to get a hold of it. You have them talking about the Verstraeten study and saying there’s a clear link, not just with autism but with the whole range of neurological disorders—speech delay, language delay, all kinds of learning disorders, ADD, hyperactivity disorder—and the injection of these vaccines.
[. . .]and at the end of that meeting they make a few decisions. One is Verstraeten, the man who designed who conducted the study, is hired the next day by GlaxoSmithKline and shipped off to switzerland, and six months later he sends in a redesigned study that includes cohorts who are too young to have been diagnosed as autistic. So he loads the study down, the data down, and they tell the public that they’ve lost all the original data. This is what CDC says till this day: That it does not know what happened to the original data in the Verstraeten study. And they published this other study that is a corrupt and crooked—what we call tobacco science done by a bunch of bio-stitutes, crooked scientists who are trying to fool the American public.
Then Kathleen Stratton from CDC and IOM says “What we need is we need some studies that will disprove the
link.” So they work with the vaccine industry to gin up these four phony European studies that are done by vaccine industry employees, funded by the vaccine industry and published in the American Academy of Pediatrics magazine, which receives 80% of its revenue from the vaccine industry. And none of these scientists disclose any of their myriad conflicts which conventional ethics rules require them to do. It’s not disclosed.
TOM CLARKE: 64,000 people dead. Tens of thousands hospitalized. A country crippled by a virus.
The predictions of the impact of swine flu on Britain were grim. The government’s response: Spending hundreds of millions of pounds on antiviral drugs and vaccines adverts and leaflets. But ten months into the pandemic, only 355 Britons have died and globally the virus hasn’t lived up to our fears.
Were government’s misled into preparing for the worst? Politicians in Brussels are now asking for an investigation into the role pharmaceutical companies played in influencing political decisions that led to a swine flu spending spree.
WOLFGANG WODARG: There must be a process to to get more transparency [about] how the decisions in the WHO function and who is influencing the decisions of the WHO and what is the role of pharmaceutical industry there. I’m very suspicious about the processes which are behind this pandemic.
TOM CLARKE: The Council of Europe Committee want the investigation to focus on the World Health Organization’s decision to lower the threshold required for a pandemic to be formally declared.
MARGARET CHAN: The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic.
REPORTER: When this happened in June last year, government’s had to activate huge, pre-prepared contracts for drugs and vaccines with manufacturers. They also want to probe ties between key WHO advisors and drug companies.
PAUL FLYNN: Who is deciding what the risk is? Is it the pharmaceutical companies who want to sell drugs, or is it someone making a decision based on the perceived danger? In this case it appears that the danger was vastly exaggerated. And was it exaggerated by the pharmaceutical companies in order to make money?
JAMES CORBETT: And a perfect example of that came out just in the past month where it was discovered, revealed—”Oh my God! Who would have thought it?”—people who consume artificial sweeteners like aspartame are three times more likely to suffer from a common form of stroke than others. Who would have thought it (except everyone who’s been worming warning about aspartame for decades and decades)?
And if you want to know more about aspartame and how it got approved in the first place you can go back and listen to my earlier podcast on “Meet Donald Rumsfeld” where we talked about his role in getting aspartame approved for human consumption in the first place. But yes, now decades later they come out with a study that shows “Well guys, we had no idea, but guess what? It does apparently cause strokes!”
And this is particularly galling, I suppose, because if you go back even a couple of years ago the paper of record, the “Old Gray Lady,” the New York Times (and every other publication, to be fair) that ever tried to address this would always talk about sweeteners as being better than sugar for you. And they would point to a handful of studies. The same studies every time, including—I mean, just as one example this 2007 study which was a peer review study [that went] through various different studies that had been published, and this was done by a “panel of experts” as it was said at the time. And it was cited in all of these different reports by the New York Times and others as showing that aspartame was even safer than sugar and blah blah blah. And when you actually looked at the study itself you found that—lo and behold!—the “panel of experts” was put together by something called “the burdock group” which was a consulting firm that worked for the food industry amongst others and was in that particular instance hired by ajinomoto, who people might know as a producer of aspartame.
So, yes, you have the aspartame manufacturers hiring consultants to put together panels of scientific scientific experts that then come out with the conclusion that, “Yes! Aspartame is sweet as honey and good for you like breathing oxygen. It’s just so wonderful! Oh, it’s like manna from heaven!” And lo and behold they were lying. Who would have thought it? Who would have imagined that the scientific process could be so thoroughly corrupted?
Sadly, there is no lack of examples of how commercial interests have skewed research in a range of disciplines.
In some cases, inconvenient data is simply hidden from the public. This was what happened with “Project 259,” a feeding experiment in which lab rats were separated into two groups: One was given a high-sugar diet and the other was given a so-called “basic PRM diet” of cereal meals, soybean meals, whitefish meal, and dried yeast. The results were astounding. Not only did the study provide the first experimental evidence that sugar and starch are actually metabolized differently, but it also found that “sucrose [. . .] may have a role in the pathogenesis of bladder cancer.” But Project 259 was being funded by something called the “Sugar Research Foundation,” which has organizational ties to the trade association of the US sugar industry. As a result, the study was shelved, the results were kept from the public and it took 51 years for the experiment to be dug up by researchers and published. But this was too late for the generation of victims that The Sugar Conspiracy created, raised on a low-fat, high sugar diet that is now known to be toxic.
In other cases, industry secretly sponsors and even covertly promotes questionable research that bolsters claims to their product’s safety. This is the case of Johnson & Johnson, which was facing a potential scandal over revelations that its baby powder contained asbestos. They hired an Italian physician to conduct a study on the health of talc miners in the Italian Alps, and even told him what the study should find: data that “would show that the incidence of cancer in these subjects is no different from that of the Italian population or the rural control group.” When the physician came back with the data as instructed, J&J were unhappy with the form and style of the study’s write up, so they handed it to a scientific ghostwriter to prepare it for publication. The ghostwritten paper was then published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and the research was cited by a review article in the British Journal of Industrial Medicine later that year, which concluded that there is no evidence suggesting that the “normal use” of cosmetic talc poses a health hazard. That review article was written by Gavin Hildick-Smith, the Johnson & Johnson physician executive who had commissioned the Italian study, dictated its findings and sent it out for ghostwriting. Dr. Hildick-Smith failed to disclose this conflict in his review article, however.
The list of such egregious abuses of “scientific” institutions and processes is seemingly endless, with more stories surfacing on a weekly basis. Websites like Retraction Watch attempt to document fraud and misconduct in science as it is revealed, but stories about the corporate hand behind key research studies or conspiracies to cover up inconvenient research are reported in a haphazard fashion and generally receive little traction with the public.
But these are not new issues. There have been those warning us about the dangerous confluence of money, government power and science since the birth of the modern era.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
In his prescient warning, Eisenhower not only gave a name to the “military-industrial complex” that has been working to steer American foreign policy since the end of the second World War, but he also warned how the government can shape the course of scientific research with its funding. Is it any wonder, then, that military contractors like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are among the leading funders in cutting edge research in nanotechnology, quantum computing, “human systems optimization” and other important scientific endeavors? Or that the Pentagon’s own Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency provides billions of dollars per year to help find military applications for breakthroughs in computer science, molecular biology, robotics and other high-cost scientific research?
And what does this mean for researchers who are looking to innovate in areas that do not have military or commercial use?
Yes, there is not just one crisis of science, but multiple crises. And, like many other crises, they find a common root in the pressures that come from funding large-scale, capital-intensive, industrial research.
But this is not simply a problem of money, and it will not be solved by money. There are deeper social, political and structural roots of this crisis that will need to be addressed before we understand how to truly mitigate these problems and harness the transformative power of scientific research to improve our lives. In the next edition of The Corbett Report, we will examine and dissect the various proposals for solving the crisis of science.
Solving this crisis—these crises—is important. The scientific method is valuable. We should not throw out the baby of scientific knowledge with the bathwater of scientific corruption. But we need to stop treating science as a magic 8-ball that can solve all of our societal and political problems. And we need to stop venerating scientists as a quasi-priest class whose dictates are beyond question by the unwashed masses.
After all, when an Ipsos MORI poll found that nine out of ten British people would trust scientists to “follow the rules,” even Nature‘s editorial board was compelled to ask: “How many scientists would say the same?”
By Jamal Kanj – Intifada-Palestine.com – January 14, 2011
Israel’s survival kit is: perpetuate conflict, insecurity to rationalize collective hate and finally playing victim.
Devoid of conflict, Israel implodes internally; without hate, Zionism loses its justification; and playing eternal victim to continue blackmailing the West. Absence of this holy trinity, Israel ceases to exist.
From its inception, the house of Zion has mastered exploiting adversarial powers to advance Israel’s cause. For instance, their influence over the Democratic Party in the US began with President Truman’s bid for 2nd term election in 1948.
Responding to strong opposition from Secretary of State General George Marshall and Department experts urging against recognition of Israel, President Truman replied: “I’m sorry gentlemen but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands [Jewish voters] who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of [voting] Arabs among my constituents”
Zionists influence over liberal American politics was matched with the doctrinal school of Conservative theoreticians aligning the Republican Party’s platform with Israel’s objectives. The Neoconservative Zionists, coined Zioncons, invented the “Clash of Civilization” concept to fight Israel’s wars. … continue
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Laurent Guyénot’s magisterial From Yahweh to Zion “unveils the process by which Yahweh, through the voices of his priests, prophets, and scribes (the ‘cognitive elite’) shaped the vision and collective psychology of his chosen people” (p.18). That voice of the Jewish cognitive elite, masquerading as the voice of God, wielded the same kind of charismatic, irrational authority over its victims as the voice of the hypnotist wields over his hypnotic subjects.
The endgame of a certain Jewish elite’s effort to hypnotize the world into submission became apparent by around 1500, when the messianic-yet-worldly Zionism of Isaac Abarbanel drew the blueprint for the creation of the state of Israel more than four centuries later—and the apocalyptic war between Muslims and Christians it would instigate. To understand the significance of Abarbanel, we must remember that Jewish messianic thought has always awaited the coming of the Messiah, viewed as a king and warlord who will lead the Jews to a military triumph over all other tribes (the goyim) and institute 1000 years of pax Judaica. (Obviously this involves a severe rejection of the Christian and Muslim doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah.)
More than a century after Abarbanel laid the groundwork for the Clash of Civilizations, the famous false messiah Sabbatai Zevi—whose career peaked in the numerologically significant year 1666—led the first wave of Zionism by convincing large numbers of Jews to emigrate to the Holy Land. Zevi’s thought was taken up in the next century by Jacob Frank (1726-1791) who codified Zevi’s madness into the doctrine of “purification through transgression”: the notion that individuals and communities should “religiously” commit sex crimes and other abominations. Rumors of kabbalistic black magic, human sacrifice, and bizarre sexual practices have attended the Frankists, who—according to such Jewish scholars as investigative journalist Barry Chamish and Rabbi Marvin Antelman—were behind both the fiat money magic of the Rothschilds and its seeming opposite, Communism. Taken together, Rothschild capitalism and Marxian communism form a sort of Hegelian dialectical one-two punch in service to the larger project of secularized, materialist Jewish millenarianism.
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