Tag: journalism

Got $500? You too can get a scientific paper published!

11:33 am

A Harvard scientist used a random text generator to create a fake science paper entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and was able to get it accepted at 17 journals. [Note: the link includes an auto-download of the pdf of the scientist’s fake paper.]

Shrime decided to see how easy it would be to publish an article. So he made one up. Like, he literally made one up. He did it using www.randomtextgenerator.com. The article is entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and its authors are the venerable Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. The subtitle reads: “The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.” Shrime submitted it to 37 journals over two weeks and, so far, 17 of them have accepted it. (They have not “published” it, but say they will as soon as Shrime pays the $500. This is often referred to as a “processing fee.” Shrime has no plans to pay them.) Several have already typeset it and given him reviews, as you can see at the end of this article. One publication says his methods are “novel and innovative”!. But when Shrime looked up the physical locations of these publications, he discovered that many had very suspicious addresses; one was actually inside a strip club.

Essentially, these fake journals are scams to get $500 from scientists, generally from third world countries who can’t get their papers published in the bigger first world journals. (What does that tell us about those bigger first world journals?)

The best line of the article however was this: “Many of these publications sound legitimate. To someone who is not well-versed in a particular subfield of medicine—a journalist, for instance—it would be easy to mistake them for valid sources.” [emphasis mine] It seems to me that if you are a journalist writing about a particular field, you should be reasonably educated on that field and be able to spot a fake journal. I certainly can. That it is assumed that mainstream journalists who report on medicine cannot speaks volumes about the quality of the field.

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The left wing pundit press makes fools of themselves

9:53 am

Link here. Be sure to watch the video and then read the article. As the author notes quite correctly,

Every one of these “pundits” have spent the last six years extolling the virtues of President Obama’s brilliant foreign policy. Every single one of these panelists have written columns, given opinion, and appeared on TV shows telling the consuming sheeple how brilliant President Obama was. Now they sit around presenting themselves as some form of disconnected gallery observers talking about how the consequences of those same policies they exalted are abject failures.

Insufferable does not begin to explain the level of hypocrisy within the U.S. Obama Praetorian guard media.

I must also note that this video clip does a great job of revealing how the entire panel on Face the Nation are all supporters of Obama and the Democrats. Repeatedly, as they described the President’s string of failures in foreign policy, they were forced to note that it was Obama’s “critics” who were right about every issue, “critics” that happen also to not be present on this Face the Nation panel. So, who are these mysterious “critics” that none of these pundits can name? They are conservatives, including Republicans, journalists, and tea party leaders, none of whom Face the Nation thought worthy of including on its panel.

This shows us again how completely worthless it is to depend on television for intelligent and objective reporting and analysis of the news. Mainstream television is working for the Democratic Party. Know that when you watch it.

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New York Times explains why it won’t publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons

8:36 am

bombhead

Cowards: “[L]et’s not forget the Muslim family in Brooklyn who read us and is offended by any depiction of what he sees as his prophet.”

Note that the Times has had no reluctance to show images that are as equally offensive to its Christian and Jewish readers. I wonder why the Muslims get this special treatment?

Meanwhile, representatives of the religion of peace have now taken hostages, both in a factory near Charles De Gaulle Airport as well as in a kosher grocery store in Paris.

Update: It appears both hostage situations have ended.

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“Why the media’s fact problems are much bigger than Rolling Stone.”

1:09 pm

Link here.

For those who haven’t been following the story, Rolling Stone recently published an expose about a supposed gang-rape at a fraternity at the University of Virginia that they and their reporter used to illustrate the terrible rape culture of today’s universities.

The article has turned out to be largely a fabrication and has instead illustrated the terrible state of modern journalism as well as the corrupt truth-challenged intellectual elite of our society. Mollie Hemingway’s devastating analysis at the link above summarizes this situation nicely, also illustrating why much of what comes out of modern intellectual discussions today is total hogwash.

She doesn’t mention it, but I could not help thinking about global warming as well as the recent Orion test flight (“the spacecraft that will take us to Mars!”). In both cases the press has been seriously challenged to show some justifiable skepticism of official press releases and has failed miserably.

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Emails reveal press willingness to be manipulated by the Obama administration

3:35 pm

Transparency! Freedom of Information emails obtained from the Obama administration in connection with the Justice Department’s effort to allow guns to leave the U.S. for Mexico illegally, dubbed Fast-and-Furious, show the administration’s aggressive effort to manipulate the press and squelch any reporters willing to report the scandal honestly.

Key quote: “Any way we can fix Fox?” The emails also show that White House officials trying to silence reporting by Sharyl Attkisson, then working for CBS.

I am less outraged by the jackbooted behavior of the Obama administraton here than the wimpy willingness of the so-called independent press to follow the administration’s orders. The very effort of White House officials to silence journalists was a story in itself, and any good press person should jump at the chance to reveal this behavior to everyone. Instead, top editors at the major networks apparently got down on their knees to lick the boots of these White House officials.

It amazes me that anyone believes anything aired by these mainstream media news organizations. They have become a joke.

More here, including this juicy quote: “There are very few things that are actually as dishonest, wicked and corrupt as conservatives think they are. But CBS News is one of them.”

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Focusing on strategy instead of substance

6:14 pm

This article, about the back room maneuvers by both political parties leading up to last week’s election, has been making the rounds on all the political websites. Called a “must-read, vivid piece”, it reveals all the strategies, mistakes, and childish in-fighting that took place during the campaign, the kind of stuff that makes many people consider politicians such a lower form of life.

I am normally not interested in these smoke-filled backroom stories as I care a lot more about what politicians do when they are in office. This is why I didn’t read the article until today, two days after it was published and after I had seen it quoted in maybe a dozen other political articles about the election.

Having read it I have to agree it is worthwhile reading, but my main take-away is that its focus on the campaign strategies and maneuvers by politicians of both parties epitomizes all that is wrong with modern political journalism as well as the interests too many of its readers. Only once did the article hint at the actual issues crucial to the election, when it summed up the Republican strategy near the beginning of the article:

From the outset of the campaign, Republicans had a simple plan: Don’t make mistakes, and make it all about Obama, Obama, Obama. Every new White House crisis would bring a new Republican ad. And every Democratic incumbent would be attacked relentlessly for voting with the president 97 or 98 or 99 percent of the time.

That’s it. That’s the only hint at real substance in this whole very long and detailed article.

For you see, the election was about Obama and his fumbling incompetence. It was about the policies he and his Democratic supporters in Congress had foisted on the nation. And it was about how those policies have been a disaster for ordinary people all across the nation.

All the games that these politicians play against each other during campaigns really isn’t that important. It might tell you something about their character, but what really matters is what these guys do, when they are in office. Keep that in mind when the next election rolls around, because I guarantee that the politicians and the journalists who write about them are not going to be interested in talking about that. It would be far too embarrassing.

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Greenhouse gases up; Temperature stable

10:00 am

The uncertainty of science: Even as the Earth’s climate temperature has remained essentially unchanged for the past two decades, the rate of increase in greenhouse gases in 2013 hit its highest number in thirty years.

This Nature article is interesting in two ways. First, it actually breaks with the tradition of the past two decades and notes the gigantic uncertainties that exist in climate science.

The question remains, however, of why the rise in global mean temperatures near the surface has apparently slowed, after a series of exceptionally warm years in the 1990s.

To have mentioned an inconvenient fact like this, casting doubt on the theory of human-caused global warming, has been forbidden for decades in major journals like Nature. That the article does mention it shows that the inconvenient facts have become too obvious to ignore.

The second way the article is interesting is its repeated attempt to make believe that new theories, based on this very incomplete and contradictory data set, can explain the mystery.

Scientists have suggested a number of possible explanations for the global warming pause. According to the latest hypothesis, regularly occurring changes in circulation patterns in the Atlantic and Southern Ocean may have caused an increased volume of relatively warm water to sink to the depth of the ocean, thus reducing the amount of ocean heat escaping to the atmosphere.

The sad fact is that there are now dozens of theories to explain the long pause in global warming, none of which are convincing. The uncertainties continue to rule!

Similarly, the article also makes this naive statement:

Atmospheric methane, the second most important long-lived greenhouse gas, also reached a new high of about 1,824 parts per billion last year, mostly due to increased emissions from cattle breeding, rice farming, fossil fuel mining, landfills and biomass burning. [emphasis mine]

The certainty expressed here about the sources of methane increase in the atmosphere is misplaced. We don’t really know all the sources of the increase in methane in the atmosphere. Recent data instead suggests it could have many natural sources having nothing to do with human activities.

The bottom line remains: The knowledge we have of the Earth’s atmosphere and climate remains very incomplete and preliminary. Any theories about its nature and operation must be taken with a very large measure of skepticism. Any particular theory might be right, but it is just as likely that future research will very easily prove it wrong.

It would be nice if the journalists at Nature would take this advice.

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German journalists arrested by police in Ferguson

1:43 am

Modern American free speech: Two German journalists were arrested by police in Ferguson for wanting to take photographs of a burned out gas station.

The comments of one of the journalists was especially shameful:

This was a very new experience. I’ve been in several conflict zones: I was in the civil war regions in Georgia, the Gaza strip, illegally visited the Kaliningrad region when travel to the Soviet Union was still strictly prohibited for westerners, I’ve been in Iraq, Vietnam and in China, I’ve met Cuba dissidents. But to be arrested and yelled at and be rudely treated by police? For that I had to travel to Ferguson and St. Louis in the United States of America.

Except for the arrests of journalists there, I have not posted much about the situation in Ferguson, mostly because no one at present really knows what happened and the subsequent behavior of everyone has been exceedingly disgusting and uncivilized, undeserving to my mind of much attention.

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TSA don’t know nothing about geography

5:36 pm

Does this make you feel safer? A TSA agent did not recognize a District of Columbia drivers license and did not know it is part of the United States.

When Gray handed the man his driver’s license the agent demanded to see Gray’s passport. Grays told the agent he wasn’t carrying his passport and asked why he needed it. The agent said he didn’t recognize the license. Gray said he asked the agent if he knew what the District of Columbia is, and after a brief conversation Gray realized the man did not know.

What was unfortunate for this particular agent was that the individual he questioned also happened to be a television news reporter.

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TSA backs down

9:34 pm

The furor over TSA policy to allow illegal aliens to fly without identification has forced the agency to change its policy.

TSA employees at Laredo International Airport notified Border Patrol agents last night at 11 p.m. local time that a new policy was in place that would not allow illegal aliens to fly solely using an I-862, otherwise known as the Notice to Appear form. TSA employees stated they will allow illegal aliens who had been released on their own to travel with a foreign passport or ID in addition to an I-862.

The TSA continues to deny they ever had a policy in force that allowed illegals to fly without identification, but the fact that they have announced “a new policy” proves that denial is an outright lie. Moreover, so does the willingness of many Border Patrol agents to testify to the earlier policy, under oath, which also probably contributed to forcing the TSA to quickly change its policy.

From my perspective, this entire story proves once again how completely worthless the TSA is. We would be better off without it entirely. At least then we wouldn’t have to be subjected to sexual abuse whenever we boarded an airplane.

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Global warming scientists find another cute species to use for political purposes.

5:47 pm

The fantasy land of global warming science: Despite a stable and robust population for emperor penguins, combined with a new record in Antarctica this very week for the size of its icecap, scientists today issued a report demanding that this species be declared endangered because global warming will make them all die.

Global warming will cut Antarctica’s 600,000-strong emperor penguin population by at least a fifth by 2100 as the sea ice on which the birds breed becomes less secure, a study said on Sunday. The report urged governments to list the birds as endangered, even though populations in 45 known colonies were likely to rise slightly by 2050 before declining. Such a listing could impose restrictions on tourism and fishing companies.

It’s insane. It is as if facts have no relevance. For example, the recommendation of the report is based entirely on computer models, the same models that have failed 100% to predict anything in the past twenty years. Moreover, the report admits the emperor penguin population is stable and large and is likely to increase in the next three decades.

But who cares! We have to save these cutsy penguins, so let’s make them endangered so they can be used as a political weapon against any disagreement about global warming!

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Update on the LDSD partly successful test flight

11:52 am

Another eleven news stories were published today on the LDSD test flight (go here to find them all), but only two gave an honest and informative appraisal of the parachute failure and the program’s future. This CBS report clarified the results well with these two quotes:

The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator then fell toward impact in the Pacific Ocean northwest of Hawaii. The carrier balloon apparently came apart after the LDSD’s release and it was not immediately clear what recovery crews standing by in the landing zone might be able to retrieve.

and this:

Two more LDSD vehicles are being built for “flights of record” next summer.

Another report from Space Insider also provided this key information, something I would have expected every journalist in the world to have considered essential to their report.

Sadly, not one of the other news stories saw fit to mention that the test vehicle might have been destroyed because of the failure of the chute, nor did any of them bother to report that two more such test vehicles are under construction, allowing program to continue anyway.

That so many news stories were published on this test flight indicates the interest that exists in it. Too bad most reporters writing these stories were only interested in providing us propaganda and pro-NASA cheer-leading.

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Left wing activists demand but fail to prevent someone from videotaping an open public event they had scheduled at a college.

9:55 am

Fascists: Left wing activists demand but fail to prevent someone from videotaping an open public event they had scheduled at a college.

Watch the video below the fold. You will be amused when the leftists try to block the videographer’s camera and somehow think this prevents him from recording their actions. If anything, it allows him to document forcefully their lack of respect for free speech.
» Read more

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The 2013 Walter Duranty Prize for mendacious journalism was announced on Monday.

9:39 am

The 2013 Walter Duranty Prize for mendacious journalism was announced on Monday.

This prize – in honor (or, more accurately, dishonor) of Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent during the 1920s and 1930s – was first given in 2011 by PJ Media and The New Criterion. For various reasons of sloth and bureaucracy, it has taken the organizations a year and a half to award a second round, but the prize will now be put on an annual basis.

A second award – The Rather (after Dan Rather) — for lifetime achievement in mendacious journalism was initiated this year.

Sadly, the number of qualified candidates far exceeded the number of prizes.

In related news: “A suspected arms dealer, an allegedly crooked mayor dealing in White House access, and a cowardly attorney general walk into a bar. Even if it’s the bar right next door to The Washington Post, would they get any coverage? If they’re Democrats, the answer is probably no.”

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“A lot of investment in green technology has been a giant scam, if well intentioned.”

9:36 am

“A lot of investment in green technology has been a giant scam, if well intentioned.”

The quote, and entire interview, are significant for two reasons. First, the interview is seeped with many skeptical opinions about human caused global warming, is very critical of that movement’s effort to politicize science, and the person being interviewed is James Lovelock, the founder of of the concept of Gaia, a former strong advocate of global warming but now a skeptic.

Most significant however is where the interview is published. It is in Nature, one of the most important and influential science journals, which previously has been aggressively pushing global warming politics for years. That they allowed these politically incorrect opinions within their walls and then broadcast them to their readers signals a major cultural shift within the science community. It is beginning to be acceptable to be a skeptic again!

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How Washington journalists conspire to not report accurately the President’s yearly budget proposal.

5:47 am

How Washington journalists conspire to not report accurately the President’s yearly budget proposal.

The article focuses on the bad reporting in connection with the Obama administration’s most recent budget proposal, but the criticism applies to every budget announcement since the 1970s.. Each year, the President’s budget proposal in the January/February/March time frame increases the amount the federal government will spend from year to year, as far as the eye can see. Washington journalists however report that the proposal cuts the budget instead. How can this be? As the writer notes,

In the 1970s, Congress tortured the English language by requiring that if federal spending grows less than expected, it should officially be called a spending cut. Outside of the beltway bubble, nobody talks like that. Reporters are letting the public down by accepting the word games of politicians and not reporting the real numbers in the language of ordinary Americans.

I have been fighting this dishonest reporting for decades. It is not the business of reporters to help the federal government get more money. They should report the budget, as it is.

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In reporting on climate change, ABC and CBS have excluded any commentary from any skeptical scientists for literally years.

4:52 pm

In reporting on climate change, ABC and CBS have excluded all commentary from any skeptical scientists for literally years.

Neither CBS nor ABC have included a skeptical scientists in their news shows within the past 1,300 days, but both networks included alarmists within the past 160 days — CBS as recently as 22 days ago. When the networks did include other viewpoints, the experts were dismissed as “out of the scientific mainstream” or backed by “oil and coal companies.”

It is almost like these news organizations are closing their eyes and sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting, “La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la…” Not the kind of behavior you’d expect from a legitimate news organization.

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Global warming activists organize a petition to ban a column by Charles Krauthammer that criticized global warming activists of trying to silence opposing points of view.

10:33 am

You can’t make this stuff up: Global warming activists organize a petition to ban a column by Charles Krauthammer that criticized global warming science and the activists who try to stuff it down our throats.

These activists don’t seem capable of addressing any of the actual facts that Krauthammer mentions in his column, facts that readers of this webpage already know in great detail. No, the debate tactic of today’s global warming fascists is simply to tell their opponents to “Shut up!” Who needs facts when you can silence your opponents?

In related news, CNN and at least one of its anchors have declared that the debate over global warming is over and that they no longer consider the skeptical view worth covering.

Debate is such an inconvenient thing.

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A Democratic Congressmen threatens the loss of the FCC license of television stations which air an ad criticizing his vote in favor of Obamacare.

1:56 pm

Leftwing fascism: A Democratic Congressmen threatens the loss of the FCC license of television stations which air an ad criticizing his vote in favor of Obamacare.

Then Rep. Gary Peters, who is the running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, went all-in Friday, having his lawyers send a letter to a Michigan television station citing the Post in demanding that AFP provide more evidence that Obamacare is as terrible as it really is. Mr. Peters’ lawyers wrote that “Unlike federal candidates, independent political organizations” — and by extension, Ms. Boonstra — don’t have a “right to command use of broadcast facilities.” They clinched with a threat that airing the ad could “be cause for the loss of a station’s license.”

More here.

Other that supporting a law that is causing great anxiety and pain and financial loss to millions of innocent Americans, now this Democrat is also out to squelch freedom of speech. What’s not to like?

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A blogger with brains and a passion for free speech explains to the brainless and partisan mainstream press why the Obama administration thinks it can get away with monitoring the news gathering operations of the press and not face outraged criticism.

9:09 pm

A blogger with brains and a passion for free speech explains to the brainless and partisan mainstream press why the Obama administration thinks it can get away with monitoring the news gathering operations of the press and not face outraged criticism.

Read it all. If you happen to be a journalist with any ethics, it will make you sick.

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