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The Listing Attic

December 22, 2018, 3:29 am
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Before it went mainstream and lost its hipster edginess, Medical Hypotheses was a boon to lazy bloggers on account of its regular supply of hilarity. In the opinion of the journal's founder (shared by his successor), a peer-review system for screening contributions would just pile another pelion of risk-averse conformity upon the ossa of medical-science mediocrity. Or conceivably the other way around. The whim-based selection criteria preferred by Horrobin was what kept Med.Hyp. on the forefront of nescience production for so long. To pick a few examples totally at random:

Autism: a novel form of mercury poisoning (Bernard et al., 2001).
The potential importance of steroids in the treatment of autistic spectrum disorders and other disorders involving mercury toxicity (Geier & Geier, 2005).
Conjugate vaccines and autism (Ross, 2011).
Hypothesis: conjugate vaccines may predispose children to autism spectrum disorders (Richmand, 2011).*
So it was a surprise to encounter a list of "24 PEER REVIEWED SCIENTIFIC Studies from the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health that link AUTISM to VACCINES", and recognise those same four instances from Med.Hyp. -- that is, explicitly not peer-reviewed. I would take that as an enormous slur on my professional conduct if I had been one of the journal's non-reviewers.

"Paper" #6 on the list -- "The role of mercury in the pathogenesis of autism" (Bernard et al., 2002) -- was in fact a summary of a conference production, with the authors reprising their 2001 Med.Hyp. paper for a second bite of the cherry. Which to say, it wasn't peer-reviewed in 2002 either. The subtle clue that it appeared in a Conference Proceedings Supplement, rather than in the regular pages of Molecular Psychiatry, is the pagination "S42-S43".


The very next presentation was Andy Wakefield with his "Enterocolitis, autism and measles virus" fraud, so you know that this was a very classy conference, admirably eclectic and ecumenical.


I am open to the possibility that the list of 24 PEER REVIEWED SCIENTIFIC Studies was put together as a sting, to expose the intellectual bankruptcy of the antivax movement. In particular, the vacant incuriosity of people who forward it without investing a second or two to check any of the entries. It does not take a complete mastery of the relevant literature to notice that there is no attempt to link anything to anything else in #9 ("The potential importance of steroids", see above) or #8, "Reduced levels of mercury in first baby haircuts of autistic children" (Holmes, Blaxill & Haley, 2003). IT'S IN THE SODDING TITLES. The authors of #8 assumed that maternal exposure to mercury is the cause of autism, then found less mercury in their autistic sample, causing them to conclude that their test must be unreliable.


But before progressing further through the list, we should invest a second or two to check whether the wheel has been already invented. Another occupant of the Listing Attic is Marcella Piper-Terry, of 'VaxTruth'; on one of her visits to reality, she provided her own list, also with 24 entries. It overlaps considerably with the present version, but there are differences.



Marcella's version received the piñata treatment from 'Kathy', and from Liz Ditz.

There's a version with 33 entries:

50 published studies which show vaccines cause Autism. PEER REVIEWED SCIENTIFIC Studies from the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health that link Autism to Vaccines-

It is aimed at the wokest of anivaxxers who have no sense of numerosity and will not notice that 33 < 50. Confident in the knowledge that the consumers won't follow entries that are bare PMC accession numbers, and in fact they won't even notice repetitions, the compiler has taken the opportunity to duplicate nine of the entries. In fact it's just Marcella's list again.


Evidently, though, that's not enough. Versions of the List stretch out towards infinity like the VR armory in 'The Matrix', stacking up 124131 142 bricks in the wall of antivaccine scientific consensus. Many of those bricks do not belong there (lacking anything to do with 'vaccines' or 'autism' or both); they were caught up in the number-boosting round-up and just want to go home. In other words, these lists are as bogus as crowd-size claims for a Trump Inauguration Rally. Liz Ditz seems to have taken on the onus of Bogus List Scrutiniser and I am happy to out-source to her.


It is possible that all these different lists have evolved from a single original Ur-List in the manner of multiple copies of a medieval codex, variously extended or corrupted by different chains of copyists. The task of tracing the evolutionary tree and reconstructing the lost original is left as an exercise for the reader, because bored now.

Still, you don't have go all William-of-Baskerville Cosplay to notice the friendliness of the lists toward exploitative grifting. They advertise the predatory oeuvres of Boyd Haley (noted for selling an industrial-waste metal chelator as a "food supplement" to "cure" autism) and the Geiers père and fils (with their chelation-and-Lupron chemical-castration racket). When eight of your 24 papers turn out to be from the Geiers, it is time to think about your life and where it went wrong.


* In fairness to Richmand, he explicitly renounced any vaccine / autism association in the Introduction of a much more recent paper (still antivax, and statistically-incompetent).
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Do not want

December 24, 2018, 8:30 pm
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You kids have gone too far with your novelty coffee flavours.

Also too, where do espresso-machine wranglers get off, calling themselves "barristas" like they are a kind of Roman siege catapult?
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Frontiers Masterpiece Theatre, Vaccine Edition (in three acts) Manuscripts which should have been left in Saragossa

December 24, 2018, 11:25 pm
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This post was earlier cross-posted at Leonid Schneider's site, hence the unfrivolous tone. The version there is improved by Leonid's editing and explanation of the backstory.

Overture

Academic journals are bombarded with bad manuscripts, with contents that are plagiarised or fabricated or simply incompetent. The authors could be inflating their publication statistics, or employed at a 'paper-mill' to churn out bespoke papers for the nominal authors, or manufacturing the impression of scientific support for a political / commercial cause they promote. It is inevitable that some of these efforts, which would ideally have remained in a file-drawer oubliette or been consigned to cleansing fire, will slip past the peer-review gate-keepers and into print.

In the author-funded open-access paradigm of scholarly publication, editors and journal management have a conflict of interest, and may feel encouraged to relax their vigilance to maximise the income. This is a special concern for journals from the 'Frontiers' stable, which have a multilevel-marketing aspect: reviewers (and authors) are urged to nominate 'Research Topics', with themselves as editors, while soliciting submissions from friends and colleagues. This publisher also follows a model of 'review iteration' where it is difficult for peer-reviewers to reject a submission outright, however dire it might be... if a manuscript is not eventually published, it is because the authors' persistence and patience were exhausted before the reviewers'.

So our host Leonid has had occasion to point and laugh at some of the more egregious products of the Frontiers editorial / review system. On their own, of course, these 'bread' anecdotes do not prove that the publisher is any friendlier to these embarrassments than anyone else in the Open Access world, but they are a necessary counterbalance to the Impact-Factor- and Citation-Rate-brandishing self-congratulations one encounters on the Frontiers website.

Here I propose to marshal a few more examples, arranged around the themes of 'autism' and 'vaccines'. Frontiers has a special openness to new ideas in this research area (in parallel with Henry Markram's Manhattan-Project-scale goal of simulating brain function, neuron by neuron, on a supercomputer). Back in 2007, the premiere issue of Frontiers in Neuroscience was a vehicle for the Markrams' ambitious though not-entirely-mainstream "Intense World" framing, which relied on a valproic-acid rat model of autism, and tied cortical microcolumn organisation together with either hypoactivity or hyperactivity (or maybe both) of the amygdala. See also 2009, 2010, 2015, etc.

For fairness I include some egregious cases from other publishers, and even from outside the OA domain. Some examples have been the subjects of past Riddled posts, so I can make the job easier by resorting to the fine scholarly tradition of self-citation. If some passages are worded awkwardly or incoherently, this just shows that the original phrasing was a model of literary elegance before I reluctantly rearranged the words to avoid self-plagiarism (which would be wrong).

Act 1

My first examples are only peripheral to the central theme. They were solicited by Canadian PhD Lucija Tomljenovic and her mentor Christopher Shaw, within a Research Topic of Aluminum Toxicity and Human Disease where the focus was the putative neurotoxicity of low-level exposure to aluminium compounds (especially as an adjuvant in vaccines). To be scrupulously fair, and "according to the malicious calculations of a certain critic less versed in literature than in arithmetic", the word 'autism' hardly appears. Nevertheless, these papers were intended as ammunition for the vaccines-cause-autism cause, and were weaponised accordingly by a readership of antivaccine activists who understood 'human disease' as meaning 'autism'.
Aluminum is now well established as a general toxin, including neurotoxin, but its role in human disease has been downplayed in the past. This is largely due to some very incorrect assumptions about the role of aluminum in human disease. [...]
None of the above assertions are even remotely true as an abundance of recent studies now attest. The proposed series will review the literature and put aluminum's role in diseases in humans and animals into perspective.
The odd thing is that at some point between 2016 and now, the Research Topic was dissolved, leaving the papers still published but stripped of their unifying rubric. I do not recall that this management intervention was ever explained.
Then

Now.

One paper is a Review. It contains little new material, existing mainly to promote the authors' earlier reports, devoid of new results or new interpretations; and to promote an otherwise-unknown medical condition, "macrophagic myofasciitis"... this is fine in blogging and science journalism, but were I reviewing the ms., I might have asked for some novel content.


But rather than me, in an unusual editorial selection of reviewers it was peer-reviewed by the soliciting editor (another reviewer, Mark Burns, moonlights as "Specialty Topic Editor for Neurodegeneration").
Edited by:
Lucija Tomljenovic, University of British Columbia, Canada
Reviewed by:
Samir Kumar-Singh, Antwerp University, Belgium
Mark P. Burns, Georgetown University Medical Center, USA
Lucija Tomljenovic, University of British Columbia, Canada
In a further erosion of content novelty, Tomljenovic was editing the same manuscript -- at the same time -- to become Chapter 27 in a 37-chapter compilation of "Different ways vaccines will make you sick"published by WileyOnline. This was an unexpected plot twist!


The two versions have different Introduction paragraphs, and the WileyOnline chapter has only three authors. But otherwise...

One reason to characterise the compilation (and the Frontiers paper) as 'antivax' is that in parallel with their publication, the group CMSRI circulated a Summary document containing the main points of each chapter in bullet-point form, for the convenience of activists eager to use those claims as ammunition without actually buying the book. It is natural to wonder whether CMSRI subsidised the production of "Vaccines and Autoimmunity" (Shoenfeld, Agmon-Levin & Tomljenovic, eds.; 2015).



Anyway, more about CMSRI below. Coming back to this contentious "MMF" syndrome: the same research team provided the Special Topic with a second paper ("Clinical features in patients with long-lasting macrophagic myofasciitis"), presenting their evidence to support its clinical reality as a sequela of vaccination.

Inquiring minds in PubPeer comment-threads questioned the quality of that evidence, and compared it with the same evidence as already published in 2014 (in French) and in 2012. There was puzzlement how a collection of cases could grow from 457 to 583 with only one change in the sample's demographics and incidence of various symptoms.

This was interesting, too:

Edited by:
Christopher Ariel Shaw, University of British Columbia, Canada

Reviewed by:
Harish Pant, National Institutes of Health, USA
Lucija Tomljenovic, University of British Columbia, Canada
Françoise Noële Chapon, Université de Caen Basse Normandie, France
A third paper in the Special Topic is worth checking for the title alone. It would be more at home on a conspiracy / Truther site like InfoWars or AboveTopSecret, or cyclostyled and stapled to power-poles.


It may be that Tomljenovic could only find one peer-reviewer willing to sign off on it, so she ended up recruiting herself for the second review.
Edited by:
Christopher Ariel Shaw, University of British Columbia, Canada

Reviewed by:
Nelson Silva Filho, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil
Lucija Tomljenovic, University of British Columbia, Canada
I will not go into the other papers of the Special Topic, except to say that the rigor of their peer-review process should come as little surprise:
Edited by:
Christopher Ariel Shaw, University of British Columbia, Canada

Reviewed by:
Lucija Tomljenovic, University of British Columbia, Canada

Act 2

Now without delving too deeply into the politics of autism and antivax advocacy, a little bit of background is helpful at this point. Readers of the "Rise and Fall" post may dimly recall the Children's Medical Safety Research Institute (CMSRI) as funders of a quickly-retracted study on aluminium, vaccines and autism (in mice). Doctors Exley, Shaw and Gherardi (and Shoenfeld) are prominent on the Institute's Scientific Advisory Board, enjoy its hospitality at Caribbean get-togethers, and benefit from its financial generosity. The CMSRI is essentially the operational branch of the 'Dwoskin Family Foundation', an antivax lobby-group... here the "Medical Safety" part of the name is code for "banning vaccines". For reasons unknown, foundation head Claire Dwoskin had become convinced that there are no neuroatypical or challenged children, only "vaccine damage"; also, that the appropriate response to some families' plight is a worldwide ban on disease-prevention programs.
“Vaccines are a holocaust of poison on our children’s brains and immune systems.”
Other families share the same opinion: convinced that (a) autism has a simple, single cause (which mainstream science is keeping secret), and (b) by the same token there is a single, simple cure for autism (similarly suppressed for Big Science's financial gain). Naturally, a ecosystem of con-men sprouted up, offering that cure... or more accurately, a series of cures (if the first five cures don't work, never despair, there is always a sixth in the scammocopoeia). Around the world, a range of regular scamborees allow desperate yet optimistic parents to hear the latest etiologies and treatments directly from the grifters... the largest of these being AutismOne, a kind of fraudster trade fair or medical-malpractice Woodstock.


We should stipulate in the interests of fairness that regular attendees at AutismOne are not all mercenary mountebanks. Some are fervently committed to helping parents and normalising autistic children, and convinced by the strength of that fervour that whatever treatment they're currently administering must bring some improvement, at least until next year. But still...
Bleach enemas!
Esoteric parasitology!

Yes, the Dwoskin Foundation does help bankroll these charlatan charivaris.

A certain Jeffrey Bradstreet epitomises this whole milieu. When life gives you lemons, make silver linings; and there is a silk purse within every dark cloud; and when life gave Bradstreet an autistic son, he turned that challenge into a career of serial fraud. From treating autism with exorcism, he pimped secretin prescriptions until that bubble burst, progressing to mercury chelation and intravenous immunoglobulin and hyperbaric oxygen tanks and transcranial magnetic stimulation and (inevitably) Ukrainian stem-cell quackery. Bradstreet was an AutismOne rockstar and anyone collaborating on any of his short-term scams comes under suspicion as well.¹ ² ³

Finally he gravitated to the GcMAF grift, before killing himself after the FBI turned up on his doorstep with difficult questions.

This all brings us to another Frontiers Masterpiece. My earlier critique of it drew upon comments from a PubPeer thread. It is a tour-de-farce of fractal stupidity and incompetence in every detail of cranial and cortical anatomy, notable for the authors'failure to read even the sources they cited.


The novelty of the method was to dispense with a dedicated transcranial scanner (high-powered enough to send ultrasound pulses through the skull and return a signal from the cerebral interior) and use instead a standard LA523 soft-tissue scanner that was on hand, manipulating scans in Photoshop to achieve the desired appearance. Suffice to say that the technique did not catch on, with no subsequent applications.... though there were precedents, in the form of otherpapers by main author Ruggiero's team. What inspires me to touch on one of these (not in Frontiers, but an Italian embryology journal) is the extent of its plagiarism.


The authors of these papers were under the impression that tissue density is what reflects ultrasound, rather than abrupt changes in density, causing them to misread the outside surface of each subject's temporal bone (smeared out by the instrument's poor resolution) as the thickness of the bone. Naturally the rest of the Maps-of-Mars of meningeal and sub-arachnoidal and cortical layers are equally meaningless artefact pareidolia, wildly variant from the accepted ranges (and probably incompatible with life), but for the authors and reviewers, this was a discovery. It may be that the reviewers lacked knowledge of the field and accepted Ruggiero's claim of expertise in radiography.

Reviewed by:
Hanoch Cassuto, Leumit/Clalit HMO, Israel
Dario Siniscalco, Second University of Naples, Italy
James Brewster Adams, Arizona State University, USA
If true, the result reported here would be a major breakthrough: a simple, non-invasive physical marker for diagnosing autism. Thus the second reviewer (Dario Siniscalco), concerned that it might go unrecognised, contributed a Commentary paper to Frontiers and praised it beyond moderation. For unknown reasons that brief Commentary required four reviewers.
Reviewed by:
Anna Sapone, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Harvard Medical School, USA
Lorene Eve Aurelie Amet, Autism Treatment Plus, UK
Nicola Antonucci, Biomedical Centre for Autism Research and Treatment, Italy
Alessandra Cirillo, Alfa Intes, Italy
Three of them shared Siniscalco's and Bradstreet's noble goal of subsidising predatory journals.
In the Commentary's Conflict of Interest section, "The reviewer Dr. Sapone declares that, despite having collaborated with the authors, the review process was handled objectively"... leaving us to reach our own conclusions about the objectivity of the reviewers who did not volunteer any such disclaimer.

However, "The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest". Siniscalco's construal skills may need work, as his collaborations with Marco Ruggiero (and with his reviewer Antonucci) in commercial GcMAF-related autism-curing activities are well-documented: for instance, in a presentation at the 2nd Noakes / Ruggiero GcMAF-fest (Dubai 2013), and another at the 2017 Fulda Integrative Medicine Scamference:


I mention Dottori Siniscalco and Antonucci not only to question the rigor of Frontiers peer-reviewing, but also because they pimp for stem-cellfraudsters, referring desperate families to clinics in Ukraine. This gives me an opportunity to mention this egregious bolus of quackery:


The final entry in the Bradstreet Files is a posthumous Commentary, congratulating the authors of a recent rediscovery of cerebral lymphatic drainage, while trying to claim precedence for it.

While not actually wrong in any obvious way, new content is absent, blurring the boundary between a science journal and a paid-press-release advertising service like PRWeb.

Entr'acte

These authors explicitly ruled out searching for a link between vaccines and autism (although the third author does believe that they're linked). Antivaxxers don't care and heralded the paper anyway as smoking-gun proof of the link's existence.
[H/t Orac]
Sadly, the paper's only value is as a demonstration of the importance of multiple-comparison correction after a statistical fishing expedition. The authors compare the diagnosis of seven neurological conditions (and two physical-injury controls) against six vaccines, and total, with three different time delays. They found about as many significant associations (p< 0.05) as they could expect from random chance.

Perhaps none of the reviewers were cognizant of statistics. They seem to have been recruited from the Editor's circle of fellow-psychiatrists.

Act 3

We close with another non-Frontiers paper. Dr Anthony Mawson conducted an on-line opinion poll on the link between vaccination and childhood ill-health. It was billed as a 'survey', with home-schooling parents invited to report on the health and vaccination status of their children or imaginary friends (here's a copy), but no evidence for these reports or proof of existence was needed. Perhaps more crucially, antivaccine True Believers were selectively targeted to participate, by the choice of a home-school target group (also by the circulation around a true-believer website of news of and a link to the anonymous poll). In effect it was an invitation to submit health reports in line with one's belief system, and in consequence there is not a single datum of value.


The paper -- in a trash 'journal' from the parasitical publisher OAText, who are several sub-barrels down beneath the bottom of the barrel -- is relevant partly because the Dwoskin Foundation funded Mawson's research. The entirely predictable results (vaccine denialists report that unvaccinated kids are healthier!!) were to be released at AutismOne in May 2017, with fanfare and ballyhoo, as the main draw-card and flagship Scientific Finding. In case you were wondering, no, "Ballyhoo" is not a small town in Ireland.

It appears, though, that the lovable rogues running OAText found out about this, realised that the paper was worth more to the author than the quotidian resume-fluffing piffle they usually charge for, and increased the publication fee -- depublishing the valuable hostage until the ransom was paid. Note that this is my own reconstruction of events, while the Believers have their own interpretation, involving sabotage and campaigns of slander.

The Mawson Manuscript is also relevant because it was originally accepted for publication in Frontiers, progressing as far as the Abstract going on line. In this case, the Editors-in-Chief recognised that peer-review had failed, overruled the editors, and retracted it (though "retraction" is an ugly word and some prefer "withdrew"). And you know how that story finished... with a mad scramble at CMSRI to rehome the manuscript in time for AutismOne... hindered by the little problem that by then, helpful antivaxxers had obtained a complete copy and placed it on-line, putting the manuscript in the public domain, so that only a fraudulent parasite would pretend to publish it. Hence the OAText debacle.

And there was a wailing and a mighty gnashing of teeth across the land, blaming the retraction (or withdrawal if you prefer) on the machinations and coordinated bullying of a vast troll conspiracy. Just saying, if pretend-independent-journalist Celeste McGovern ever tires of being the CMSRI staff writer, there is a job waiting for her in the White House as the next press secretary. The "coordinated bullying" narrative does not survive contact with the time-line, in which just two tweets pointing and laughing at Frontiers -- one from Leonid, one from Tara Smith (@aetiology) -- were enough to alert the Editors-in-Chief to their blunder.

The situation is complicated by a second Mawson discovery, that developmental disorders in premature babies are not caused by prematurity per se, but rather by vaccinations (based on 49 reports of prematurity within the 666 survey responses, 12 of them showing developmental delay, I am not making this up). This enjoyed the same drawcard status at AutismOne, then the same roller-coaster ride at OAText, but it was never accepted by Frontiers. Am I alone, by the way, in thinking that "The Mawson Manuscript" would be a good title for a spy thriller, in the "Quiller Memorandum" / "Eiger Sanction" / "Bourne Identity" genre?

So kudos to the Frontiers management! The organisation is capable of doing the right thing and expunging blunders from the literature. It only remains to continue cleaning shop, and address the papers identified above. It may be that one of the goals when the Frontiers fleet of journals was launched was to bring progress in research in autism... instead, Henry and Karmila Markram created a tool that vaccine denialists and con-men are using to divert research funding into thoroughly-beaten dead-horse avenues.

Just trying to finish on a positive note here.

Curtain Calls

1. Bradstreet (at right), three since-convicted felons, and others at the 1st GcMAF Scamfest (Frankfurt, 2013).

[H/t Psiram]

2. Let's give a big hand to regular AutismOne speakers DottoriDario Siniscalco and Nicola Antonucci!

The in vitro GcMAF effects on endocannabinoid system transcriptionomics, receptor formation, and cell activity of autism-derived macrophages (Siniscalco, Bradstreet, Cirillo & Antonucci, 2014)


Possible use of Trichuris suis ova in autism spectrum disorders therapy (Siniscalco & Antonucci, 2013). Autism is caused by lack of tapeworms.


The impact of neuroimmune alterations in autism spectrum disorder (2015).


3. Let's give a big hand to Doctors Dan Rossignol and Richard Frye!

Hyperbaric oxygen treatment in autism spectrum disorders (Rossignol, Bradstreet, ... Frye, 2012).


Hyperbaric oxygen therapy may improve symptoms in autistic children (2006).


The Use of Medications Approved for Alzheimer’s Disease in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review (2014).


Treatments for Biomedical Abnormalities Associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (2014).

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He's found the awful truth, Balthazar He's found the saucer news

December 26, 2018, 12:26 am
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Arthur Clarke once mused in an essay somewhere (can't be arsed looking up the details) about faking a threat of alien invasion, as the best way to end the Cold and Hot Wars by uniting the superpowers against a common foe. Other manifestations of this trope include
Clarke and the others were hopelessly naive optimists, blithely oblivious to the fact that any alien invaders (whether real, or filmed by Stanley Kubrick inna Hollywood backlot with lots of CGI from Weta Workshop) would meet with overtures from rightwing Nouveau-Vichy politicians, offering their skills as Quislings and sugar-mine overseers. But anyway, we can agree that the "Genghis Gambit" is a familiar concept, even without checking at TVTropes.

“Just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing toward the dark,our own shadows race into the past to trouble mankind's dreams.” And the most parsimonious explanation for these fictional False-Flag Invasions is that they echo an actual faked alien invasion -- one which has not yet occurred (the morphogenic field cares nothing for temporal directionality). Or such is the conclusion drawn by the Riddled Ktistec Machine, when we provided it with the 60-year sequence of data points, from 1948 to 2011. However, the Ktistec Machine was unable to estimate the likely date of this future event.

This caught my eye, if only because Mainstream Historians record Wernher von Braun as dying in 1977:
I'm curious if the elites plan to stage an alien invasion as a way to consolidate global power.
It sounds kind of out there, but Wernher von Braun did say, shortly before his death in 1976, that the elites would do this as a final play.
Things were clarified (for certain values of 'clarification') by an email sent by Edgar Mitchell -- New Age parapsychologist and Apollo XIV astronaut -- to presidential confidante John Podesta, inviting Podesta to a Skype session to discuss Zero Point Energy (!) and the demilitarisation of space. In passing he mentioned his colleague Dr. Carol Rosin. It is a cryptic little message, but to dedicated conspiracist initiates who are familiar with the background, it speaks in a deafening "Shaka, when the walls fell" manner. Podesta did not take up the invitation.

BREAKING: WikiLeaks Releases New Emails Exposing Clinton’s & Podesta’s Knowledge Of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Welcome to the reinvention of Wernher von Braun as a man of peace, a convert to the cause of space disarmament, and whistle-blower against the power-usurping encroachments of the New World Orderlies! I am not making this up.


So the backstory consists of von Braun -- belatedly woke, but retired and stricken with cancer -- becoming privy to the long-term plans of the Global Elite to consolidate power, legitimise their rule and militarise space by conjuring up a series of adversaries, culminating in an extraterrestrial False Flag. He did not use his status as Architect of Apollo or his access to the media to publicise his concerns before dying; nor did he record them in written or recorded form... he opted instead to share them sub rosa with his protégée Carol Rosin, who was then a manager in Fairchild Industries as well as von Braun's assistant and self-appointed spokeswoman, and the only source for any of this.

Rosin left the aerospace company in the year of her mentor's death and set about lobbying for the continued neutrality of space, founding the Institute for Security & Cooperation in Outer Space (ISCOS) in 1983 and recruiting Edgar Mitchell to the cause. She did not mention von Braun's revelations until a 2004 interview.
He repeated this continuously. He would say that starting where I entered the industry with the supposed Russian threat, but never actually existed ­ the Russians were made to be the enemy. Then there would be terrorists, Third World country threats, there would be an asteroid threat.
They might even say to us to try to influence the public into believing that there are many reasons for why we should put weapons in space. There might be a reason to protect our assets in space.
But, the real one that he was always holding off on and would say again with tears filling his eyes every time he said this to me repeatedly was that the last card they are holding is the 'alien card,' the extraterrestrial card and none of them are hostile.
Dr Rosin is further convinced that aliens do exist, but are benevolent. She has deduced that von Braun shared that belief but was too scared to mention it
I have felt that since this happened, since I learned from the heart of von Braun, that this huge secret is being kept ­ it has to have something to do with the 'off-planet culture,' that I call OPC phenomenon ­ that in fact, it was so real that this man could hardly talk about this big secret and did not because of the threats to his life and probably to the lives of others who worked with him who might or might not have known.
'None of them are hostile. It's all a lie.'
This von-Braun / Aliens / False-Flag narrative is not universally familiar within the conspiracy-ideation subculture, despite its obvious potential as a single, self-contained tessera of Secret History waiting to be used as a building-block in the construction of the Alternative-Reality mosaic of your choice. It did not manifest, for instance, in the agenda of the Ship-of-FoolsConspiraSea Cruise.

Nevertheless, the narrative has its fans who do their best to publicise it. No-one could accuse them of secrecy. Its appearance within the Podesta email was especially dispositive in Truther circles because it was part of the Wikileaks stolen data-dump, providing a frisson of excitement from reading someone's private correspondence, which is seen as authentication.

In 2001, ISCOS begat ICIS -- the Institute for Cooperation in Space -- which was basically Rosin and Alfred Lambremont Webre. At some point after 2010, ICIS dropped Webre from the board and morphed back into ISCOS.

We mention the involvement of Alfred Webre as he is a Person of Interest to the Mad Scientist Anti-Defamation League, on account of his eccentric but entertainingly inclusive worldview, in which Earth's independence teeters in a precarious balance between contending galactic empires and federations and power-bases (it is possible that he was exposed to James Blish juvenalia at a susceptible age). It is not clear how Webre reconciles all this with the ostensible warnings about scare-mongering with fake aliens.
ET Council: War with grey-Draco reptilian ETs is won, no false flag ET invasion
My 1970s meeting with DARPA's Project Pegasus secret time travel program
Andromeda Council: East China Sea 6.9 quake - undersea reptilian base destroyed
Webre seeks out the company of con-men and scammers, as if drawn by Crank Magnetism. He has promoted the self-seeking fantasies of Charles Seven, and is part of the Truther accretion disk swirling around the Hampstead Satanic Cannibalism hoax. But the central element in his performative artistic practice (and his point of difference from other Alt-Reality grifters) is Tesla Time-Travel technology, which has fallen into the hands of the Global Elite who are misusing it to construct an empire that extends in time as well as space, I've read that book. Anyway, Webre retired from ICIS to spend more time campaigning against the HAARP ionosphere probe [and submarine-communication project] weather-control / mind-control / earthquake trigger / soul-prison device... undeterred by the public access and open days there, which are obvious cover-ups.

Institute for Cooperation in Space (2001-2011)[edit]

Alfred Webre and Dr. Carol Rosin founded the Institute for Cooperation in Space (ICIS) in 2001, as an outgrowth of the former ISCOS, Institute for Cooperation and Security in Space.[18] The ICIS mission is to educate decision-makers and the grassroots about why it is important to ban space weapons.
Through the help of former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the Space Preservation Act was originally introduced into the 107th Congress on October 2, 2001 (HR 2977) and included provisions banning "extraterrestrial" weapons, as well as chemtrails and "exotic weapons systems" such as HAARP. [19] A revised Space Preservation Act (HR 3657) eliminating the prohibitions on space-based extraterrestrial, chemtrails, and exotic weapons systems was introduced to the 108th Congress on January 23, 2002.
Alfred Webre resigned from the Board of Directors of ICIS on January 1, 2011 to focus on a treaty to ban HAARP, which he alleges to be a weapon.[20]

There is a troubling corollary here. This could all be a feint within a feint... a whole collection of False Flags sewn togethr into a Moebius Strip. The effect of familiarising and desensitising people to the prospect of a faked ET invasion is that when the actual malevolent ET onslaught begins, the warnings will be dismissed as a fictive simulation until it is too late.

Who are Carol Rosin and Alfred Lambremont Webre really working for??!


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Signs

December 28, 2018, 12:19 am
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New Zealand roadsigns are weird. I think this one means "Plumber ahead", or "Watch out for faucets" or something.

Would it be very wrong to open a plumbing business called "Farrah Faucet-Majors"? Asking for a friend.
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So I beheld, and lo! an ensign borne Whirling, that span and ran, as in disdain Of any rest; and there the folk forlorn Rushed after it, in such an endless train

January 2, 2019, 11:54 pm
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The last of the photos 163 to 167 of the Kaipara Harbor with the site of the Moai Tidal Turbines in the future There are a few other books bound with the Manukau Kawharu History of New Zealand and Moriori There was No MAORI in this History That is a Fiction Tribe of Ngati Whatua created by the Queen to Dupe the Native peoples in the World She corrupted the Kings Titles now we are settling her accounts and the Corporations Rothschild Bank Accounts of Fraud and Corrupting the Kings Bench Bank Court Magistrate I will sort this out next week with videos on Radio in Europe and Britain
My bad. My fingers slipped on the tuning knob of the Crank Magnetron and suddenly we were picking up John Waroa's Faceborg broadcast up in the ALL-CAPS frequency band, in a bad translation from the original Majuscule.

The Wanoa channel is rather like one of those Numbers Stations of yore. It is unconcerned with coherence or any discernible connection to consensus reality, and it never stops. If you tune out and tune back to the station later on, nothing has changed.* Mr Wanoa has been shouting at clouds since at least 2009, when he registered his New Zealand tidal-energy company Na [sic]Atua E Wa Aotea Ltd with 999 999 999 999 £25 shares, and began touting for investors.

MOAI TIDAL TURBINES PLATFORM BRIDGE BASE STRUCTURE FIXED TO THE SEABED FLOOR 50 KM OFF TE PITO POINT ON THE RANFURLY BANK EAST CAPE NORTH ISLAND NEW ZEALAND! ESTIMATED POWER OUTPUT 5000 MW
This whole John Wanoa hairball, with his Sovereign King claim and his Hydrogen Economy Tidal Turbine brain-fart, it is not original bloggerly material. But the recycling is an appropriate beginning to 2019, here at the Riddled World of Gnowledge and Novelty Silage Agricultural Emporium, where we are all about the recycling and the reduced ecological footprint.
Reduced footprint: Doin it Rong
Also it is a good lead-in to a weird phenomenon. It is an echidna wrapped in carborundum. I refer to the spectacle of white-supremacist Nazi-wannabees in the UK and Ireland, having adopted the colour "yellow" as the heraldic tincture of their marching uniforms, further adopting the 1834 United Tribes flag of NZ indigenous independence, under the impression that it symbolises the illegitimacy of the UK gubblement. I am not making this up.




17,000,000 (F) Class Shares offer from 1,000,000,000 Shares, raises ₤500 Trillion This Fund, for Moai Crown Sovereign Monarch State Dual British Government with the proposed new Surrogate King of England to challenge the Crown State Throne. The "Moai Crown King William IV Trust" is the Commercial Trading Bank Creditor of the Kings Bench Royal Revenue derived from King William IV British Crown Federal State Dual UK British Government in Devonport England. Great Sovereign Seal Royal Crown and Anchor Admiralty Court Martial Prize Possessions Cargo and Salavaged Property from Default Convicted Fraudsters and Criminal Felons using our MOAI CROWN STATE and KING WILLIAM IV Commercial Trading Bank Mortgage Liens illegally Fraudulently and collecting Royal Revenue that legally belonging to KING WILLIAM IV Male Bloodline Royal family Commercial Contract Agreement with our MOAI Tahitian Royal Monarchy Sovereign State Government Admiralty Partnership!
Prepare now for your hopes to purchase shares to be cruelly dashed... in the intervening years, the e-commerce purchasing features of Wanoa's webstore have not been enabled, despite occasional promises, reminiscent of Billy Bunter's perennial promises to repay his debts one day soon when the money-order arrives. The frequently-heralded funding from overseas investors remains equally elusive.

The present dispensation allows you to reserve shares...
This is your receipt for a 25 GBP Note registered share in the Company's House London prepared creditor plus one free share Please do not send any money yet until a share broker member of our Moai Power House Group Limited Trust takes over full time from me You will then be required by British Crown Law to pay a share for the Company's Share Record as a claimant beneficiary Creditor of this Moai Power House Group Trust Business for the meantime until the new website moaipowerhousegroup.com is completed for public share record still under construction and You are now a 2 share Creditor claimant under Moai Power House Group Limited 1,000,000,000 share register company in London UK one of 250 Countries in the world under King William III King William IV King George IV King George III Flag Sovereign Authority Jurisdiction GROUP Organization each with their own Country 1,000,000,000 shares ONE SHARE FITS ALL 250 Countries Co Operative Shareholding CORPORATE KINGS EMPEROR CONGLOMERATE BANK CREDITOR .https://www.moaipowerhouse.com/
Anyone in the world can register for a GBP 25 Pound Note share in this Westminster City Country of England 1,000,000,000 Share registered company from new born baby to death certificate of a natural man or corporate person is now a legitimate stakeholder in this MOAI POWER HOUSE GROUP LIMITED Corporate Company in England
Thank you John Wanoa Surrogate King William IV UK NZ
Also if you are concerned for Wanoa's impecunious state, his on-line impresario and media maestro (i.e. prolific Youtuber) -- one Andy Devine -- will direct you to send money to a John Paterson (or conceivably vice versa), who will look after it until the company shares are transactable (or replaced by a UK company of the same name).

To be fair to Wanoa, there have been shiny objects and skwirls to distract him onto otherimage-theft design projects... e.g.

· The Moai Power House Bank,
designed as the Share Holders Bank Account under TagPay France Administered by the new Bank Manager from ANZ Bank Auckland New Zealand very experienced in Commercial Banking philosophy. Will appear in every Country in the World as Electronic Money Transactions against the British Pound Note at the present time. Until such notice of a change to Euro Dollar it remains GBP British Sterling Pound Notes. The other Bank is the MOAI ROYAL BANK is for the MOAI CROWN CONFEDERATION Fraud Recovery Moneys using KING WILLIAM IV KINGS BENCH STATE COMMERCIAL LIENS UNDER MOAI CROWN KING WILLIAM MONARCH SOVEREIGN SEAL JURISDICTION ADMIRALTY LAW!
· Establishing his Moai Admiralty / Crown King William IV Federal State Court.

· Holding his own Moai Crown Native Magistrate Court in 2017 (in Te Unga Waka Marae, Epsom, Auckland, joined by three other old scrotes engaged in Important-Personage cosplay) and arraigning most of New Zealand's political elite to defend themselves against charges of treason [WARNING: Linked page is rich in hatstand condamine fishsticks; may be injurious to rational thought].



· Currency (because what is the point of a pretend bank without pretend money?). It seems that inflating the numbers on your play-money with more zeros endows the notes with credibility and gravitas, as we saw in Zimbabwe and Venezuela and Weimar Germany.




· A Moai Airline of hypersonic hydrogen-fuelled aircraft to circumnavigate the globe in four hours and shuttle between tidal-turbine-mounted airstrips off the NZ and UK coasts.

· Suitably opulent buildings to house the Commonwealth World Government / World Trade Centre / NZ Federal State Government Senate, built in Auckland's Eden Park -- a Bruegelian Babelian tower born of the unnatural union of the BBC Euston Tower and the GCHQ rotunda in Cheltenham.

· Moai Aquafarming


· More Turbines!

· Stalking a police officer who annoyed John in some arrest-related fashion.**

There are about 100 more Wanoa-related FB pages revealing different facets of his crackpottery but bored now.

Is it nice to be pointing and laughing at such a brainfucked old cockwomble? Do you feel good about that, Uncle Smut?

No, I feel guilty.
John Wanoa has two main lessons to teach us: Go easy on the medicinal herb when self-medicating for florid psychosis, and if you do insist on huffing petrol, stick to the unleaded blend to minimise the damage. Better still, switch to huffing Wanoa Solid Hydrogen.

But we need to remember: Wanoa has been adopted as a kind of mascot by the Truther conspiracist-ideation Alt-Reality grifters in the UK, who actually scraped together the airfare for him to visit. This contrasts with his 2015 abortive UK expedition -- in the company of his State Secretary and Resreve World Bank Govenoress and assistant designer JAYMIE ANNA-MARIE PATRICK-STEWART NGATAI*** -- to meet potential investors and no doubt to dismiss Parliament and dethrone Queen Betty. On that less-auspicious occasion, a crowd-sourcing page raised only £0.00 of the £50,000 he required.


He has been interviewed by the media Youtube magnates of that not-entirely-coherent intellectual tradition, e.g. by Andy Devine, John Paterson, and Sean Maguire (previously familiar to Riddled readers as a pimp for Amanda Mary Jewell's patient-killing cancer scams), who have groomed and indoctrinated him in virtue-signal Worship Words (currently these are "Hampstead satanic-cult baby-eaters!!" and "788-790 Finchley Road", never mind why). Making fun of the gobshite is not just an indulgence, it is a moral obligation.

It may be that in the Looniverse Wanoa serves as a virtue signal himself, or as a purity test. Any half-hearted barmpot can claim to believe in Rothschild Bankers and climate-change-denial and vaccines-are-evil and QAnon and the rest of the crank-magnetism conspiracist catechism; these quotidian items do not winnow out the wannabees. But to take seriously John Wanoa and his tidal-turbine generator UFOs, that shows true commitment to the war against the tyranny of evidence. Some of them suspect that he's a delusive grifter but expect admiration for not saying so out loud.


Though the Hydrogen-Economy aspect of Wanoa's performative art practice does not interest the Truthers so much as his Moai Royalty Heir-to-George-IV self-stylings. Hence the popularity of the United Tribes flag. The flag's chequered history is not entirely free from fraudulent associations, but I will try to be succinct with the backstory.

Back in 1834, a British diplomat convinced various Maori tribes in the Bay of Islands region (in NZ's Deep North) to send representatives and form a Confederacy, in order that they could proclaim New Zealand to be a sovereign nation; and to solemnise that announcement by choosing one of his suggested flag designs... all as a ploy to discourage acquisitive Frenchpersons from staking out the NZ islands as a French possession. The declaration was later superceded by the Treaty of Waitangi, or possibly not.
SENTENCED: Gerard Otimi was sentenced to 18
months in jail despite a supporter, right,
disrupting proceedings and challenging the judge.
Anyhows, the "Confederation of Chiefs" concept was revived in the 1990s, when various chancers and lowlives saw the economic possibilities in anointing themselves as the successors of that first Confederacy... able to bestow exemptions from inconvenient laws, for a fee (by invocation of Maori Customary Law). Also able to sell passports and visas and citizenship via Maori tribal adoption / initiation... the purchasers being individuals residing in NZ in unorthodox and officially-unapproved ways, hopeful of avoiding deportation by way of these worthless documents. The scam recurs at intervals, usually with the United Tribes flag for verisimilitude.


So it was inevitable that Wanoa would research the flag, find a supplier, and coopt it into the heraldic iconography of his not-entirely-coherent origin story.


It adorned the mise-en-scene at the 2017 Moai Crown Native Magistrate Court performance like an American Confederate banner at an especially treasonous Country-&-Western concert.



And at last we come back to the yellow light-brownshirt protesters who were blocking London bridges a few weeks ago and threatening to come back in even larger numbers -- in their 40s rather than 30s -- and wreak even greater hilarity if their Brexiteer demands are not met. They have appropriated the yellow vests from anti-austerity protests in France, combining them with islamophobic slogans and QAnon imagery in case their extreme rightwing leanings went unnoticed. They have also appropriated the Pen-Draig theme from Welsh culture and turned it into an icon of racism, for these are garbage people. They had no problem with going on to steal the United Tribes flag that Wanoa stole from Northland Maori iwi, believing it to be another symbol of White Trash Supremacy.


It is not clear how the banner demonstrates that the UK gubblement is a corrupt usurpation, but these are not smart people.
[H/t: The hard-working commentariat at Hoaxtead Research]

* Many decades and a few regenerations ago, at the ICA, I saw a touring retrospective of Situationist International work. What stuck in the mind was Pinot Gallizio's Industrial Painting from 1959: long scrolls of canvas, randomly daubed and dyed and decorated without beginning or end, which art consumers could buy by the metre to fit into their workers' abodes.

John Wanoa's continual stream of rhetoric brought it to mind, for some reason.

** Having a conviction or restraining order for stalking is seen in the Looniverse as a desirable social accomplishment. Preferably someone whom you encountered on the opposite side of a courtroom. The absence of anyone to stalk is practically a badge of establishment status.

*** The ALL-CAPS denote the Sovereign-Citizen legally-untouchable form of Jaymie's name and it is apparently a crime to use it. She is still on the scene, but less socially-medially active than in 2015, when she was Faceborging supportively about every turbine-related breakthrough and salivating at the prospect of mass executions as soon as the MOAI Court system got off the ground.

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Left to die by two good friends Abandoned me and put to sleep: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowd-funding #2

January 9, 2019, 2:05 am
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Crowd-funding through on-line charity is one option, if you or a family member seeks some kind of therapeutic intervention unavailable through your local health-care provider (because it is not known to work, or because you're in America so there is no health-care provider). This distributed-donation model is popular with stem-cell scammers and autism grifters and German and Tijuana cancer clinics, left unfunded by health-care providers because they're unadulterated frauds.

There is the alternative of pressuring the NHS to treat your sister's cancer with antibiotics and a stay at the Oasis of Hope Tijuana wallet-debulking facility, but that trick never works, no matter how many like-minded fuckknuckles you recruit to the cause.


Here is my favourite GoFundMe grift at the moment. The beneficiary (David Halsall) was part of the GcMAF empire of scam, distributing the overpriced snake-oil through Europe on behalf of David Noakes and his company Immuno Biotech (a.k.a. First Immune). He was left stranded in France, where he remains the subject of scrutiny, when French and UK agencies tired of the illegality and shut down the whole operation. GcMAF fraud had made Noakes a millionaire -- much of it raised through GoFundMe appeals or JustGiving from consumers who could not pay his charges by themselves -- but he had none to spare for his imperiled accomplices, which is why Halsall is asking for your charity instead.¹ Noakes, meanwhile, is enjoying 15 months of Her Majesty's hospitality.

The synergy between communal-charity services and medical mountebanks has become a regular target of scholarly inquiry in the medical literature: most recently, a paper in Lancet (Oncology) (see also BB). Sites like GoFundMe are what make the cancer-leech business model so profitable. They enable the fraudsters to out-source their grifting by inducing their victims to grift on their behalf: they can suck money from entire virtual communities of friends, workmates and random strangers rather than be limited to extracting the savings from one corpse at a time. Standard practice for cancer charlatans now is to have someone on staff to help prospective victims set up their GoFundMe appeals.
'gofundme hope4cancer': About 4,450 results
'gofundme hoxsey clinic': About 340 results
'gofundme "oasis of hope"': About 15,000 results
'gofundme hallwang': About 5,120 results
This example is almost Platonic in its prototypical purity. The victim suffered a relapse of cancer but instead of conventional oncology, she was persuaded to take up the infallible but un-cheap cures available at Pearl Lodge in Bulgaria (i.e. administrations of industrial bleach by mouth and intravenously and per vas nefandum). The Daily Heil and the Mirror dutifully applauded her brave decision, while advertising (as a heart-warming silver lining of altruistic generosity within the dark cloud of disease) the fundraiser for £15000 that had been helpfully established by her friend Amanda Mary Jewell.


It only remains to add that Amanda Mary Jewell was the proprietor of the Pearl Lodge Cash-Extraction Restoration facility, funnelling donations directly to herself. As a member of the Genesis II fake church, AMJ reckoned that Bleach was a sacrament so prescribing it to gullible victims is protected by religious freedom.

This touches on the role of the tabloid press as co-symbionts in the Crowd-Scam industry. Having co-opted each primary victim's name to insert into otherwise-interchangeable stories about Plucky Battler / Positive Attitude / Indominable Spirit, they go on to distill tragedy and pathos from the follow-up fund-raisers for the funeral and family support.
It makes a good media narrative. It allows the newspapers and TV stations to present themselves as heroes in helping to raise the money.
Anne Pharo credits Freddie Aplin Mansfield, another Pearl Lodge victim patient, for grooming her for AMJ's ministrations. Freddie's crowd-funding plea is here, with a triumphant announcement and an inevitable coda.

AMJ's loudest cheer-leader was Steve Kellogg... a gun-licking, Tea-Party racist asshat, who owed her boundless gratitude for curing his prostate cancer with sacramental bleach enemas on a pilgrimage to Chorazin Pearl Lodge.



Non-white people, always expecting hand-outs
The GoFundMe appeal to cure his prostate cancer a second time specifies stem-cell therapy because of course it does, but also vertebral-fusion surgery. By then, AMJ had left Bulgaria -- motivated by a combination of (a) interest from the authorities in the unseemly number of deaths at the Lodge, and (b) Bulgarian mobsters impatient to see the colour of their loans again -- and shifted to Mexico. There, she had ascended to the rank of Holistic Health Adviser and Senior Cancer Researcher, cosplaying as a nurse at the Flor de la Salud chopshop in Puebla. The chief malpractitioner there is a back surgeon, who insists that the non-invasive healing modalities of Harmony with Nature must always be preceded by spinal surgery, for slipped disks are always the root of every organic dysfunction; also, carving up his victims' spines is the part of his job he most enjoys.

Suffice to say that Steve did not survive to vote for Trump or re-tweet conspiracy droppings from Qanon.

It would be easy to fill an entire blogpost with these AMJ-related Crowd-Scam anecdotes, but I won't have to do that if people send me their own. I will set up a crowd-sourcing website for you to send them to. Also, Fiona O'Leary is alreadyon the case, with examples such as Aliki Buckwell, whom we meet in April 2016, dramatically cured enough to be thoroughly exploited for vindication and triumph and advertising...


...with the now-familiar Ends-Badly coda.

But now we turn to New Zealand. Oh hi, Cheryl from Perth:


Uncle Smut, you did not tell us that Noakes'Immuno Biotech is based in NZ!

Well, no, it isn't. There is no longer a Immuno Biotech NZ (Licensed Medical Immunotherapy -- it was never quite clear which authority issued this licensure), and the immunobiotech.nz site is nuncupatory. But before the "Immunotherapy Clinic"put up the shutters in 2016 it was indeed presented as Noakes' operation.²


This was an enhancement of reality on the part of the site's owner, Michael Stuart Kelly. Company directors were Kelly, and (for a while) Dr Ulrich-Bero Doering.³


The cheeky wee scamps also took advantage of David Noakes' legal distractions to spoof a post on his First Immune Faceborg page, redirecting potential customers to the New Zealand imitation.

Michael Kelly has enjoyed an eventful career. Company archives tell us that he co-owned an Auckland cafe/bar in 2000, progressing through Vibronic Tuning Centre, which shifted focus from musical instruments to gemstone-themed coloured light therapy and became the Vibronic Health home of Crystal Healing Bafflegab,4 then morphed into Natural Health Ltd.... along the way, acquiring a physical location as a pantechicon of New-Age frivolity at 40 St Benedicts Street. Natural Health begat Natural Cosmetics, and Immuno Biotech, which begat Natural Solutions NZ.

There used to be stbenedictshealthcare.com as a digital shopfront. Alas, after a number of recensions, that vanished in 2016 -- initially redirecting to naturalhealthsolutions.nz and then to healthcentre.nz, which is far more straight-faced and less entertaining. There is also the NaturalSolutions.nz webstore to take the place of the old Immuno Biotech.

The Natural Solutions catalog is dominated by merchandise from Marco Ruggiero's fertile laboratory: as well as Bravo Magic Yoghurt [bacteria convert milk proteins into the magical molecule GcMAF] and fruit-juice-based Non-Dairy Bravo [contains no nasty milk proteins!], one finds the now-deprecated GcMAF[magical properties were all a mistake], and GOleic[GcMAF-based], and the obsolescent Rerum, and the latest New Good Thing Imuno. The eponymous GcMAF.biz, Rerum.biz and Imuno.biz comprised a parallel chain of webstores.

We should pause to admire this screen-grab taken from James Bradstreet's blog: originally praising a UK purveyor of Bravo Yoghurt, it had been retouched into an endorsement of the Natural Solutions version of that life-giving fermented milk product.
Spot the difference


Hey, if someone wants to forge an endorsement from a dead fraudster, that is not my problem. My intention is only congratulate the St Benedicts crowd for boarding the GcMAF bandwagon early, in late 2011.

Notably, the stbenedictshealthcare site provided a helpful list of doctors who were woke on the molecule's all-curative properties, and could import it past customs barriers for sufficiently desperate patients. Alert readers will recognise the names of ImmunoBiotech directors.


This digression, though regrettable, is not as irrelevant as it seems. 'GiveALittle' is the distributed-donation service of choice in New Zealand. Yes, there are crowdsourcing appeals for expensive medical interventions of unproven efficacy, not funded by the country's health service; and yes, journalists find these appeals irresistable.

April 2014

July 2014

July 2014

June 2015

August 2015

Some names may be familiar. Fortunately these cases are all ancient history and I am optimistic that everyone belatedly accepted their mistakes.

If you were wondering, Iscador is a quasi-homeopathic mistletoe liqueur brewed according to the intuitions of broad-spectrum-crazyperson Rudolf Steiner, who applied the logical precept that being a parasite of plants, mistletoe is perfectly attuned to kill parasites of the animal kingdom, i.e. cancer. Iscador was part of the Immuno Biotech pharmacopoeia though dropped from the NaturalSolutions product line-up.
Right: Höðr & Baldr: Mistletoe
injection goes horribly wrong


Not actually FDA approved
But TBL-12 can also still be obtained there: this being a Blue-Horizon-themed seafood cocktail, mixing sea-cucumber squeezings and sea-sponge and hitherto undreamt-of quantities of exporto grass (the original recipe contained shark fins but that was dropped from the packaging to appease all you bleeding-heart liberal do-gooder spoil-sports).

Bonus seafood


Related Riddledblogging from the archives: A, B, C, D, E.

1. Another casualty of the war between GcMAF and the French legal code was Lesley Hutchings, living not far from Halsall, and like him, abandoned by her erstwhile colleagues. She has opted for "GoGetFunding" for her plea for financial support.

David Halsall blogs as "Crusty Surfer", if you want your conspiracy theories to be misinformed, and your misinformation to be conspiratorial.

2. Cheryl from Perth was given a fraught account of strife between the Noakes and NZ versions of ImmunoBiotech, which she passed on to supporters:
I was advised by John my health professional at Power Labs in Fremantle to make contact with the the UK company who has been researching, testing and producing the GcMAF protein for the past 20 years, to establish if in fact the product in Auckland was the real deal. I hadn't considered this as the company in Auckland had the same name as the original laboratory in the UK. But, as John has been dealing with chronically ill people for over 20 years, and really knows his stuff, I decided that it made sense to follow his advice. Low and behold, the UK people told me that the clinic in Auckland had been set up by an ex-employee,who had registered the company using the UK company's same good name. They went on to explain that rather than fight them they had in fact started supplying the NZ clinic with product but that they had ceased doing this over a year ago, and that what the clinic in NZ were now selling was NOT the real deal! They provided evidence that this was in fact the case.

Isn't the universe amazing?! Had the clinic not been closed (my thinking is that perhaps the UK organisation had something to do with this, although I didn't go into this with them) I would have gone and started treatments that weren't authentic. Just shows how careful one has to be. I thought I had really done my homework!
I am SHOCKED.

3. I had not previously realised that "Anthroposophic General Practitioner" was a thing in New Zealand. On first glance, the doctrines invented to Rudolf Steiner (or vouchsafed to him by the invisible leprechauns inhabiting his teutonic underpants) could easily conflict with primary health provision... for instance, the principle of Spontaneous Blood Circulation, where blood moves around the body of its own accord or under the influence of tides or something, and the heart merely acts as a regulator. But the specialty fills a niche in the market.

4. Obligatory Electronic Gem Therapy from the St Benedicts archives:


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Foundation and Empire

January 10, 2019, 2:08 pm
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So I wandered into a rough neighbourhood of the Interweave the other day while looking for information about David Halsall (European drug distributor for David Noakes; scores 4 Teslas in terms of conspiracist crank magnetism), and found myself at the National Health Foundation website.

Noakes' recent vicissitudes and his persecution within the UK legal system have weighed heavily on NHF minds (Noakes and the NHF have been BFF from way back), and there is a report on his conviction in Southwark Crown Court. It is complete with a fabricated "George Orwell" quotation to virtue-signal the author's commitment to the cause of mendacity.


From it we learn that
(1) Arcane, unwritten provisions of UK law compelled Noakes to admit guilt when he would rather have proclaimed his innocence before a jury.
While David Noakes did not want to plead guilty to any of those charges and certainly not to the completely bogus charge of “money laundering,” the unique British justice system funnels (i.e., strongly encourages) its defendants into pleading guilty at the earliest possible stage of any criminal proceeding.
(2) Noakes was poorly served by the defense lawyers he chose, and we can infer that they were really imposed on him by the Deep State with the hidden agenda of ensuring a custodial sentence.
In the event, of the 20 witnesses whom Noakes wanted on the witness stand to testify on his behalf, his own counsel only placed one of those witnesses on the stand and even then only for a very brief time. David Noakes himself had to carry the testimonial burden.
As it turned out, David Noakes held up well, despite being on the witness stand for hours and with unfriendly questioning by both his own attorney and the prosecuting witch.
(3) Despite that, and despite the consensus between the judge and both teams of lawyers that the efficacy or otherwise of GcMAF was not under discussion -- only the legality of its sale -- the trial was a glowing vindication of its curative properties.
So, on that Tuesday, Judge Nicolas Loraine-Smith decided that David Noakes had attempted to save lives and that GcMAF could be effective to treat cancer and other diseases. Still, the Judge did not award David Noakes the medal that he deserved.
It may be that there were two concurrent trials in the Southwark Court, with the NHF's informants attending one while court reporters and BBC journalists were all at the other.

It may also be that you have not heard of the National Health Foundation. They are all about Health Freedom, which is the freedom of pill-mill scammers to make up supposed benefits of food supplements without having them fact-checked by burdensome stickybeak gubblement agencies... as opposed to health unfreedoms like abortion rights, birth control and womens' autonomy in general, which are BAD. Mandatory GMO labelling: GOOD. Accurate therapeutic-benefits labelling: BAD. I hope that is clear. There is a lot of overlap with the Dr Benway wannabees at the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
Not Scott C Tips
Health Freedom does include the right to turn yourself into a Smurf by drinking Libertarian Azoth, so NHF president Scott Tips works the colloidal-silver side of the street as well.

Understandably they would like to greenwash themselves as Happy New-Age Progressives and play down the extreme-rightwing Trumpeteering Truther-trash aspect... much like the NRA repositioning themselves with attractive young poster-girls (who turn out to be Russian operatives).

So in the 16 months since my last visit the NHF website has tried to become less embarrassing. With a more mainstream appearance in mind, they have purged the Articles and Press Releases in their archives... removing the material that's too overtly racist (environmental degradation is all caused by immigrants!) or too far out there with Nazi-moonbase conspiracy theories.

Will Humans Be Secretly Microchipped Through Bird Flu Vaccines That Will Be Mandated On The Population? Microchip Implants, Mind Control, and Cybernetics 
[file under "Betteridge's Law"]

Out of of 1700 entries (many of them stolen *),


this left 65 (dominated by advertisements for Neem products).


Sadly, not all NHF contributors got the memo about "Try to look sane and don't mention white supremacy outside the club-house". Here's Katherine Carroll, all about the evils of Planned Parenthood ("monthly corporate abortion quotas"), the danger of biology research without theocratic control, and the importance of Racial Purity.


NOT HELPING, Katherine.


* Libertarian respect for the sanctity of property rights disappears when other people's intellectual creations are waiting to be filched.



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Because the world was not stupid enough already

January 13, 2019, 4:14 pm
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CHIZ CHIZ the January 20/21 lunar eclipse will not be visible from this side of the world. But this has the consolation that we are spared all the media bollocks about WOLF MOON.


Journamalists are no longer content with the frisson of excitement that comes from flirting with the End-of-Days Revelation-fanfic rhetoric preferred by US Talibangelists, and writing "Blood Moon" headlines instead of boring old "lunar eclipses". They are searching for a stronger hit to enmoronise their audience.

Evidently there is an ancient Native American tradition of using "Wolf Moon" to label the first full moon of the year (Julian calendar), going all the way back to the 1990s.


This is why we can't have nice things.
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Dem dry wet bones

January 13, 2019, 10:00 pm
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STOP PHOTOGRAPHING SMUT

January 14, 2019, 1:38 pm
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I have no idea who Geoffrey is, but he should definitely stop peeping.
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Goats, goats, got no goats And stitches don't help at all

January 14, 2019, 4:12 pm
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New Zealanders are no longer passive consumers of other countries' news. Lately they have been producing all the best news themselves!



1. At the end of last year, a Scary Sea Alien found on Rakaia Huts beach appearaed in headlines around the world UK tabloids, although many of them were along the lines of 'HA HA HA just look at these numpties'.



Alas, panic sparked = 0. No actual human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, or even mass hysteria. Great was the disappoint.

Goat being stressed
2. Alternative title:
Left to die by two good friends
Tears of god flow as I bleed

Then there was the goatcitement of the tug-of-love over Zeus. Zeus the poorly goat was either abducted from a loving owner's life-style block, or rescued by a passer-by, concerned by his moribund condition and apparent abandonment, who had not considered the possibility that he was being stressed to increase his rate of Vitamin-C secretion. NZ media woefully neglected the opportunity for "kidnapped" jokes. After nursing him back from moribundance, Zeus' rescuer relinquished him to the SPCA. When last heard of, she was locked in debate with the loving owner as to whose moral claim to his custody was greater.



The dispute calls out for a Solomonic judgement. Ideally ending in goat curry.

3. Invasive wallabies. Feckin wallabies should just feck right off and feck back to where they feckin came from.

4. A large bronze gnome was stolen from outside an Auckland art gallery, in a daring Christmas-eve-midnight heist that was noticed and reported to police three weeks later. The artist, Gregor Kregar (friend of Riddled), is reportedly feeling gnomesick. Police are describing the actions of the visibility-vested robbers as 'brazen'.


Anyone seeing a two-metre bronze gnome posing for photographs to be posted home from tourist attractions and landmarks around Europe should contact the New Zealand authorities.
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An béal bocht a chur ort

January 15, 2019, 6:31 pm
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A classic tale of struggle, power, personalities and tripe
Oh noes! I must have dozed through an episode of the long-running saga of tripe GcMAF (the all-curative blood- or colostrum-sourced glycoprotein), so I missed the reasons why Candice Lee-Bradstreet dropped out of the medicinal fortified skin-cream industry. and is now putting on the poor mouth.


That only leaves Margaret Shaver and her Maine-based webshop MWSdistributing.com still dealing in the 'GlycoPlus / GcMAFplus' range of healing unguents, out of a broad though collegial cartel of rivals who had shared the North American market between them. The only activity at their GcMAF GlycoPlus of the America'sFaceBukkake page is that of tumbleweeds and crickets. Florida Woman Nicole Sullivan at PureLivingHealth remains in business but has dropped the product range.


Huzzah! The market is wide open now for the Riddled product, 'Liniment of Gratified Desire' (alternative brandname is 'Crème Passionel'; Space-Time Eddie is in charge of sourcing the fortifying protein, and we know better than to question him in depth). All the old suppliers plagiarised a blurb about 'hyaluronic acid' from an Asian medscam company, so we are happy to follow suit.
Pharmaceutical Grade Hyaluronic Acid
The Hyaluronic acid in all our products is pharmaceutical grade. Ours is formulated with a much higher molecular mass than other similar products. This helps boost anti-viral activities and stimulate an endogenyous production of Granulocyte Colony Macrophage Activating Factor. This is different than other suppliers who use low molecular Hyaluronic Acid that does not provide the same effect upon your immune system.
But wait! The previously-abeyant webstore glycoproteinplus.com is active again, currently selling the ointments and extracts. Crucially, it continues to route enquiries and purchases through Candice's e-address (glycoplus@protonmail.com)... which leads one to infer that her departure from the industry was not entirely honest.

There is also the primary manufactury / dispensary gcmafplus.com, which is heavily anonymised (though purportedly grounded at a location in Hong Kong). On a previous visit, it and Candice's domain were housed in the same Icelandic server and the same IP address. Things have changed, and gcmafplus.com now inhabits its own unique IP address, 72.52.133.222... coincidentally, someone once chose the same address to use as name-server for glycoproteinplus.com -- fostering a suspicion that Candice remains active in both entities. Also encouraging one to associate the 'Thomas Cosner' -- mentioned in bulletin-boards and FB chatter as "Senior Partner and Lab Owner" of GcMAFplus -- with Candice's husband, Thomas Bradstreet.

But Candice must be destitute because there is a GoFundme appeal for her and Thomas, to pay for
alternative treatments that are necessary to beat this cancer. Suggested treatment include oxygen hyperbarics, high-dose Vitamin C infusions plus many other alternative treatments

One downside of being a fauxvangelist grifter, networked with a community of other fauxvangelist grifters, is that friends and business contacts are bountiful with the Thoughts and Prayers but not so generous when reaching into their pockets.

Despite the fraudulent therapies, it may be that Thom's actual diagnosis is genuine. Just saying: the pair previously ran a GoFundMe appeal after the suicide of Thom's brother Jeff (a careerist con-man who specialised in autism-cure scams), aiming for $25000 for a PI to re-investigate Jeff's death, then raising the target and eventually taking in $43000. The account was wound up and there the investigation rests.
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SMUT DON'T EAT IT

January 16, 2019, 1:31 am
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The story of Chew Chong is not well-known enough (which is to say, I didn't know it until recently so therefore everyone else must be equally ill-informed). Around 1870 (1868, in one version of the tale) he came to the neighbourhood of Mount Taranaki (New Zealand), where native bush was being cleared for dairy farming, intending to start a butter factory and export business, but he saw a niche for a different extractive industry. He started and dominated the export trade of saprophytic fungus to China.
When he died (aged 92) in October 1920, Chew Chong was an honoured member of the community and a wealthy man...
It would make a good children's book, or even a Netflix miniseries. There is a biography.

The fungus in question was Auricularia cornea (or possibly A. polytricha) which is or are so closely related to the Northern Hemisphere A.auriculajudae that only the mycologists can tell the difference, and they're probably making it up. It is 'black fungus' in Chinese-restaurant menus, and 'wood-ear' or 'mouse-ear' in English. The fruiting bodies dry out during drouth but soak up water when it rains and go back to being flubbery and cartilaginous...

And now I have my own, without having to forage!

Well, it's really growing on a neighbour's elderberry tree, but it is near enough to the fence to GET IN MAH BELLY.


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The starry wisdom Owned by the Baron And he’s got the cure [Carpe Diem edition]

January 17, 2019, 2:53 pm
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Glymino? Glycolush? Glycovive? Glycoshyne? Are these really someone's well-considered choices for brandnames; or are they car marques from an alternative time-line, or the outputs of a neural network that has been trained on a list of small towns in Ontario and Saskatchewan? HA HA this is a trick question. These strange words come to us from the fertile glymagination of Darren Fleming, so they might as well be the work of a bot.

Fleming is arguably the world's worst conman, but fortunately he gravitated to the field of alt-med scams where standards are so low that even an absolute cockwomble can prosper. He first came to our attention, here at the Riddled Research Laboratory and Academy of Milking-Shed Innovation, by reverse-engineering Magic Yoghurt. All announced through a spray of March 2014press releases and a portfolio of websites like GcMAF4all.com and gcmafproducts.com. That is, he promised to find a coalition of yeast and bacteria which would not just curdle milk into yoghurt, but also transform the traces of the glycolated peptide VDBP in milk into the deglycolated and all-curative analog "GcMAF"... different from the secret microbe blends advertised as Bravo Yoghurt and MAF314 and MAF878. This would break the monopoly of the House Harkonnen usurpers, weaken the influence of the Bene Gesserit witches while keeping the Spacing Guild on-side, and THE SPICE WOULD FLOW in hitherto undreamed-of quantities.

Darren's entrepreneurial zeal commended him to Trevor and Lesley Banks, breakaway members of the original protein-alchemy cartel, who invited him onto the distribution list as the Australian rep of their GcMAF-fortified products. They may also have been glympressed by the string of 5-star accolades he had awarded himself in his persona as "Dr Fleming" at his 'World Naturopathy Clinic'. Or his activities on a support-group bulletin board: asking cancer patients about their alt-med experiences, while promising his own composite cancer-vanquishing Fleming Protocol and offering unsolicited advice about other therapies they could profitably try.* Or perhaps by his volunteer co-grifting at the "Cancer & Natural Therapy Foundation". I have seen horror movies like that, and the only way this Fleming character could be made any creepier is by dressing him in the make-up and livery of a clown.



There was in fact a website for the World Naturopathy Clinic, originally erected around the stolen identities of two Ayurvedic conmen in India. From 2012 to 2013 it evolved into an entire fantasy world of curative promises, decades of experience, detailed accounts of what clients could expect at a consultation, and plans for Australia-wide expansion, all without ever providing a physical address for those consultations: instead apologising for the lack of open appointment slots in the foreseeable future. This was either a weird conceptual art project (mixed with the urge to be taken seriously as a Medical Professional without the bother of training), or the least-functional grift EVAH.

LinkedIn and curing cancer in China
Many of the social-network sites where Mr Fleming composed his alternative biographies - rich with qualifications and accomplishments - have prolapsed into desuetude, CHIZ CHIZ. I especially miss his Alibaba entry, which boasted of Trumpian deal-making skills and project management around high-end golf-club and holiday resorts. But fortunately, like the Dude and like Earth, his 'Baron's Club' abides in the Wayback Machine...
Holiday resort
a kind of cigars- and poker-chip-infused on-line wet-dream, offered to sign up suckers who might pay for an entrée to the billionaire lifestyle. Russian arrivistes were specifically targeted by an entry in the VK Faceborg clone.
No no no, you should visit The Club yourself, I cannot describe the level of aspirational grandeur it attains. The goal appears to be a cheap Ashley-Madison knock-off, offering a social portal in which hoi polloi could rub shoulders and other body parts with an exclusive invite-only elite... so the promises of hot-totty-matchmaking are interlarded with Vegas High-Roller life-style signifiers of cigars and scotch and poker chips and private jets, all with the understated refinement of Donald Trump filming an advertisement for Lynx. When the Baron's Club emerged on FB in the course of June 2013, it could already boast of a two-decade history of wild success, so who am I to doubt that membership ever exceeded 1? There is aspirational talk of a luxury cruise liner for the club members, private islands, buying French chateaux. The most charitable interpretation is that the brashness is carefully cultivated to appeal to parvenu Moscovite oligarchs.
I hasten to add that Darren was not a complete fantasist, content to settle for grandiose dreams of a career as a scoundrel, for his email addresses were used to set up an entire virtual shopping-mall of credit-card-phishing sites in the guise of illegal-pharmaceutical outlets.

Now one of those e-addresses togethersearch@hotmail.com also featured in Darren's Global Fundraising Network, a kind of charity broker. The company's website has lapsed but it lingers on in small-business community listings. Community-minded on-line shoppers would be directed towards participating webstores, with assurances that some of their money would go to support signed-up charities.


The main beneficiary being 'La Trinite Church' -- a tax-exemption-claiming entity, previously trading as Fleming Couriers, staff consisting of Darren Fleming (secretary). You get the picture. What keeps me coming back to the GcMAF phenomenon is the delightful nature of the characters encountered there, and by that criterion Fleming comes under the Riddled rubric, also within the Riddled auspices, or for short, the rausbrices.


Subsequent snapshots of the gcmafproducts.com webstore find Darren stocking the Banks''MAFactive' lifestyle accoutrements for a time, moving on to his own-brand no-frills colostrum-infused congelations coming Real Soon Now. Meanwhile showing all the conviction of a dude in a metro-station subway selling Genuine Gucci Merchandise spread out on a trestle table, as he hawked a series of short-lived, MAF-themed nasal sprays and suchlike, none of them likely to have ever existed outside of Photoshop.

Along the way, "GcMAF" had undergone apotheosis and become a Worship Word in alt-med-consuming circles, losing its original biochemical meaning and coming to signify one's acceptance of a whole system of anti-Big Pharma values. So it did not matter when Yamamoto's papers were retracted for fraud, and Yamamoto's enzymatic process for deglycolating VDBP into GcMAF vanished in a puff of reality (i.e. the process supposedly performed by microbes during the fermentation of Magic Yoghurt). The persons making and distributing GlycoPlus unguents just shrugged, and dropped the pretense that their colostrum cow-squeezings had undergone any molecular transformation or contained actual magic molecules.



NRG = Energy, is joke
This is the context in which Darren's glyconic glychors -- Glycolush, Glycovive, Glymino and mustn't forget Glycoshyne -- could be a thing. For they are the current glyncarnations of his colostrum scammocopoeia. I earlier doubted that they would ever get past the 'Coming Soon!" conceptual stage and I feel so foolish now. In fact there is even a US distributor, Natural ReGenesis! (some June Lee who is new on the scene). Truly the student has surpassed the master.

On the topic of GlycoPlus, the brief careers of the Australian distributors is of note. Anni Diamond the Cancer Diva... Lucy Corrigan the Tasmaniac Lyme lady... one by one they pop up, staking out websites and FaceBorg support groups to lure in users, only to vanish from the scene again, as if into unmarked graves. Perhaps Darren is only posing as a hopeless bumblefuck, while he disposes of his rivals with a combination of canny business practice and ruthless midnight assassination.


But wait, it transpires that a new Australian shopfront has opened for the GlycoPlus product (under its Pacific title of GcMAFplus), in Brisbane! The Quantum Healing Centre is one of those all-in-one New Age Chambers, where the whole chromatic-light-healing spectrum of pissant woo practitioners have come together under one roof as if drawn by the attraction of Crank Magnetism, so you can have your aura read, your chakras balanced, and your bank-account detoxified without breaking a sweat. Someone should insure their lives, or warn them to watch their backs, whichever seems easier more lucrative.


* "If your wife is only on radiation and not chemotherapy I would only recommend that she uses Arginine 20 to 30 grams taken 30 to 60 minutes before each radiation session. This can help the radiation generate more free radicals due to enhanced blood flow the the cancer tumor as well as other benefits."
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Texas Brain-sore Massacre

January 26, 2019, 4:43 pm
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This post was earlier cross-posted at Leonid Schneider's site, hence the nonfrivolity and Explaining Voice. The version there is improved by Leonid's editing, explanation of the back-story, and illustrative inserts. It attracted a gratifying amount of attention from readers and Tweeters who had not encountered the scandal in all its schadenfreudilicious glory.

Like the Force, and like duct-tape, the new digital media of science publishing have two sides. There is an admirable, encouraging trend for research reports to provide access to the experimental data with links to an archive. Over on the Dark Side, though, freed from the pressure of page space to enforce discipline and difficult choices, Figures are bloating out into unstructured, unselective omnium-gatherums. Multiple panels form a smorgasbord of cell-biology methods, depicting all aspects of an experiment in different plotting techniques, with no unifying theme or graphical coherence: grasping the logic of any one panel brings you no closer to understanding the next one.

A homing system targets therapeutic T cells to brain cancer


This recent Nature paper illustrates both trends. The 16 Figures (six in the main article and 10 in Supplementary Data) are like David Salle post-modernist / neo-figurative paintings: juxtapositions of multiple graphic styles, without privileging any one style as higher-priority than the others. They give me a headache. It is as if the 27 authors all contributed something, and between their 25 academic affiliations they could not agree on what to leave out.

The paper holds out the prospect of effective immunotherapy of otherwise-intractable brain cancers, by redesigning immune cells for better penetration of the blood-brain barrier. Spotting its potential as a source of citations and an adornment to the journal's reputation, the Nature editors singled it out for headlines in the News and Views column ("T cells engineered to home in on brain cancer"), and extending the cruise-missile metaphor, as a Research Highlight in the Nature Immunology section ("Missile guidance for brain tumors"). With so many institutions claiming credit for it, the press release was circulated and went prokaryotic viral across the science-churnalism sites.

In an Update on October 25 the paper acquired the Scarlet Letter of Shame in the form of an Expression of Concern Editor's Note, and even now the authors will be trying to work out which of them (and how many) were responsible, and how much of the paper is salvageable. Quite possibly it will be cited often in years to come, but not in a favourable way. For as well as illustrating the trends I began with, it is also a showcase of different ways of fabricating results. One could prepare an entire Data-Faking Masterclass around it.

The critical discussion thread at PubPeer is currently up to 46 comments. It began on October 16 -- six weeks after the publication date of September 6 -- when 'Gymnopilus Purpureosquamulosus' observed the presence, within the line-ups of fluorescent murine corpses, of some identical-twin pairs of mice.


The reuse of a few mouse portraits could be an innocent error, from researchers paying too little attention to mouse individuality. This is Nature, so duplicated images could in fact be convergent evolution. But the commentator also remarked on many other repetitions within the Figures. Subsequent commentators explored further connections, and alternative methods of dramatising the data-integrity concerns. I have picked out a few subthreads.

Readers come to 'For Better Science' expecting to see dodgy Western-Blot electrophoresis gels, and I am happy to oblige. G. Purpureosquamulosus pointed out a triplicated lane within Supplementary Figure S2A, supposedly representing the expression of three different proteins:

'Leucanella Acutissima' extended this to Figure S2A, noting that "Many of the lane similarities are partly obscured by vertical or horizontal squishing, or by flipping", while increasing the contrast of both images with a pseudocolourgradient map to emphasise the replications.


'Salsola Zygophylla' preferred to regroup the lanes to show their family relationships.


Any attempt to redesign T-cell signalling will involve flow cytometry and FACS plots: histograms (or two-dimensional distributions) of how many cells are found with different levels of some protein (or proteins) expressed on the outside of their cell membranes. Cells of the desired kind are cultured under the desired conditions, and decorated with fluorescent flags attached to those proteins so that they can be measured and counted as they are pumped down a narrow pipeline.

If identical histograms result from completely different cell lines, treated in different ways, then Houston we have a problem.




At left below is G. Purpureosquamulosus' original observation of identical two-dimensional cell-count plots in Figure 6A. At right is an extension from 'Pseudonocardia Adelaidensis', where certain plots have been coloured either red or blue, and then overlapped with semi-transparency, so that dots (cells) with identical protein levels (coordinates) in both plots appear as purple.



When more points overlap than chance could explain -- the vast majority of points, perhaps -- this could be a clue that both plots come from the same raw file of flow-cytometry data, but with different "gating" parameters for excluding spurious signals.


While on the topic of raw data, we have already noted the admirable trend to provide or link to raw data. This opens up new possibilities for colour-coding, as here for the Source Data for Figs 4c and 4d, to emphasise values which appear (a) unexpectedly often, or (b) in parallel between columns that come from different experiments and should be independent.

Or one can just graph the values from any two columns in a scatter-plot, expecting a chaotic cloud of points because of that independence. Certainly not expecting a diagonal line.



Which reminds me of how a scatter-plot appears twice in the paper, illustrating different associations between protein expression. Somehow the same distribution of points is summed up by two different correlations.


In Figures 4g and S5d, each panel is a kind of distribution of distributions. The goal is a statistical comparison, within each panel, between the populations of normal, control T-cells and altered, HS-expressing cells -- the left-hand and right-hand columns respectively.
g, Characterization of migrating T cells through collective quantification of actin MFI, focal adhesions, area of spreading, and podosynapse formation by high-throughput deconvolution microscopy at HS–ALCAM interface in a representative donor (n = 200–800 cells per condition). Each column represents cells in one well.
Although the panels show different measurements, sets of columns recur (with some variation in the horizontal NT and HS bars, i.e. which columns are included in which group for statistical purposes). This phenomenon could be described in several ways but "admirable thriftiness" is as good as any.

These repetitions are glaringly obvious once they have been pointed out. They are impossible to unsee. It is tempting to criticise the reviewers, and the authors of the approbative side-columns in Nature, for not spotting them... they should be looking at themselves and thinking about their poor life choices. But we need to ask ourselves here, "Would I have done any better without image-enhancement and prompting and priming?" For we do not all have Terminator Vision.


Is it reasonable to expect peer-reviewers to spot the cyclic repeating snaggle-teeth of Figure 1c? 'Condylocarpon Amazonicum' noted this "scenic plot" of "autumnal forest colours", "the forest march[ing] on in regular step", but that observer was already in 'data sleuth' mode: assuming that the data are flawed somewhere and should be scrutinised until the flaws are found. Should this adversarial approach become part of a reviewer's duties?

I have hardly started on the bewildering succession of enhanced and highlighted diagrams within that PubPeer thread. You should read the whole thing; it will help you imagine the plight of the peer-reviewers, confronted with a bewildering succession of diagrams in the original manuscript.

Data malfeasance is not a new phenomenon, of course. It may or may not be encouraged by the new possibilities of digital publication... or by a third trend, where funding bodies are encouraging researchers to network themselves into large-scale collaborations across institutions and across countries. This is just a particularly high-profile case, thanks to the publisher's decision to broadcast the paper through press releases and science churnalists.

We eagerly await the outcome of the editorial investigation into the paper's integrity (announced on October 25), to see who will be singled out as a scapegoat. It is hard to believe that a single rogue author could have faked so many different modes of data collection / presentation.
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We cannot call a mortal bein happy before he’s passed beyond game free from pain

January 30, 2019, 4:24 pm
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Is it wrong to be piping the classics of Greek Tragedy through the Gizoogle Textilizer?

PRIEST: Oedipus, rula of mah natizzle land,
      you peep how tha fuck playas here of every last muthafuckin age
      is crouchin down round yo' altars,
      some fledglings barely phat enough ta fly
      n' others bent by age, wit priests as well -
      fo' I’m priest of Zeus - n' these ones here,
      tha pick of all our youth. 


OEDIPUS: What tha fuck iz tha oracle, biatch? So far yo' lyrics
      inspire up in me no confidence or fear.
CREON: If you wish ta hear tha shizzle up in public,
      I’m prepared ta speak. Or we could step inside.
OEDIPUS: Speak up ta everyone. Da grief I feel
      fo' these playa hatas is even pimped outer
      than any pain I feel fo' mah own game.
CREON: Then let me report what tha fuck I heard from tha god.
      Lord Phoebus clearly ordaz our asses ta drive away
      tha shittin' on stain dis land has harboured-
      which aint gonna be healed if we keep nursin dat shit.
--------------------------------------------------
 If it is then I don't want to be right.
CREON: Laius was killed. And now the god is clear:
those murderers, he tells us, must be punished,
whoever they may be.
OEDIPUS:                       And where are they?
In what country? Where am I to find a trace
of this ancient crime? It will be hard to track.

CREON: Laius was capped. Y'all KNOW dat shit, muthafucka! And now tha god is clear:
      dem murderers, tha pimpin' muthafucka drops some lyrics ta us, must be punished,
      whoever they may be.
OEDIPUS:                       And where is they?
      In what tha fuck ghetto, biatch? Where is I ta find a trace
      of dis ancient crime, biatch? It is ghon be hard ta track.
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Nature attacks you and Nature heals you #2: My vegetable love should grow

February 1, 2019, 12:49 pm
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This is an admirably forthright, doubt-free Review Article:


The authors sing the praises of carnivorous plant-squeezins as a Cure for Cancer, advertising a cancer-fraud product and seeking validation for the bafflegab surrounding it, without actually using its title "Carnivora". I eagerly awake their next project, of staging "Hamlet" while dispensing with the Prince of Denmark character.

We have encountered Carnivorabefore. Impressed by the ability of carnivorous plants to digest insects without digesting themselves (a common ability across the Animal kingdom), a small-town German doctor reasoned in the late 1970s that their juices would also be able to digest tumours. By energetic hustling, aided by cool stories of celebrity patients (Ronald Reagan and Yul Brynner) and their successful cures,* he managed to collect a loyal and vocal customer base, who lobbied on his behalf when he came to the attention of the authorities and of mainstream media in the mid-80s.


1985 and 1987 saw a couple of mockademic publications, though the world is still waiting for any records from his 15,000 patients to document his claims of a spectacular cure rate of (depending on source) 56%, 82% or 98%. The highest value relied on early detection and treatment: so early, in fact, that the only evidence of a cancer to cure might be Dr Keller's clinical intuition.


Here at the Riddled Research Laboratory we are inspired to extend Helmut Keller's work to triffid juice, which is bound to be even more curative, as soon as we open that portal to the John Wyndham Fictive Realm (don't worry about safety or the risk of escape, all the research will be conducted within our best-practice Fictive Confinement Facility).

The squeezings are not well-accepted in the US, where the Carnivora company fell foul of the FDA by importing it through a fraudulent labelling scheme. It is promoted mainly through Truther Health-Freedom channels, targetting barmpots who want to protect themselves against Chemtrail Toxicity and vaccine injury, and who take it for granted that the only cancer cures that work are the ones that the evil Gubblement is suppressing. Griftospheric channels like "Extreme Health Radio", or Jeff Rense's operation [as well as a conspiracy-weaponising conman, Rense is a literal, unabashed Nazi].

The Carnivora webshop provides a helpful Note from the Founder, Dr Keller himself, in which he retconned his rationale for the product and rebranded it as an immuno-modulator rather than a direct dissolver of cancers:
From this observation, I concluded that the Venus Flytrap plant must have an advanced immune system capable of distinguishing between harmful intruder organisms and its own materials.
In fact, the plant only digests the "primitive" undeveloped, undifferentiated cells of its own prey. These "primitive" cells are the same kind of cells that intrude into the human body.
Did I mention that Carnivora now cures non-diseases like Chronic Lyme Disease as well?

The webshop also provides contact options for dead people, which is unusual even by the standards of medscammers.
Senior Vice President
the late Robert Ostrow 1927-2014
robert@carnivora.com
Founder
the late Dr. Helmut Keller
info@carnivora.com
It is tempting to email them to see if a pre-recorded message bounces back (along the lines of Brian O'Blivion), or even a response: "For God’s sake! — quick! — quick! — put me to sleep — or, quick! — waken me! — quick! — I say to you that I am dead!”

Disgraced data-forger as co-editor:
a positive for intended readership
Keller's magical thinking resonated more successfully in Europe. The mystical mind-set of "Nature knows best" / "Nature Heals All" is not exclusive to Europe... the "green nanotech" tradition of alchemical-compost junk science is universal (this is where nanoparticles are synthesized using juice or leaves from some culturally-valued medicinal plant and thereby inherit the plant's magical powers). Bharat Aggarwal managed to leverage his systematic curry-based science fraud into a lucrative decades-long career, because natural product! BUT that mysticism seems to be especially strong in the German Mitteleuropa culture-sphere, for which I am inclined to blame Goethe and the whole Romantic anti-Aufklärung backlash.

"Anti-Inflammatory and Anticancer Drugs from Nature"
Nature vitalism: Often ends in
human sacrifices to green cats
So Carnivora was dragged along in the slipstream. In the Green Millennium tradition of phytopharmacology / ethnopharmacology it makes perfect sense to delve into medieval-herbalist magic from different cultures, and to genuflect before the toxic scammocopoeia of Indian Ayurveda [shorter version: arsenic and cowdung poultices cure everything] and Traditional Chinese Medicine [shorter version: tiger bones and mercury cure everything]. Also, to treat some mountebank's recent-past brainfart with the same reverence for Time-Honoured superstitions, as if it were just another Tribal Healing Modality.

This makes it difficult to distinguish between authors / researchers who were on the Big Carnie payroll, and those who believed the lies that fell out of Keller's face-hole and were sincerely convinced that flytrap constituents must be therapeutic (because plant-based) so it only remains to determine how and on what they therapeutise. There is a substantial genre around flytrap toxins, scrutinising their Petri-dish injurious effects on cancer cells as well as normal tissue (though actual clinical trials have not been repeated after the early negative results: Hauser 1988). In the former group we find the Bulgarian group of Todorov and Ilarionova, whose laudatory paeans to the active ingredients in Flytrap Juice and how well they killed cancer in test-tubes were promulgated as in-house reports for Carnivora-Forschungs GmbH.** I am not so sure about the papers and posters of Kreher, Wagner, Jurcic and / or Neszmelyi. Readers who like this sort of thing can find the motherlode in Kukułczanka & Budzianowski (2002), whose comprehensive literature review cries out to be illustrated with artwork by Philipp Otto Runge.

Anyway, Kreher & Wagner cite Keller (1985) in reverential terms (and are in turn cited approvingly on the carnivora.com"Science" page as the most credible sciency support for the fraud). Gaascht et al. (2013) read and cited Kreher & Wagner, so they were aware of Keller’s central role as instigator of the whole Better-Living-through-Flytrap grift. As noted, they take trouble not to mention "Carnivora" directly or cite the primary source, so they were also aware that Keller’s reputation as a lying gobshite charlatan might raise concerns, even among Frontiers reviewers.
[H/t Leonid Schneider @For Better Science]


* "...President Ronald Reagan who received the substance postoperatively following his operation for malignant polyps of the colon. The President took Carnivora drops for their healing and preventive powers against cancer recurrence.""Actor Yul Brynner also received dosages of Carnivora in injections and/or Carnivora drops. Yul Brynner's lung tumor's were rapidly diminishing in size until he foolishly followed the recommendation of a New York City oncologist and failed to keep up with the remedy."

** Todorov, Ilarionova & Pajeva (2000) did stovepipe one of their paid fabrications into the legitimacy of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
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"History is a nightmare in which I am trying to get a good night's sleep"

February 8, 2019, 6:35 pm
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It is a consolation to know that current events will ultimately prove to be a wholly fictitious farrago of imaginary, non-eventuating non-events -- decades (if not centuries) that never happened -- at least in the accounts of future History Truthers.

History Truthers, Uncle Smut? Like 'Fake not-News'?

Phantom Time theorist Illig
Totally a thing. I have learned, for instance, that the current date is really about 1720, because the 297 years from 614 to 911 CE were spurious interpolations into the historical record. The entire Carolingean epoch of operatic violence and incestuous dynasties was script-written by George R. R. Martin in a previous incarnation and staged by Crisis Actors; artworks were faked; documents were forged; new scripts were devised for those forgeries. All arranged at the behest and through the connivance of Pope Sylvester II and Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, all to let them celebrate the 1000 Millennium although the date was only 703 CE. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.


All that pales in comparison beside Fomenko and his New Chronology, or lack thereof, in which nothing happened before about 1500... or more accurately, whatever did happen had to be suppressed to further the political ambitions of non-existent countries like 'Ukraine'.

According to Fomenko's claims, the written history of humankind goes only as far back as AD 800, there is almost no information about events between AD 800–1000, and most known historical events took place in AD 1000–1500.

All of Classical, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Middle-Ages "history" was cobbled together by cloning and copy-pasting the few events and biographies that were available, and papering over the gaps with hand-waving and pebble-dash.

Fomenko claims that the most probable prototype of the historical Jesus was Andronikos I Komnenos (allegedly AD 1152 to 1185), the emperor of Byzantium, known for his failed reforms, his traits and deeds reflected in 'biographies' of many real and imaginary persons.[19] The historical Jesus is a composite figure and reflection of the Old-Testament prophet Elisha (850–800 BC?), Pope Gregory VII (1020?–1085), Saint Basil of Caesarea (330–379), and even Li Yuanhao (also known as Emperor Jingzong or "Son of Heaven"– emperor of Western Xia, who reigned in 1032–1048), Euclides, Bacchus and Dionysius. Fomenko explains the seemingly vast differences in the biographies of these figures as resulting from difference in languages, points of view and time-frame of the authors of said accounts and biographies. He claims that the historical Jesus may have been born in 1152 and was crucified around AD 1185 on the Joshua's Hill, overlooking the Bosphorus.[20]

Fomenko was stealing from my own theory, which I have rigorously proven to the satisfaction of Mrs Spat the Cat, that Jesus Christ and Oedipus Rex were actually the same person... both kings, with pierced feet, who fucked their own mothers, and no-one ever saw them in a room together (the corollary follows that Tiresias and John the Baptist were also a single character). This creates interesting mash-up-scenario situations, like the oepisode where the Sphinx leads Oedipus up to the summit of the mountain and tempts him with sovereignty over all the nations of the world if only he will pledge his allegiance.

Fomenko's mode of reasoning is strangely seductive when you think about the implausible similarities and echoes and reflections that link so many supposedly-different historical actors. I mean, most of them were kings or queens or nobility, and when you think about the tiny proportion of the population who were actually Nobles, how likely is that? Also, most of them were played by Nicolas Cage, Udo Kier, Klaus Kinski or Mads Mikelssen.

1066 and all WTF?



With new centuries of Past pouring out of the forgery factories to fill the needs of various conspiracies, there is no need to stop now. Here at the Riddled Museum of Comparative Clionics and Chocolate Hob-Nobs, we are in favour of pushing back the milestones of the past still further with even more centuries of freshly-woven dramatic tapestry, retro-fitted into the time-line. The important thing is that they be well-scripted, and entertaining, with good special effects. But NO ALIENS, and no Hitler-inna-time-machine, that just looks like the authors ran out of imagination.

I have not mentioned the Centuries of Darkness school of Bronze Age revisionism, because it is a minority position of scholarship but it is not completely condamine calenture fishsticks. The general notion is that there are missing centuries from several parallel columns of Bronze Age chronology (Minoan, Levantine, Egyptian, etc.), bridged with wattle and daub and vague postulations, but the gaps can be parsimoniously removed by sliding the two halves of the jigsaw together with some readjustment of the links between those parallel columns, without the need to assume missing pieces. Personally I find jigsaws easier to complete if I turn the pieces picture-side-down to eliminate the distracting shouty colours on them and I can concentrate on the geometrical niceties of their shapes, but that is why I was never invited to be a Bronze Age archaeologist.

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Ripe and ready to the eye Yet rotten somehow to the core

February 14, 2019, 5:31 pm
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We are pleased for putting your profitable time in looking this blogpost

Jeffrey Beall described 'Juniper Publishers' as "Rotten to the Core", suggesting some familiarity with BÖC lyrics.



These "Juniper" gombeens offer a street address in Arcadia, Ego California - the latest in a series of CA apartments as their US fuckpuppets abscond from one rent arrears to another - but to the surprise of absolutely no-one they are hiring trainee scammers and spammers in Hyderabad. Incompetence in English seems to be one of the desiderata. They also hired some now-defunct Hyderabad graphic designers to replace their naff logo, though all the suggestions seem more appropriate for an Early Education centre.


This is all by way of preamble to the latest innovation in parasitical-publishing spam, inspired perhaps by the Piranha Brothers and their Other Other Operation, i.e. threats of unpleasant consequences if contributions for their journal-shaped jizzmop and their bank-accounts do not swiftly ensue.
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Dear $NAME,

Hope you are doing well!

We are pleased for putting your profitable time in looking this email. My target is to place the forthcoming issue by the finish of February. In any case, due to lack of another article we are unable to release it.

So, I ask for you to submit your article if you have it promptly or something bad might happen if conceivable, if you don't mind proposing to your friends and colleagues and fill my plate in succeeding the issue.

We gently appreciate your understanding and immediate response in this matter.

Warm Regards,
Melissa Gerald
Annals of Reviews & Research (ARR)
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I gently appreciate their understanding and immediate response dying in this matter a fire.
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