The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Spy agencies team up with National Academies
In an unprecedented move, U.S. intelligence agencies are teaming up with the nation's most prestigious scientific body in a bid to make better use of findings from the country's leading social and behavioral scientists.
From Orwell to Gladwell and Back
The technology of power is moving from the past’s emphasis on privacy and concealment toward more contemporary techniques of diversion, bias, misconception, and willful stupidity. The crude methods that George Orwell summed up in his image of the incinerator-chute “memory hole” are growing into more sophisticated devices for providing the public with misleading frameworks for mentally organizing (or rationalizations for simply ignoring) the overload of available facts, thus making it harder to remember or understand politically inconvenient knowledge.
We see some of the old-fashioned memory-hole techniques at work currently with Wikipedia. Read full article.
Above headline by Phi Beta Iota editors. Below is original headline.
Harvard: Does the University Sell What the Customer Wants?
Consider fat and sugar. The answer is my reaction to “Sugar Industry Secretly Paid for Favorable Harvard Research.” For the moment, let’s assume that this article is spot on.
The write up informed me:
As nutrition debates raged in the 1960s, prominent Harvard nutritionists published two reviews in a top medical journal downplaying the role of sugar in coronary heart disease. Newly unearthed documents reveal what they didn’t say: A sugar industry trade group initiated and paid for the studies, examined drafts, and laid out a clear objective to protect sugar’s reputation in the public eye.
Further to the Phi Beta Iota comments on the mistaken limitation of OSINT to passive monitoring of web sites and such….
Prevalent approaches to countering ‘radicalisation’ ineffective, conceptually flawed
“A lack of research based on primary sources has been one of the major impediments to progress in the field of (counter-) terrorism studies… As numerous leading experts have warned, the consequences of an overreliance on secondary sources of information, such as newspapers, has led to a great amount of theorising based on a perilously small empirical foundation.”
More extracts, 2 cartoons, comment by Robert Steele below.
Continue reading “Antechinus: CIA Killed OSINT at Birth — 80% of “OSINT” Studies are Bullshit”
Manufacturing consent in science: the diabolical twist
Predatory corporations who spray poisonous pesticides all over the world and cause birth defects need special protection and cover? Invent, overnight, and broadcast, a consensus that a basically harmless virus is the cause of those tragic defects. I can assure you there are many scientists who don’t, for a second, believe the Zika virus is the agent of destruction. But they are keeping their mouths shut now and rolling with the tide.
I read “This Renowned Mathematician Is Bent On Proving Academic Journals Can Cost Nothing.” If you are not an academic, you may not know that some folks pay the publisher to publish one’s research report, journal article, or wild and crazy summary of non reproducible results.
Good business? You betcha. I remember a meeting a decade ago at the Cornell Theory Center. I asked if a faculty member who published in an online journal would be recognized for the work. The answer, not surprisingly, was, “No.” Flash forward to today. Many institutions like the estimable University of Louisville prefer their wizards’ write ups to be in prestigious paper journals. Sure, maybe a short item in the Harvard Business School blog will get some blue or green stars. The gold ones, from what I have heard, go to the expensive, paper journals like those from the ever savvy Elsevier outfit.
The write up states: read more.
Viva The Academic Publisher Boycott!
Elsevier is one of the largest and most well-known scientific journal database, but it is also the most notorious for its expensive subscription fee and universities are getting tired of it. Univers reports that “Dutch Universities Start Their Elsevier Boycott.” The Netherlands, led by state secretary Sander Dekker, want all scientific content to be free online. In order to be published, the university or financier pays to be so. All content by Dutch scientists will hopefully be open access by 2024.
In the meantime, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands has asked all Dutch scientists that work with Elsevier to resign from their positions. As to be expected, some are willing and others are more reluctant. The goal is to pressure Elsevier to change its practices.
