A liberal retired judge from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is about to publish his memoir. That story broke Friday in Newsweek, which was quoting The Washington Post. In an apparent interview with the Post, this judge made several serious accusations against the United States Supreme Court. But everything he said, is actually true of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia while he sat on it – and is still true today.

Who is Judge David Tatel?

Judge David S. Tatel came to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1994 on appointment by President Bill Clinton. Clinton, of course, elevated Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg from that Court to the Supreme Court. He then appointed Judge Tatel to take her place. For twenty-eight years he served as an active judge. In May of 2022 he became a senior judge, which gave him a lighter workload and excused him from en banc hearings.

Then in June 2023 he decided to retire permanently and completely from the Court, and rejoin his old law firm. That retirement became effective in January of 2024. More to the point, the United States Supreme Court had finished two momentous terms that evidently caused him great disquiet. The 2021 Term was arguably the more famous, involving as it did a leak of a pending decision. It was also famous for another reason: the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Not only did that decision make abortion no longer “the law of the land,” but also – and perhaps more disquieting to Judge Tatel – it served notice that precedent – or in Latin, stare decisis – would no longer be absolute. Time, in other words, would no longer sanction all Justicial errors. Judge Tatel might have known that time doesn’t sanction all errors with the two rulings in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. That he didn’t know, shows his worst failing: he’s a hypocrite.

Our precedents are better than yours!

Precedent is venerable – so long as he likes the precedent. On the one hand, he would never defend Scott v. Sandford or Plessy v. Ferguson. But he is perfectly copacetic defending:

• US v. Miller (1939), sustaining the National Firearms Act of 1934.

• Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing (1947), forbidding government aid to any religious institution because it was religious. (See here for further discussion of that precedent.)

• McCollum v. Board of Education of School District 71 (1948), the real School Prayer Case.

• Engel v. Vitale (1962), the “School Prayer Case” of legend. The infamous Madalyn Murray O’Hair liked to take credit for that, but she likely didn’t deserve it. The credit – or the blame – goes to James G. Blaine (1875).

• Abingdon School District v. Schempp (1963), another explicit prohibition against Bible reading in class.

• Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), containing the anti-religious “Test” bearing the name of the petitioner.

• Roe v. Wade (1973).

• Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), forbidding silent prayer time.

• Lee v. Weisman (1992), forbidding baccalaureates or clergy-led prayers during commencement at government schools. (In the USA, a baccalaureate is a religious service for honoring graduates.)

• Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (1995), essentially forbidding prayer on school playing fields.

• National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius (2012), the Obamacare Case.

• Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the “gay marriage” case.

How the Supreme Court weakened those precedents

In its 2021 Term, the Supreme Court overruled many of these precedents and put others in direct threat. To be specific:

Roe v. Wade fell to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. This case occasioned the Great Leak. Every overruling of precedent follows the reasoning in Dobbs.

Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing fell to Carson v. Makin.

US v. Miller doesn’t quite fall to New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, but it did come under threat. Federal firearms regulation was not at issue. But State “may-issue” licensing schemes that openly invited arbitrariness and caprice, were.

Lemon v. Kurtzman fell to Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. In CNAV’s view, this decision invites challenges to the McCollum, Engel, Abingdon, Wallace, Lee, and Santa Fe precedents. Had Coach Kennedy really “pushed” it, he could have knocked out Santa Fe as well as Lemon.

In addition to all the above, Clarence Thomas specifically, in his concurrence in Dobbs, invited re-examination of no fewer than three “substantive due process” precedents. Obergefell v. Hodges is one of them. If any precedent will fall from revising out “substantive due process,” it’s that one. (Of the other SDP precedents, Roe has already fallen. The other three precedents will prove much harder to challenge, because they might merely need better reasoning.)

The 2022 Term

In its 2022 Term, the Supreme Court struck down or weakened yet more precedents. The two Students for Fair Admissions cases overrode Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and Grutter v. Bollinger. 303 Creative v. Elenis overrode a plethora of precedents asserting that Woke-ism Must Be Obeyed. Biden v. Nebraska didn’t so much override precedent as set one – that Presidents must also obey the Constitution. (Joe Biden, you’re no Andrew Jackson!) And one case – rolling back the absolutism of the government in deciding that a mud puddle was a wetland – was unanimous in its finding for the petitioners.

All these decisions represent a rollback of the liberal dominance of federal – especially appellate – jurisprudence after nearly fifty years. The near-absolute liberal dominance dates from Roe v. Wade. Understandably, liberal Court watchers regard Dobbs, which overrode Roe, as the floodgate. This is not correct. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to take her place, was the floodgate. Or perhaps the election of Donald Trump was the floodgate.

Either way, Judge David Tatel objected strenuously to the Court’s jurisprudence. Specifically he told the Post that he grew tired of the Supreme Court reversing his rulings on certiorari. He feels the Supreme Court “hold[s] in … low regard the principles to which [he has] dedicated [his] life.”

The tragedy is that he fails to recognize that he has devoted his life to principles of social justice and social equity, not to equal justice under law.

Judge Tatel makes his complaint

The complaint by Judge David Tatel takes the form of a memoir: Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice. And as far as one can determine from the Newsweek piece, Judge Tatel’s major complaint is that the Court kept reversing him.

It was one thing to follow rulings I believed were wrong when they resulted from a judicial process I respected. It was quite another to be bound by the decisions of an institution I barely recognized.

Just what judicial process does he respect? The judge doesn’t say. The Newsweek piece strongly implies that he objects to Dobbs. Perhaps he also objects to Bruen, Carson, Kennedy, 303 Creative, the SFFA cases, and Biden v. Nebraska. (Whether he would object to Sackett et uxor v. EPA is less clear; the specific judgment that the EPA went overboard in their findings against the Sacketts was unanimous.) But the only grounds one can infer for his objections is that the decisions upheld “conservative” principles.

This statement gives a better clue:

[While neutral judging] fosters public trust in the rule of law, [judging that could be] based on a preordained agenda, not on text or precedent or deference, depletes the reservoir of public confidence.

Whom is he talking about? He could be talking about any of the Originalists, but especially Justices Samuel A. Alito and Clarence Thomas. Well, what’s the problem? Does he really suppose that once the Court, under prior composition, makes a decision, that decision must stand, no matter how much in error it was, and how much violence it did to the Constitution? That was Sam Alito’s problem with the precedent of Roe v. Wade.

Who has the preordained agenda?

Justice Alito “nailed” the problem with Roe: its majority had a preordained agenda. Why else would they speak so carelessly of “penumbras” of the Bill of Rights? And what was that agenda? Well, Justice William O. Douglas wanted to be able to chase women around his desk in chambers without fear of having to pay child support later. Perhaps that was also the desire of the other six in the Roe majority. Would today’s Supreme Court retain the esteem of the people by upholding a precedent from that kind of ignoble motive? CNAV thinks not.

And today, every member of the Liberal Bloc approaches oral argument with a preordained agenda. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor have made that abundantly – indeed nauseatingly – clear; Justice Elena Kagan has perhaps been somewhat less clear. But in fact every one of the three has broken Court etiquette in their dissents, and more than once. Justice Sotomayor did that in 303 Creative v. Elenis. Justice Jackson did it in SFFA v. UNC. And Justice Kagan did it in Biden v. Nebraska, so much so that Chief Justice Roberts actually put into the Opinion of the Court a clear message to her: be careful of your tone in dissent.

Only someone having a preordained agenda would break etiquette as all three Liberals have done at least once.

Text? Precedent? Deference?

We turn now to Judge Tatel’s complaint that this Court ignores “text”, “precedent,” and “deference.” The only text the Court need respect is the Constitution of the United States, and texts of laws that do not conflict with it. Precedent cannot stand if it is erroneous; it must yield to the Constitution if it conflicts with it. And “deference”? To whom? To what? Judge Tatel doesn’t say. (Is he talking about Chevron deference, in anticipation of a ruling abolishing that doctrine?)

In fact, the Court’s liberal jurisprudence always based itself on a preordained agenda, and never respected the text of the Constitution. Sometimes (as in Roe) it stretched the Constitution to say what the text does not say. At other times it contradicted the Constitution, especially its Second Amendment and the Free Exercise Clause of the First.

Nor has the Court’s faulty jurisprudence limited itself to the latter half of the twentieth century. Witness Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson. Or Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which barely avoided a direct challenge only last week.

The judge doth protest too much, methinks

Finally Judge Tatel speaks of a jurisprudence that “depletes the reservoir of public confidence.” Who is the public? The public is divided today – as is the American Bar. And what divided the Bar, and the Bench? Critical Legal Studies – the notion that all law is politics. This, of course, blurs the distinction between positive law, that humans make, and natural law, that follows from nature. (Or more accurately, from nature’s God.) Judge Tatel seems to have thoroughly imbibed Critical Legal Studies. His protests against the Court reversing him so often, are petty.

But what really “depletes the reservoir of public confidence” is a jurisprudence that makes justice an issue of people, not of law. New York v. Trump is the obvious example, but Roe v. Wade is an even better example. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg found its reasoning faulty, however much she agreed with its conclusion.

For a converse example, consider New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen and the dissent. Justice Stephen G. Breyer listed statistic after statistic trying to prove that it’s not safe for any person, except a law-enforcement officer, an active-duty military service member, a Very Important Person, or his bodyguard, to own, carry, or so much as touch, let alone discharge, a firearm. One can imagine him saying to Justice Thomas:

Clarence, you … you’re kidding. You’re not kidding? You’re out of your mind! Don’t all these mass shooting statistics tell you that it’s not safe to leave guns in the hands of any but those who are trained, by the exacting standards of the law-enforcement and military professions, to handle firearms responsibly? How can you sleep at night, knowing that a stray bullet, fired by just such an irresponsible civilian as any member of the petitioner organization, might crash through your bedroom window and into your body? What can you be thinking!? ARE you thinking!?

Justice Thomas in effect answered:

Steve, calm down. And remember that the Second Amendment is scarcely the only Constitutional right, the free exercise of which others have decried as physically unsafe for the public.

Judge Tatel would do well to read Justice Thomas’ opinion in Bruen. And maybe he should have read it before he wrote his book.

Conclusion

Judge Tatel did the country a favor by retiring from the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He actually saved a properly patriotic House of Representatives the trouble of impeaching him for infidelity to the Constitution. In fact he did the country another favor by retiring when the Supreme Court had no openings. Or did he give up after waiting in vain for Congress to pass a measure enlarging the Supreme Court? He must have known that no vacancy would obtain after Republicans “flipped” the House in 2022.

CNAV awaits his memoir with no small amount of trepidation, in the belief that his Vision will prove a nightmare. That need not be the case – but his statements on interview are not promising. This illustrates the vital importance of having a cadre of Senators willing to defer to the Constitution, not to a President who violates his oath to it, as it considers judicial nominations – at any level.

Link to:

The article:

https://cnav.news/2024/06/09/foundation/constitution/judge-liberal-retiring-master-projection/

Video:

Declarations of Truth X feed:

https://x.com/DecTruth

Declarations of Truth Locals Community:

https://declarationsoftruth.locals.com/

Conservative News and Views:

https://cnav.news/

Clixnet Media

https://clixnet.com/

Fifteen months ago, a little-known conference took place as part of an annual event called the World Science Festival. That conference (March 9, 2023) ran for about an hour and a half, and had a most provocative title: Rewiring the Brain: the Promise and Peril of Neuroplasticity. Few beyond the community of neurophysicists, neurologists, and neurosurgeons gave that conference a moment’s thought. Then this morning, Joseph R. Mercola, D.O., published an analysis on his site, taking note of the praises for this new technique of “rewiring the brain,” and the ethical objections many conferees raised to it. What Dr. Mercola might not appreciate is that he has just articulated the real object of the Alphabet Soup movement. It is nothing less than neuropsychological warfare, with the object of recruiting people of all ages – and forcing “stubborn” non-recruits to hang our heads in shame.

Can neurologists rewire the brain?

In fact, neurologists have always known that a newborn does not present into the world with a fixed brain. Development of mobility, language – even appreciation of musical pitch – continues after birth. Oscar Hammerstein II famously said, “You’ve got to be taught to hate.” South Pacific, 1949 (Broadway), 1958 (MGM Pictures). In fact “you’ve got to be taught” to do many more things: walk, talk, read, write, even to appreciate music. (“Perfect pitch,” as everyone knows, doesn’t come to everyone, even to every musician. But it comes more easily to those who start their musical training sooner.) Maria Montessori built a reputation from developing methods to stimulate children’s brains to make them learn even faster. (See here for more details – and how some are perverting her work. More on that below.) Neurologist Glenn Doman developed a method to teach reading to neurologically impaired children – that works wonders for neurotypical children.

Contrary to popular belief, anyone’s brain can become as “plastic” as in infancy and early childhood, given the right stimulus. When someone suffers a stroke, the sooner the patient starts retraining in speech, walking, etc., the better. (Indeed they should start to retrain at once!) And why shouldn’t the brain regenerate, given that skin or bone can repair itself?

Happily, making the brain plastic again (from the Greek plasso I shape and mold) does not absolutely require so drastic an intervention as a stroke. Magnetic fields can do the same – and one participant recounted good results in treating clinical depression.

Warning! It can destroy your identity!

Conferees waxed almost poetic at times, about not only restoring lost brain function after stroke (or concussion?), but enhancing it. They talked about drug therapies to induce brain plasticity – with a view to teaching an adult, who might never have been able to carry a tune, to learn to play or sing beautifully and even have perfect pitch! Furthermore, some of these drugs might already be available – like methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), which goes by the street name Ecstasy.

But this carries risks, and the conferees recognized some of them. Make one wrong move, and your patient might develop an Alzheimer-like dementia. Even without that, one participant warned that such intervention could destroy one’s identity.

[W]e've all gone through critical periods shaping who we are. Our identities are formed in childhood and our experiences, our cultural background, the languages we speak, the skills we have — if we were to actually be able to reverse all of that, wouldn't we lose our self?

Others warned of charlatans selling a false promise of turning someone into a cyborg – with enhancements he might actually desire – or giving someone abilities no one could ever have in real life. Like, for instance, the ability to treat the world as a simulation, as the Matrix franchise depicts.

If this were all there was to “neuroplasticity” as an area of clinical inquiry, then existing laws regarding informed consent and truth-in-advertising would apply, perhaps with some refinement. But that’s not all. From the remarks at this conference, scientists have known about neuroplasticity for decades. This discussion will treat the obvious grand-scale misuse of neuroplasticity – as neuropsychological warfare.

Neuropsychological warfare – what could that be?

Actress Leslie Stephanson (The General’s Daughter, 1999) famously said, when John Travolta asked her to define psychological warfare,

Mostly we f*ck with people’s minds.

Anyone who has “pranked” someone to scare them – say on Halloween – has engaged in psychological warfare, on a tiny scale. “Fearmongering” is psychological warfare on a grand scale. Neuropsychological warfare combines the usual emotional manipulation with a deliberate attempt to reshape the brain.

Now we see the purpose of “Drag Queen Story Hour,” to take only one particularly execrable example. Now we know why, according to Alphabet Soup movement leaders, sexual education – and sexuality education – begins in kindergarten. At such ages, the human brain is naturally plastic, without such interventions as a conk on the head. (Or slipping someone a Mickey Finn consisting of Ecstasy.)

Concerning adults, the enemies of America now know they cannot content themselves with waiting for “the old ones” to die. The visceral reaction to the recent verdict in New York v. Trump has told them that. So wouldn’t they just love to use the techniques on display at that World Science Festival conference fifteen months ago? Use them, that is, to erase an adult’s identity and turn him into a slave? Or failing that, simply order him to kill himself?

In fact, the medieval order of the Assassins practiced neuropsychological warfare, though in a crude manner. They drugged men with hashish, had prostitutes service them, then told them they had just tasted a jihadi’s version of heaven. Now they were willing to go and kill!

Neuropsychological warfare, real and potential

Again, thus far the current neuropsychological warfare program is crude. The Alphabet Soup movement urgently desires to start subjecting children to surgical mutilation and hormonal poisoning. Recently a general surgery resident, part of Baylor College of Medicine’s surgical program, exposed a secret “transgender service” at Texas Children’s Hospital, the world’s largest exclusively pediatric hospital (where your editor “rotated” in pediatrics and pediatric surgery). Then, in a scene out of The Trial (with Anthony Perkins and Orson Welles, based on the novel by Franz Kafka), three heavily armed “federal agents” accosted him at home and informed him he already had four indictments against him – for HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) violations.

Lacking experience with conditioning an adult’s mind with drugs like hashish or Ecstasy, cultural Marxists do the next best thing. They subject adults to continued stress, especially in college. To members of “protected” groups they feed lurid visions of a return of Torquemada’s Inquisition, Jim Crow, or some such. And to straight white cis-gendered males they feed a steady diet of negative propaganda. “Shame on you!” “Check your privilege!” “You maltreated these people, as surely as your ancestors maltreated theirs!” And other such pleasantries. Eventually other pleasantries succeed to these: “Give your place to the victims of your oppression!” Or: “Stop crucifying your inner [Alphabet Soup] soul! Such feelings are only normal and natural – and only latents object so violently to us!” (As science-fiction author Larry Niven specifically said in his short story, “How the Heroes Die.”)

Twisting of popular culture

Indeed we see a twisting of the popular culture that even the harshest Elizabethan-era critic of popular drama couldn’t imagine.

The cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well, and the causes of sin are plays; therefore the causes of plagues are plays.

The recent premiere of the streaming series The Acolyte, which features parthenogenesis and the violent overthrow of a male-dominated chivalric order (and the summary execution of its male members) is bad enough. But at least its creators do not pretend other than to be encouraging Alphabet Soup-ism. Moreover, viewers are free to view it or not, as they wish, and by all accounts, they aren’t. (Instead they’re accessing the explicitly Christian biographical series, The Chosen, among other uplifting works.)

But worse yet, dressed-up characters in theme parks belonging to the grandest theme-park chain in the world, are molesting children. “Drag Queen Story Hour” is exactly what it sounds like: explicitly sexual performance art in front of captive child audiences.

And when people do object to any of these spectacles, including The Acolyte, their organizers and creators snarl that the normals are the problem. They are repeating exactly the same shame-on-you message one hears at college or university.

Now imagine a new set of experiments on prisoners – like, for example, the January 6 suspects and convicts. Imagine “treatments” with Ecstasy, and a steady diet of Alphabet Soup and anti-American propaganda. Khigh Dhiegh, whether as Yen Lo (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962) or Wo Fat (Hawaii Five-O) had nothing on these people!

Not a flight of fancy

If that last sounds like a flight of fancy, be assured, it is not. Democrat Paula Collins, running against Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), actually suggested putting Donald Trump’s supporters into re-education camps. That she would say a thing like that, bespeaks a deluded conception of her chances for re-election, and her Party’s chances of recapturing the House. But we can only hope this does represent delusion, and not an accurate assessment of her, and her Party’s chances.

More to the point, such re-education camps would be the perfect place to put all those theories about rewiring adult brains to a practical test. In short, they would become laboratories for neuropsychological warfare.

Again the enemies of America and civilization have “said the quiet part out loud,” as they did a month ago. They have declared war, and those who love liberty must wage it. A boycott of current popular culture, and the creation of a parallel alternative, becomes not only an operational doctrine but also necessary to psychic and cultural salvation. Such a culture is both shelter against the neuropsychological warfare of the enemy, and staging area for a counterattack. The country has endured another Pearl Harbor. Now comes the time for the Doolittle Raid.

Link to:

The article:

https://cnav.news/2024/06/08/news/neuropsychological-warfare-alphabet-soup-offensive/

Video:

Rewiring the brain (World Science Festival conference, March 9, 2023):

The Manchurian Candidate – Yen Lo’s lecture on brainwashing, and a murderous demonstration:

Declarations of Truth X feed:

https://x.com/DecTruth

Declarations of Truth Locals Community:

https://declarationsoftruth.locals.com/

Conservative News and Views:

https://cnav.news/

Clixnet Media

https://clixnet.com/

Lately the academy – meaning the community of higher-educational institutions – has suffered a few embarrassments. The latest came from Wiley Publishers, a world-class publisher of scientific journals and textbooks. They recently had to close 19 of the more than 2,000 journals that went out under their imprimatur. But this latest incident highlights a larger problem that has plagued the academy almost since its inception. This problem – fake science – results from an “aristocracy of pull” called “publish or perish,” with almost no accountability for publishing false – or dangerous – scientific insights. Society at large has always known this – but its leaders have never thought to reform the system.

What is the academy and how do publishers serve it?

The academy refers to the general community of institutions of higher education, and especially to those with research programs. A large number of other institutions, especially publishers, has grown to serve the academy in one way or another. Specifically, academic publishers make available the scientific papers that inform the academy of the latest scientific research. Furthermore, policymakers and legislators rely on academic papers to justify the policies they make, propound, and support.

But the academy usually consists of miniature communities that labor in isolation from the larger societies that surround them. In extreme cases, like Harvard University, members of these institutions need never see an “outsider” or “townie.” (Yale University is less isolated, but faculty and students do not normally speak to “townies” even when using city streets to get from one building to another.) This isolation encourages hubris – that unhealthy pride that numbers among the Seven Deadly Sins. “We’re better than you are,” members of a college or university think of townies, at least unconsciously. The larger network we call the academy encourages all its members to consider all the rest of the world as one big “town,” from which they isolate themselves. To any member of the academy, anyone other than a fellow academic is a townie, who rates condescension at best.

The extreme case in popular fiction and drama

The most extreme, and yet the most popular, hypothetical case of the academy treating its surrounding community with such condescension, is the Star Trek franchise. This gets very little treatment in Star Trek canon, but this condescension – indeed rulership – follows logically from certain canonical statements. Politically, the United Federation of Planets operates under Articles that mirror those of the present-day United Nations. Economically, all industry is under government control. Memorably, a capital-ship captain tells a guest aboard his ship, “Money does not exist in our society.” Elaborating, he says he and his officers and crew work “for the betterment of humankind.” Or rather, all intelligent life-form kinds; the Federation does not discriminate on the basis of species.

Who, then, decides what career an individual will pursue? The Star Trek canon is absolutely silent on this point, but only one thing follows from what canon does say. Which is: the academy rules. One can apply to Star Fleet Academy, which has a competitive admissions process familiar to all college and university students. If one doesnt “get in,” only one thing will serve. A Career Placement Board must judge the fitness of every individual for a certain career – from ditch digger to professor.

Thus far no real-life society gives the academy that much power – but that hasn’t stopped its leaders from seeking it. The contempt they pour upon “townies” is as old as university culture. For actual history, consult the history of the English city of Oxford, and its venerable university.

Publish or perish

This overweening arrogance also governs how academy members treat one another. “Publish or perish” is the rule. Author listings on as many published papers as possible are the ticket to promotion, or research grants. Grantors know they cannot hope to gain exclusive access to inventions – for the academy treats all inventions within its laboratories as “in the public domain,” or close to it. So they must want something else. They say they want insight into how the world works. But they actually want respectability for a version of “how the world works” that will benefit them in some way. That benefit could be pecuniary, an appeal to their vanity – or take the form of political power. (Every academic hospital might as well call itself Vanity House. People pay dearly for their names on the wings and their oil portraits in the hallways.)

Nowhere is this system more tempting to pride (and many kinds of greed) than in academic medicine. That is also the part of the academy with which your editor is most familiar. Not only does your editor hold a medical degree, but he has also taken an active part in “peer review.” Peer review asks the peers of a scientist to judge his work as deserving of publication – or not. But several memorable cases demonstrate that peer review often fails. Either the peers don’t read the papers carefully enough – or they have agreed to do someone a favor.

Latest embarrassment to the academy

A certain disreputable industry – disreputable even to the academy itself – has grown to serve scientists grasping for promotions and grants. Paper mills (described here) will literally make up a scientific paper, then sell authorships on it. They will then submit the paper to several journals with lower than usual editorial standards.

Wiley Publishers got into trouble by acquiring Hindawi, an Egyptian publishing house that published several journals. They ended up having to shut down 19 of those journals, after finding that they had accepted papers from paper mills, many of which papers were riddled with scientific errors, not all of them honest. Wiley has had to retract 11,300 papers in the last two years, by reason of such errors.

The real tragedy is that those putting their names to these papers are getting their promotions and other grants. The Peter Principle – that one gets promoted to the level of his own incompetence – combines with this scandal to cast doubt on all of academic science, and especially academic medicine. Worse yet: a scientist that achieves a certain academic rank faces no accountability for any fraud he has committed. Only when a particularly serious incident brings embarrassment on a given university do any repercussions occur. The world saw this with Claudine Gay, whose “immediate” sin was plagiarism – but whose worse sin was an indirect endorsement of mass murder.

A much older problem…

Allegedly, the editors of Science, the organ for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (or more accurately, the American Association for the Promotion of Evolution and the Deprecation of Faith-based Origin Theories, but that’s a discussion for another day), spotted this practice eleven years ago. But this problem existed when your editor was in medical school in the early Nineteen Eighties.

A medical student named J. R. Darsee published a series of papers in The New England Journal of Medicine. That organ is scarcely a fly-by-night publication like those Wiley recently shut down! Darsee, a student at Duke University School of Medicine, was expounding on a particular theory of the causes and distribution of heart disease. The head of the department – Dr. Eugene Braunwald, who also served on the editorial board of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, insisted on claiming co-authorship on every paper that went out of his department.

Well, J. R. Darsee had performed the clinical-research equivalent of dry-labbing. The Yale Student Handbook, at least in 1976, explained this:

The practice known as dry-labbing, constructing observations out of one’s own head or misappropriating the observations of others, is an offense of such gravity that it warrants excommunication from the community of scientists. At Yale the comparable sanction is expulsion.

Two years after Darsee’s series appeared, Duke retracted the papers. Obviously they expelled Darsee, and blamed him totally. But did anything happen to Dr. Braunwald? No. Your editor’s preceptor in Medical Information Science, familiar with the situation, had a laugh at Dr. Braunwald’s expense years later. But that was literally all.

…and a wider one

Nor is outright fraud the only problem. The source that broke the story describes two other problems: “irrelevant and insipid subjects, and incoherent language.” Your editor saw that first-hand. A column announcing recent research grants listed this gem: “Reproduction in women with mammalian reproductive characteristics.” Laboratory staff, commenting on it, noticed the redundancy at once – but the grant stood. And “incoherent language”? Anyone trying to bamboozle an editor – or give that editor plausible deniability – knows how to throw up clouds of terminology. The medical literature today is nauseatingly replete with utterly unreadable papers. (They would never pass the Flesch Reading Ease Test!)

Even more harmful to society are the papers that pass muster, not because the editors just want to sell space, but because the editors have an agenda they wish to promote. When legislators, bureaucrats, and ambitious chief executives get hold of such papers, they can work all kinds of mischief while claiming academic support for their policies. Climate-gate was the worst example, fifteen years ago. More recently came another example: the coronavirus and its vaccines. The chief driver of that scam – Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. – practiced a blend of venal and ideological corruption that would have made even J. R. Darsee faint.

Has the academy subverted itself in the aid of totalitarianism?

Yes, it has – and that’s a worse problem than a few charlatans advancing to the level of their scientific incompetence. The late Ayn Rand, in her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, described the ultimate in scientific horror that the academy, combining with totalitarianism, can produce:

[T]he damned and the guiltiest among you, are the men who had the capacity to know, yet chose to blank out reality, the men who were willing to sell their intelligence into cynical servitude to force; the contemptible breed of those mystics of science who profess a devotion to some sort of “pure knowledge” – the purity consisting of their claim that such knowledge has no practical purpose on this earth – who reserve their logic for inanimate matter, but believe that the subject of dealing with men requires and deserves no rationality, who scorn money and sell their souls in exchange for a laboratory supplied by loot. And since there is no such thing as “non-practical knowledge,” nor any sort of “disinterested” action, since they scorn the use of their science for the purpose and profit of life, they deliver their science to the service of death, to the only practical purpose it can ever have for looters: to inventing weapons of coercion and destruction.

Among said weapons: a virus giving those who catch it a very bad cold, or an “immunization” that actually kills. Furthermore, some weapons are not physical, but psychological: a convincing but false scenario of a doom for the world that requires the suspension of industry – or literal suicide. This is what Climate-gate was all about.

(Definition: a mystic claims secret knowledge of how the world works, or what moves the world.)

This is the worst harm the academy is now doing. Redemption will not come easily. It will likely require a completely different “business model,” in which the universities offer courses in – for lack of a better term – the “pure science” that can back new developments in engineering, to those ready to undertake or finance the sort of engineering projects this science can make possible. Or courses in basic biology, to those willing to pay for the basis of new farming, medical, and other techniques. In such a model, fraud would “out” very quickly, as it already does in engineering. And that knowledge wouldn’t go to “gain-of-function research” or creating “cures” that actually kill.

Conclusion

In whatever way it can happen, the academy badly needs reform. The Wiley scandal is relatively harmless in comparison to the Climate-gate and COVID-19 scandals. Sadly, the academy is set up for scandals of that kind. A “Parallel Academy,” in addition to pledging not to censor contrary opinion (another historical problem), must address such scandals and invent new ways to prevent them.

Link to:

The article:

https://cnav.news/2024/06/07/editorial/talk/academy-dishonest-games/

Video:

Wiley publishers retract 11,300 papers, shut down 19 journals

https://conservativesdaily.com/academic-publisher-overwhelmed-by-fraud-11300-papers-retracted-19-journals-shut-down

The Peter Principle:

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/peter-principle-theory-decline

The Flesch Reading Ease Test (a description and usage guide from a college editorial help center):

https://www.morainepark.edu/help/what-flesch-reading-ease-score-should-my-content-have/

Declarations of Truth X feed:

https://x.com/DecTruth

Declarations of Truth Locals Community:

https://declarationsoftruth.locals.com/

Conservative News and Views:

https://cnav.news/

Clixnet Media

https://clixnet.com/