Academics Push Back Against Censorship

Plus problems with so-called 'peer review'

fudged statistics, research fraud, political ideology, faked papers, compromised news media, the near impossibility of getting non-consensus views published, the unreliability of peer review, and the solution - self publishing

“But evil men and imposters will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived” 2Timothy 3:13

After recording the audio, I added some additional info, but didn’t have time to redo the audio. Scroll down to the addendum at the very end. It’s about abortion, which has become a big issue in this election.

manipulation of data

Kelly Crowe, with cbc news, reported clear back in 2018 on a study by Ralph Katz, a New York epidemiologist, to see if statisticians were ever asked to manipulate scientific data to get a ‘better result’.

“McGill University bioethicist Jonathan Kimmelman said the results should be concerning to everyone. "We use [statistical] information to make decisions about what drugs to take, what foods to eat, what policies to make, what chemicals to ban," Kimmelman said. "It's crucial to protect the integrity of that data."

statistics don’t lie, but liars can twist them

“Kimmelman does his own research using statistics. And he's not surprised that there's pressure to embellish results.

"Everyone has had papers that are turned down by journals because your results were not statistically significant," he said.

"Getting tenure, getting pay raises, all sorts of things depend on getting into those journals so there is really strong incentives for people to fudge or shape their findings in a way that it makes it more palatable for those journals."

"And what that shows is that there are lots of instances where there is threat of adulteration of the evidence that we use."

“Shocked, Katz asked other statisticians and realized it was a common experience among the mathematical whizzes who analyze research results. "They talk about what they've been asked to do over beers, after the meetings of the day." Katz said. But there was no data to reveal the extent of the problem, so Katz conducted a formal survey sent to a randomly selected group of statisticians. Published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the ethically dubious things the statisticians were asked to do included altering data records, falsifying statistical significance, and stressing only the significant findings.”

In “It’s a Sad Day for Science” I drew from Coffee & Covid, June 12, 2024:

“Publicly traded John Wiley & Sons, one of the largest and most well-regarded science publishers, has been polishing its sterling reputation for over 200 years. But over the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than eleven thousand papers that turned out to be faked, and last month Wiley announced it was closing nineteen journals “infected by large-scale research fraud.”

another sad fact - the National Science Foundation has been politicized - here’s an excerpt from a report released by Ted Cruz

“… the National Science Foundation (NSF) has increasingly funded research and programs that color scientific investigation and engagement projects through the lens of political ideology, undermining objective hard science disciplines such as physics, chemistry, and biology in which facts and theories can be precisely measured, tested, and independently reproduced.”

compromised news media

An article by Firebreak reveals how the NYTimes receives donations from biased organizations with an agenda. This kind of journalism is bought and paid for:

“The donors have now taken control of every aspect of the journalism process from start to finish. They hand-pick the reporters, often from within their own training programs. They designate the topics, select the locations, arrange the travel and logistics. They line up all the sources, already on their payroll. When the trip is over, they help compose the story.”

even doctors got censored

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 vaccine scandal, the general public has become much more aware of the way ‘peer review’ and the ‘science’, and the ‘consensus’ is a bunch of baloney. The vaccines that were pushed by Big Pharma were for the most part unneeded, and even harmful, and sometimes deadly. People are still suffering the consequences. Doctors who know a lot more about it than any politician couldn’t get their contrary opinions published.

The climate alarmism is the same story. If they disagree with the consensus, perfectly well-qualified scientists can hardly get anything published, and certainly no public funding.

Now I found another weapon of the establishment used to protect the consensus - filing away scientific papers that document undesired results and refusing to publish them. This is similar to the way the news media slants the ‘news’ every day by cherry-picking what to report and deliberately withholding news that doesn’t agree with the editors’ ideology.

“Nature” magazine has finally given some journalistic space to the problem, in Nature 631, 728-730 (2024) titled “So you got a null result. Will anyone publish it?” and subtitled “Researchers have tried a bunch of strategies to get more negative results into the literature. Nature asks whether they are working,” by Max Kozlov, July 2024.

peer review is weaponized

Stephen Heins’ THB (“The honest Broker”) post in substack 10/3/2024 “Weaponizing Peer Review” coined a new term: “tactical science”, to describe the publishing of scientific papers that are aimed at an ideological outcome. This is ‘bad science’ because what we need from science is an unbiased search for truth.

THB points out that just because a paper is peer-reviewed doesn’t mean it’s good science that is free from bias, and just because a paper is not peer-reviewed doesn’t mean that it’s bad.

here’s another excerpt from Coffee & Covid, 10/3/23

“…the so-called “peer review” process, which some top scientists have long argued has become hopelessly compromised, and captured by pharma interests. The biggest problem, and threat to all our well being, a problem which became painfully obvious during the pandemic, is that government actors dangle grant money in front of unethical whitecoats to obtain fake studies supporting the officials’ preferred policy narratives. Even worse, they all conspire to prevent inconveniently-contradictory papers from ever being published in the first place…”

I’ve written about the hypocrisy of so-called peer review.

I became aware of the problems with peer review and the difficulty of getting published or getting grants when I became acquainted with several PhD level scientists who happen to believe that evolution is not a valid theory of origins.

sometimes the only way to get published is by doing it yourself

The only way to get published with papers that don’t kow-tow to the evolutionary ‘consensus’ is to publish privately with private funding. This is how The Institute for Creation Research (ICR), Creation Ministries International (CMI), Answers in Genesis (AIG), and many others are able to publish articles, videos, and books.

In a way, it’s like substack - when you ‘own’ your publishing platform, you can’t be censored, but you’re on your own, with no public grants or subsidies.

substack is full of professional level content, and uncensored

One of the great things about substack is that so many of the science, engineering, biology, and medical writers are qualified and experienced and knowledgeable in their fields - and they can’t be censored.

Through substack, I’ve learned so much about every form of energy and power generation - factual information that I wasn’t getting from the establishment media and that would be censored by the consensus.

science should not be a popularity contest

The history of science is riddled with cases where the majority has turned out to be wrong. Science is supposed to be a search for truth. It’s not supposed to be a popularity contest.

Peer review isn’t worth a plugged nickel if the ‘peers’ were carefully selected for their own bias or “consensus” that lines up with that of the author and the editors of the publication.

I love real science, but I hate phony science.

Addendum, under the FAITH category:

After writing this, I came across this further example of the censorship of true science. (not included in audio -didn’t have time to do the whole thing over.)

source - https://answersingenesis.org/sanctity-of-life/abortion/why-were-studies-abortion-pills-retracted/? (excerpts)

“A group of 10 scientists are suing an academic journal over three scientific studies, including two highlighting the dangers of abortions pills, that were retracted by the publisher, seemingly for no reason other than that the pro-abortion lobby didn’t like the results.”

“The suit alleges that the studies were pulled, not because of bad science or “any legitimate objection to any of the findings,” but because the journal “put politics over publication ethics and blatantly disregarded the principles of open inquiry and commitment to science.”

Abortion is not just deadly for babies, it’s dangerous and harmful—and, yes, sometimes deadly—to women too.

“This is anti-women and anti-science. (and anti-baby and anti-life. A.C.) To suppress studies like the one that found “the rate of emergency room visits following chemical abortions had spiked 500% from 2002–2015” shows that these activists don’t really care about women.”

Note - Oct. 21 - the administration is proposing a new rule:

“Expand coverage of over-the-counter contraception without cost sharing. Under the proposed rule, for the first time, women would be able to obtain over-the-counter (OTC) contraception without a prescription at no additional cost. As a result, more women would be able to access and afford critical OTC medications such as emergency contraception and the first-ever daily oral contraceptive approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use without a prescription that is now widely available across the country.”

Don’t let the semantics fool you. Contraceptives have traditionally been for preventing a pregnancy. Here, the word is re-defined for preventing a birth. This is not an oral ‘contraceptive’; it is the oral abortion pill that the FDA approved despite the dangers noted earlier in the Answers in Genesis piece. Now the administration wants to give them away for free as a part of ‘health insurance’.

Again,