We read the latest venereal journals Flicked through some catalogues of fear

Here at Riddled we have long been warning our readers against the Shapeshifter Menace. The shapeshifters in question being the skinwalkers who set up more-or-less convincing website impersonations of on-line journals to skim off money from academics at the Derek Zoolander University for Researchers who Can't Write Good and Wanna Learn to do Other Good Stuff Too, who desperately need Publication Outputs but are devoid of anything worth publishing.

Tleilaxu facedancer

Sometimes the facedancers endow their nonce websites with a spurious past, scraping papers from elsewhere in the Interweave or synthesising them with software to create a purported publication history. The result is this mockademic puke-funnel which could not handle the stress of implantation with false memories; it has suffered an identity crisis, and cannot decide whether it is the Journal of Information System[s] Management, JESAM, Assessment of Economic, or Argumenta Oeconomica.

If the stolen ISSN code is any guide, it was intended to impersonate the existing Taylor & Francis journal Information Systems Management, and to extract publication fees from credulous contributors who expect their magna dopera to appear in that slightly more prestidigitous outlet. However, its archives are a crufty shambles; the titles of the putative previous-issue articles are stolen from the real Journal of Environmental Science & Management, while their abstracts are recycled from another scam, the identity-stolen version of the journal Sylwan. As for the text on the website, most of it hails from the real Academica Oeconomica (a mildly grifty newsletter from Wrocław University of Economics). So submitting material here requires a high degree of credulity indeed (or submitters who know perfectly well but don't care that they're consigning their manuscript to a highly-priced rubbish-bin).

The recycling of material from the Sylwan scam suggests that the same grifters are involved. Perhaps the uncertainty as to the title of this venture is because focus-group tests revealed that the acronym JISM lent itself to misunderstandings. Our advice is that they drop the 'Journal' and add 'Zetetic' to the name so they can call it ISZM. That will be $450, please.

It turns out that the emails soliciting contributions for Sylwan and for several other evil-clone identity-stolen journals -- Baltica, Bothalia, Ciência e Técnica Vitivinícola, Jokull, Kasmera, Mitteilungen Klosterneuburg, Revistas Academicas, Wulfenia --  are all sent through the MailChimp spamming service. All provide the same link:

unsubscribe from this list (http://arenaofsciences.us9.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=bbf5dac72c6b63dc9c35d3c00&id=872890027a&e=386f2031de&c=beea8fe88a) 
Science · Wilmington DE 19815 · Wilmington, DE 19815 · USA

While we're being all Scooby-Doo, here's the scammers' "Arena of Sciences"... "World's Pioneer Publishing Corporation"... and an entertaining spectacle it is, a chimera of plagiarised photography and plagiarised text, stitched together and animated by electrical current in the midst of a lightning storm.

Its Archives are minimalist, containing only eight titles about lumps of green putty which some author found in their left armpits; in a commendable display of environmental awareness, they are recycled from (again) Sylwan. Little attempt is made to entice a potential audience into paying $50 each to read these concretions of bafflegab and lucubration, with no Abstracts on offer:

after you make the payment, the username and the password to access the article will be emailed to you within 2days (48 hours)

Our ambitious skinwalkers display a level of optimistic greed that is egregious even by the standards of on-line fraud, asking $400 from authors to add an article to the green-putty collection, and warning them to expect further (open-ended) charges for "Edition costs". The explanation of why potential authors need the benefit of their superior English-language editorial skill is plagiarised.

But wait, there's more! Six more scamsites from the same shapeshifting crew!

Not Jeffrey Beall

Ultimately the grifters present them as 'portals' or 'libraries'. This places them outside the purview of Jeffrey Beall (World's Toughest Milkman Librarian) who focuses on predatory or flatly fraudulent on-line journals. Thus they are fair game for Riddled. Yay team!

Science Route Online

Leading Publishers

Of the seven sites, "Leading Publishers" seems have been cobbled together with most haste and shoddiness and least competence, but it is a close call.

Knowledge Insights

Research Pioneers

The images are scraped from different sources but the copied text is the same in each incarnation. Each site offers a prestigious publishing history of eight titles from Sylwan, and is purportedly helmed by an six-member Editorial Board of optimised diversity (two Anglosaxon-ish surnames, one French, two Eastern European and one Middle Eastern).

More crucially, all seven claim to be operations of the Mellatron Limited Partnership (registered 24/10/14, company registration SL018524).

Pioneer Scientists

Science Borders

Another Kiwi's theory is that what we see here is an experiment in the effect of environment, in the manner of a twin study, to see how much divergence is possible across a cohort of websites with the same business model and the same HTML DNA. "Nietzsche versus nurture" was how he put it.

Being brought to life again meant bringing to life as well all those deeply graven reflexes of his style. He had only to pick up his pen and they overpowered him with easy automatism, no more under his control than the jerk of a finger away from a flame

"The style is the man" as the Comte de Buffoon famously vouchsafed, "Le style c'est l'homme même" (it's not entirely clear what he meant by the bit at the end about memes). Given a choice between the two, it is easier to study the style, which only requires a Goofle search, and also the Ethics committees are less complaisant about dissecting the actual man.

Now sometimes you are exposed to a sentence from a particularly self-unaware shite writer, and a word or phrase catches the eye... a dumbprint which the author is parading which such pride that you just know it will appear again and again in his secretions, in the manner of a damaged letter in typewritten text. Like lipstick on the rim of an unwashed pint glass in the Old Entomologist, or the black thumbprint on each slice of bread-and-butter served by a slovenly landlord, you know it will be back.

Cases in point are Jonah Goldberg and his thumbless grasp and Brecht reference, or "racial fides" and "grandees" in Victor Davis Hanson  Also special commendation to anarthrous occupational nominal premodifiers in Dan Brown novels. Perhaps these barbarous turns of phrase are intended as trademarks to protect the authors' text from unauthorised misuse, much as cartographers individualise their maps with fictitious settlements.

In the present red-flag-flying case a Latin tag is followed by English translation:

the Roman consul Lucius Cassius famously asked, “Cui bono?” (“To whose benefit?”)

I had a sheltered childhood in which this would be an insult to the intelligence of one's audience, and an shortcut to non-invitation back to the High Table. Perhaps the author is from a different milieu. Anyway, the recurrences were easy to find:

New Orleans was a dysfunctional city in a state with famously corrupt and incompetent leadership
“I'm a conservative,” [Jeb Bush] famously said, “but I'm not mad at everybody over it.”
Meryl Streep once testified famously before Congress
Clinton political guru James Carville famously insisted
Anne Morrow Lindbergh famously coined the phrase “wave of the future”
The New York Times famously reported on one instance
Holder famously declared in a speech that America is a “nation of cowards”
Clinton famously refused to acknowledge Barbara Feinman, the ghostwriter of her book
Victor Hugo even more famously declared
In Die Lösung Brecht famously quipped

It is as if the writer owns but the single adverb, which he uses unremittingly, like a brutal Victorian Hackneyed-cabman whipping his poor spavined horse. Are there no Societies for the Prevention of Overuse of Adverbs? Does he have no friends to club together and buy him a second adverb? Thirteen sightings from one book-shaped object:

Vanderbilt famously quipped
Lee Billinger, the president of Columbia University, famously declared
Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist at Harvard, famously found
another famously short egomaniac
Scammon famously defined
Sheryl Crow famously proposed on her Web site
Chesterton famously observed in The Defendant
"Man is born free," Rousseau famously wrote, "but everywhere he is in chains."
Buckley was famously wrong about that
"In religion," Napoleon famously said
"If something cannot go on forever," Herb Stein famously observed, "it will stop."
Robert Ley, head of the Nazi German Labor Front, famously said
When Rabbi Hillel was famously asked to summarize the Torah

I can only hope that should I ever fall into secreting such an unrelieved, featureless stream of wordwooze, then friends and family will let all the air out of my typewriter. The message to his readership seems to be that they lack the education to recognise the fame of each [ quip / declaration / observation / event ] and need the patronising prompt to put them in a suitably reverential frame of mind.

Otherwise I will just blame the Library Pixies for typing the offending words while my attention was distracted elsewhere.

But the Riddled hospitality is unstinting and here's a longer series of sightings from a second collection of pages:

those progressive liberal journalists who famously looked out for the little guy
[Mussolini] famously responded to those who wanted specifics from him
most famously, got the "trains running on time."
Hermann Rauschnigg, an early Nazi who broke with Hitler, [...] famously dubbed
Hitler and countless other soldiers famously protested
[Bismarck] famously told the Reichstag in 1862
Bertrand Russell famously saw through the charade
He bravely fought his condition, most famously at the spa
"Take a method and try it," he famously declared
Roosevelt most famously utlized the radio
"Martial virtues," James famously wrote, "must be the enduring cement" of American society
Roosevelt's inaugural address was famously drenched with martial metaphors
Werner Sombart famously asked
the inexperienced bomb makers famously blew themselves up
JFK famously inherited this ambition from his father
More famously , [Laski] became one of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's [sic] closest friends
"It's my job," Holmes famously declared
[Holmes] concluded by declaring, famously
Isaiah Berlin famously argued that fascism was the progeny of the French reactionary
Ingrid Newkirk, the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, famously declared
Bush is famously pro-immigration
Philip, the famously progressive governor of Wisconsin
Lionel Trilling famously reduced conservatism to a series of "irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas."

Do you think he knows he’s doing that? Maybe it’s a nervous tic or something, an "irritable nervous gesture". Let's wind up with one final example. This one's a twofer. In the absence of proper documentation for the precedence order of adverbial operators, it is not clear how to parse it.

Huey Long famously said -- or allegedly famously said -- that if fascism ever came to America it would be called "Americanism."

Allegedly famously. I'm going to stare at that sentence while it thinks about what it's done wrong.

Lucifer the light

So this oozed out from the Putin-supporting conspirasphere:

[Ukrainian] Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, himself a former legal U.S. resident who has been linked to the crypto-Satanic Church of Scientology 

The passive-mood "has been linked" is a sign of modesty on the author's part, for the main source linking Yatsenyuk and Scientology is in fact that same author:*

Yatsenyuk [...] either dabbled in Scientology or was a full-fledge senior member of the cult, a position known as «Operating Thetan Level 6» or «OT-6».

But here at the Riddled Comparative Religion Department and Peach Teat Wholesalers we are more intrigued by this term "Crypto-Satanism" and would like to subscript to the relevant newsletters. Does the conflation of Satan and cryptography emanate from fundamentalist Christians, as an expression of their fear of the latter? Or conversely, is there perhaps a specific branch within the Satanist movement which holds that Lucifer smiles upon the use of strong cryptography, so that to encrypt one's correspondence is to glorify His divinity? Perhaps images and encomia to Satan are to be encoded within JPG files at pixel level by way of steganography, in the manner of musical backmasking.

"The devil is in the details," Another Kiwi vouchsafed.

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* Madsen also seems to be the creative force behind the "former US resident" assertion.

Quis est iste qui venit?

Often is the question asked, "Who is visiting Riddled?" Followed swiftly by the questions "What are the sick pervs searching for?" and "What can we do to pander to their depraved interests so as to increase the traffic?" Also it is reassuring to check the search-term log and realise that there are people out there around the Interlattice who make our own obsessions and propensities seem healthy in comparison.

So without further ado or adon't, here are the Riddled experts ready to answer your queries while they commute to the office. Unless of course they get distracted by the cardioid deformation grids floating around on the right.

brewing malts explained
The only explanation you need is 'Do not accept the vile Throgmorton's offer of malted rye which "fell off the back of an ambulance"', no matter how cheap; everything else is straightforward. Ignore his blandishments and his assurances that the rye is "ergonomic". Trust us on this.

magnetic surveillance
Oh dear, we appear to be rumbled. Only the other day Another Kiwi and I were remarking at "Odonata of Australasia and Akvavit Blind Tasting Night" at the Old Entomologist, that it's a wonder how we got away with the magnetic surveillance for so long. Using the Schumann Resonance to probe the electrochemical activity of your pineal gland. Now you'll be wearing those special helmets with the ferrite cores and the flanges to block our reception. Oh well, it's a fair cop.

zeus and leda
You do not appear to be clear on the concept of how slash-fic works.

bradstreet ruggiero

You are right, several months have passed since the last time we visited the oeuvres of Marco Ruggiero and Jeff Bradshaw. Varied oeuvres they are, and some might describe Dr Ruggiero as a true Renaissance man, except that there are no images of him naked and spreadeagled on a square / circle geometry. Not that there's anything wrong with liking that sort of thing.

As well as his expertise in diagnosing autism with brain ultrasound scans, curing cancer and yogurt enemas, Ruggiero has also published extensively on cadmium poisoning, which apparently causes breast cancer. And chronic-fatigue syndrome. By fortunate coincidence, cadmium-induced CFS and autism are remediable with the same preparation he uses to cure cancer.

Ruggiero is originally of the "HIV ≠ AIDS" school of maverick denialists, but even among the wider denialist ilk he stands out with his 2009 theory that HIV is actually symbiotic with its human hosts.

Now here at Riddled Research Laboratories we hew to the theory that Serious Academical Posters for presenting theories at conferences can come in a wide range of typefaces, but NOT COMIC SANS. Also NO PAPYRUS. But perhaps the signalling devices are different in Italian academia. Anyway, there is potential for more blogging about the Doctor and his colleagues, but we are not sure whether there is the demand for it. Also I first need to check on "oeuvre"... AK reckons that it means "eggs", which would change the whole meaning of the post.

brandon ballengée
A rising star in the New Zealand Ballet? A brand of footwear? Nope, no idea, you tell us.

mousehunt movie vacuum
You appear to be imagining a re-make of the 1997 movie but relocated to outer space, possibly as part of a mash-up with '2001'. This is a terrible idea, partly because it invites comparison with the Beachball-Alien subplot from "Dark Star" and we do not relish the prospect of a lawsuit from John Carpenter (similar legal concerns explain the absence of any mouse-related episodes in the "Red Dwarf" series), and partly because we do not care to contemplate how much larger Mrs Spat could grow under zero-gravity conditions.

ray bradbury skeleton
Do you suspect us of robbing the revered author's grave and reducing his skeletal remains to 'essential salts'? The thought of using those salts, and blasphemous incantations gleaned from the VIIth Book of Abdul al-Hazmat [supplemented by clues encoded within the the Pnakotic Fragments] to imprison his spirit within an eidolon of flesh, it never crossed our minds. OGTHROD AI'F Let alone a plan to keep that revenant fettered and forced to do our bidding within the catacomb of oubliettes delved beneath the Riddled Headquarters, GEB'L-EE'H, along with the other writers and scholars we have revived in similar manner,
YOG-SOTHOTH 
'NGAH'NG AI'Y ZHRO!
Sorry about the interruptions.

upside downies
This is presumably some Urban Dictionary term with which we are unacquainted, and that is how we intend to remain.

Maximum Acceleration: Not just an Ultravox song title

Australia's Fairfax Media Group is not as large as the Murdoch press empire, nor as aggressively devoted to reducing the intelligence of its readership, but sometimes they try harder in their reportage:

Even so, on early evidence that Soejatman has seen of what happened to QZ8501, the violence of this storm was extreme. It seems to have tossed this 70-tonne, $US90 million marvel of engineering and polymer composites like a toy into the sea at a sense-defying 24,000 feet per second.

In fairness to the trio of Fairfax journamalists responsible for this screed, they were trying to spin a 2200-word spacefiller out of an absence of facts, and current press standards still frown upon entire pages of Lorem Ipsum. Forcing them to cite the opinions of any American self-promoter willing to pose as an "aviation industry consultant".

Ipsum waits for vanity numberplate LOREM

Note also that "feet per second" is not a natural unit of measurement for Australians (where distance is measured in metres and time is measured in half-a-mo's or tinnies). Even so, I am pretty sure that QZ8501 was not travelling at Mach 22.

Bonus self-unawareness from the same sharticle:

The demands on air-safety investigators are enormous in the aftermath of a major crash. The clamour for answers has been exacerbated in the era of social media and 24-hour news, which produces a torrent of often unfounded, but firmly expressed, speculation about the causes of a crash.

UPDATE: Lest anyone think that NZ is a paragon of media accuracy, I should admit that the Fairfax group controls a swathe of papers on this side of the Tasman too. These include the weekly newspaper-shaped object the Sunday Star, which reprinted a version of the "Faces from a lost flight" Sydney Morning Herald story... chopping up the paragraphs but leaving the chimeric blend of units untranslated (metric tonnes, US dollars and imperial ft/sec).

The title has been changed lest it correspond too closely to anything in the text.