Every day is Irony Day

1. Hawkes Bay dairy farmers complain that someone upstream is polluting their river.

"You can't go fishing in that, can't go swimming in that, it's a disgrace really. Stock can't drink it and pumps can't pump it," Jarden said.*

HA HA HA. The Minister for Dairy Farming Primary Produce needs to explain to them that whenever someone else's profits require the river turning brown, then clean water is a luxury that we simply can't afford.

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2. In a recent report, Miller and Wager cherry-picked three examples of dodgy non-peer-reviewed GMO alarmism -- including our old friend Gilles-Éric Séralini -- to demonstrate that all opposition to GMO technology is driven by conflicts of interest and intellectual dishonesty.

Another trend, related and equally worrisome, is the increasing frequency of publication of the results of flawed “advocacy research” that is designed to give a false result that supports a certain cause or position and can be cited by activists long after the findings have been discredited. The articles are often found in the predatory open-access journals.

Miller and Wager are concerned that shabby but superficially-scientific junk-journals are being used by hacks and charlatans to provide their conclusion-driven propaganda with a sheen of academic plausibility, stovepipe it into political debate, and create mocktroversies out of consensus. This is all very well, but their chosen vehicle for their concerns was National Review.

No-one could have predicted that the NR comment thread would quickly devolve into a competition among the readers to see who could shout “Global Climate Change is a Fraud!!” most loudly.

H/t Jeffrey Beall, Retraction Watch

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3. There is no #3.

* Should note in the interests of scrupulous fairness that James Jarden is not necessarily a cow-cockie himself; if memory serves, he and Jamie are sheep farmers.