"Roach Motels, Hotel California, and the Noakes-Ruggiero 'First Immune' clinic in Bussigny.""I'll take 'Places where one checks in but never leaves alive' for $250, Alex"

We have not looked in on Marco Ruggiero lately to check on his recent contributions to the parasitical publishing ecosystem, or which jurisdictions he is currently avoiding.

To recall, younglings, that the last time Professor Ruggiero came under the benignly protective gaze of the Mad Scientist Anti-Defamation League, a panaceal blend of lipids, polysaccharides and Vitamin D had emerged from his workshop, superceding all his previous immortalising products (including previous blends of lipids, polysaccharides and Vitamin D).



There were lingering doubts that imuno® genuinely came with Ruggiero's imprimatur and colophon and foolscap, for distribution was limited to Naturalsolutions.nz, whose relationship to truth is fraught at the best of times and at the worst the subject of a restraining order. It also remained to be seen whether imuno® would wreak its all-curative miracles by inducing quantum entanglement and relativistic time-dilation effects at the level of cellular chromatin, as was claimed of Klotho Immortalis (that being Ruggiero's most recent product, and totally not a character in a coming installment of The Chronicles of Riddick).

Riddled radar

What brought our friend back onto the radar was the BBC coverage of the Persecution and Execution Imprisonment by the Southwark Crown Court of David Noakes. Much water and medicinal yoghurt has flowed under the bridge since Noakes and Ruggiero were camaradas in the GcMAF Skirmishes, jointly treating cancer patients for financial hypertrophy in a Swiss clinic. But enough connection remains to subject you to BBC prose stylings, which lie limp and recumbent across the screen, unwilling to task readers with more than one sentence per paragraph for fear of stack overflow and coredump:

Noakes, who now lives in Dover in Kent, first encountered GcMAF in 2009, he said, after attending a conference at the University of Ghent while working for ING Bank in Belgium.
The chance encounter would change his life, leading him to take the blood product in 2010 and curing six minor ailments, he claimed in court.
By 2011 he had set up a lab with the aim of producing GcMAF, teaming up with scientists in the UK and the University of Florence in Italy.

Scientists at the University of Florence in Italy

The framing is that of Noakes' defense."A conference at the University of Ghent" sounds serious and academic, more so than "conspiracy impresario Ian R Crane ranting about Big Pharma's genocide agenda at an conspiracist scamboree".

It is also a stretch to describe his lab technicians Rodney Smith and Lynda Thyer (née Banks) as 'scientists in the UK'. Smith's chief qualification for operating an high-affinity chromatography blood-protein-separation facility in a Cambridgeshire barn was his previous half-share in Meridian Brewery, while Thyer's qualification for certifying the separated protein was being the sister of Trevor Banks and Leslie Hutchings (née Banks) -- also employed by Noakes as social-media infiltrators / influencers (in a subplot of the whole intricate saga, they later went off the reservation with their own competing GcMAF scam).

I am disappoint that the BBC skipped over this dynastic aspect of Mr Noakes' legal adventures, all laid out as they are in archival Riddled coverage, though that might have required paragraphs of two or even three paragraphs. I console myself by calling the younglings' attention to the Whackyweedia entry on Mr Noakes. Does its post-February recension draw heavily upon Riddled investigations? I like to think it does. VINDICATION.

Noakes runs the website EUTruth.org,^[3] and since 2007 has published the free monthly newspaper Westminster News,^[54] in which he claimed that Zionists and the German company Siemens control the BBC. He has promoted theories about the Illuminati.^[55]

Lede, buried

Let us go back to the trial itself, which is buried within this post, which means that it is probably the lede. Truly the excitement has reached fever-pitch at Southwark Crown Court, with Noakes and his little team of helper elves parsing their sentences in one courtroom, while friend-of-Riddled El Coyote was witnessing an equally hilarity-ensuing trial down the corridor. All that was missing was an appearance from the Twelve Red-Bearded Dwarfs.

Now Noakes had pled pleaded guilty, but the prosecution and defense teams could not concur on some questions of material fact, leaving them for Judge Lorraine-Smith to adjudicate. For instance:

GcMAF: David Noakes 'no scientist', court hears

Does this mean that Noakes contended that he was a scientist? As night follows day, as merciful oblivion follows three pints of Gleamhound's Sobriety Draught, the corollary seems to follow. Alas, there is more to Sciencing than (1) paying the staff to dress up in labcoat cosplay and write a lot of fabricated bafflegab, and (2) signing your name to their word-dumps before paying parasite-publishers to host them on journal-shaped garbage-scow websites. That just makes you an advertiser.

As Dora has helpfully explained [warning: Italian], Mr Noakes' trial dwelled solely on the legality of his business model of extracting and selling a product he believed to be GcMAF... not about the scientific basis of the miraculous claims he made on its behalf ("It is not GcMAF that is on trial"). This is why he was granted only 15 months of Her Majesty's hospitality, rather than the half-decade or so that a more truth-centric conviction might have incurred. One can only hope that he will appeal the sentence out of injured amour propre (and because prison is no place for a gentleman, even it is not that ultimate horror, a French prison) and give the Prosecution a chance to revisit it.

So anyway, after that brief Noakes-themed anabasis, we find our way back to Marco Ruggiero and imuno®, amid joyful shouts of θαλασσα, θαλασσα! In company with Stefania Pacini (Mrs Professor), Marco has so far extruded two communiques about the new product:

A Novel potential Adjuvant for Cancer Vaccines

Rationale for the design of a novel tool for immunotherapy based on an emulsion of glycosaminoglycan

The spigot for the former was "Madridge Journal of Vaccines" (editor: M. Ruggiero) -- Madridge [Interconnecting Scientific World] being chancers in Hyderabad who have adopted a tent as their emblem, inspired by its associations of rapid untraceable overnight departures. The latter pukenozzle was "Integrative Cancer Science and Therapeutics" from OAText, more Hyderabad competitors with OMICS. In their determination to out-do OMICS in the field of shameless larceny, the latrine-sloths and shitweasels at OAText have taken to stealing the identities of less-fraudulent but defunct journals... though that is material for another blogpost, mentioned now only as reflecting on the calibre of people who share Ruggiero's stratum.

The points of difference between the new product and the now-deprecated rerum® are (1) the substitution of phosphatidylcholine for oleic acid, and (2) the elimination of Heinz Reinwald (part-owner of rerum IP) from a share of the business. The claims for imuno® have not changed; like rerum, it is protean in nature, a food supplement and a wrinkle-removing face cream and a cure for cancer / autism / chronic fatigue and a floor-wax and a dessert topping.

Tags in webstore source-code

<meta name="description" content="Buy GcMAF and imuno. Cancer Immunotherapy Support. Cancer Treatment Natural Support. Evidence based natural method. Complementary Cancer Support. GcMAF." />

<!-- Document Title ============================================= --> <title>imuno | Rerum | GcMAF | Cancer | Autism | Chronic Fatigue</title>



The two papers try to stay modest and circumspect, presenting imuno® as an immune-response-boosting adjuvant for as-yet-nonexistent cancer vaccines (much as rerum was to be an adjuvant for DNA-based AIDS vaccines that might emerge into the medscam market). However, Pacini and Ruggiero could not restrain their natural ebullience for long and the OAText advertorial went off the reservation into a rationale whereby imuno® controls one's cellular DNA by way of radio transmission. I am not making this up:

Also 'negentropy' and 'supramolecular structure' and 'protocellular bilayer membranes' and sundry other Worship Words. This novel and stimulating concept of "radio communication with DNA" is an established part of Ruggiero's performative repertoire.

imuno® is produced in New Zealand -- "manufactured in a government certified facility by Imuno Corporation" * -- presumably by Michael Kelly, who also distributes the stuff through imuno.biz and naturalsolutions.nz. Inquiries into ownership lead (for whatever jurisdictional reasons) to an accountant's office in Port Vila, Vanuatu -- also the source of an application for the 'Imuno' trademark. Neither the NZ nor the Vanuatu company registers show any record of an "Imuno Corporation".

The supply chain has branched out into a network. There are US distributors now!

"Oxygen Health Systems" may be familiar to readers. It is one of numerous grifty little cookie-cutter medscam webstores mass-produced by one Michael Carroll, and receiving quizzical attention from the FDA. "What keeps bringing me back to the GcMAF market is the high calibre of individuals one thereby encounters".

* Coincidentally, Noakes' GcMAF was "made in highly professional sterile laboratories to standards superior than those required by GMP".

[H/t Dora]

“It almost does feel like one of those teenage trends that happen,” he said. “One juvenile seal did this very stupid thing and now the others are trying to mimic it.”

This seal is how I feel about 2018.

The scientists have removed "three or four" eels from juvenile monk seals' nostrils over the past two years, mostly in the last few months. The seals are fine. The eels died.*

“It’s just so shocking,” Claire Simeone, a veterinarian and monk seal expert based in Hawaii, told The Washington Post on Thursday. “It’s an animal that has another animal stuck up its nose.”

It is only shocking, Hawaiian monk-seal expert, because you spent your youth in some unproductive way when you could have been listening to re-runs of "I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again".



*It's the opening of the seventh seal that we have to worry about.

A chariot will take me to The Valley of the Kings #2

Rowland Emett, 'Borg Warner Car of the Future':

Cornelius Bos, Grotesque Triumphal Chariot (1552) [h/t Peacay @ Bibliodyssey]

Just coincidence?

[previous chariot-related material]

Futurological Congress

"AcademicSera" are the plural of "AcademicSerum" - a biological elixir designed to transform the recipient into a tenured professor. Perhaps the AcademicSera are extracted from older academics, in a needlessly painful process that involves boiling and pressure (one of the less-profitable activities of the Abrasax clan), but that would be speculation.

Each bottle of Academicserum requires the
harvesting of 100 Emeritus Professors

This is by way of introduction to the riveting topic of Mockademic Conference Tourism. Curb your excitement!

Congress predation

All the cool kids have been investigating and exposing the fraudulence of Congress Predators like WASET and BIT, and carrying on as if discovering a novel phenomenon. Or blogging about the torrent of scammy invitation spam inundating their in-trays. Heaven knows, there is much to blog about, for conference-predation is clearly lucrative and most parasite-publishers have diversified to latch onto the money-teat (even the most pathetic and sub-barrel-bottom ones). Or preparing checklists of "Tell-tale signs of parasitical publishers", and keynote-speaking on that theme at scamference offshoots of parasitical publishers.

What is forgotten in this trend is the happy complicity of many of the customers, for whom an overseas holiday thinly veiled as 'Conference Attendance' is an accepted part of their remuneration package, compensating for their risible salaries. The production-line conference mills serving their particular market are lower in profile, for they do not need to choke the interducts with their invitation spam (though they may spam anyway)... the customers are already committed, and all they want for $mas is a list of travel destinations to pick from.

The outcome has been the emergence of three niches in the vibrant ecosystem of junk-scholarship support. Niche #1 is occupied by the conference mills themselves, like Academicsera or the equally-egregious ResearchFora:



Behold the scope of their hard work and dedication to their cause: eleven International Conferences booked in Auckland (NZ) for January 5th alone, on a diversity of disparate topics (ranging from Sports Nutrition, ICSNS to Genetics of Wildlife, ICBPGW by way of Finance and Accounting, ICEFA); and this is only one city from one country. The mill must work around the clock, staff delving into Scrabble bags for newly randomised arrangements of letters to present as each meeting's theme and scholarly body.



The function room at the Surrey Motel could become a scene of interdisciplinary eclecticism, as they simultaneously strive

to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results about all aspects of $SCAM. It also provides the premier interdisciplinary forum for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns, practical challenges encountered and the solutions adopted in the fields of $SCAM.

...Unless each specialty observes the fiction that the other 10 are somehow invisible. Assuming that any of the attendees bother to turn up to speak or to pin up a poster.

The same applies to the convention convergence the following day, when 10 meetings ranging in number from the 411th International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture (ICLLC) to the 519th International Conference on Recent Advances in Medical and Health Sciences (ICRAMHS) fight for supremacy in the Functions Room of the Anglesea Motel in Hamilton, grabbing the microphone and the remote control for the PPT projector from one another in an unseemly brawl, all under the auspices of AcademicsWorld. Or the next day on the 7th: the turn of the James Cook Hotel in Wellington to host the 459th International Conference on Vehicular, Mobile and Wearable Technology (ICVMWT), the 527th International Conference on Medical and Health Sciences (ICMHS), and four other concurrent, equally garbage creations from the "International Society for Engineering Research and Development".

The Keynote Speakers for these Potemkin events are always "To be Announced Soon", while the Definite Program Schedules are equally unlikely to ever congeal; attendees already know that the events are frauds, so why waste effort making them look halfway credible? But the clientele do need some plausible pretense of documentation that they can show to their universities, so as part of the deal they buy a personalised Letter of Invitation. Also too, an entry in a Proceedings webpage.

Inside a Conference Mill

Which brings us to Niche #3. It also contains the DigitalXplore archive, but I would rather focus on the World Research Library, for the sake of its title of grandiose, Alexandrian aspirational scope. Just look at the different conference franchises whose Proceedings-shaped word-dumps are hosted there! It is ecumenical and non-partisan, accommodating AcademicSera and ResearchFora and the whole tangled thicket of acronymic competition.

The name and web-address used to belong to the Wood-Sutton counter-globalization World Research Library (described in SourceWatch), but the domain lapsed at some point between 2007 and 2015 and fell into the hands of entrepreneurs.

This leaves Niche #2, which we have already met in passing, for it houses the commercial conference-listing services, where an alluring panoply of tourism destinations parade before the discriminating consumer. Services like ConferenceAlerts, and another ConferenceAlerts, and AllConferenceAlert.

This proliferation of niches and websites may seem cluttered and bewildering, but do not fear: the entangled ecosystem of competition and symbiosis is simpler than at sight. It turns out that all the rival conference-mills, and all the listing services, and all the Proceedings repositories enjoy close propinquity in a suburb of Bhubaneswar (Odisha state):



This must facilitate the flow of freshly-generated Conference details from the mills to the listing agencies.

In a more dispositive detail, they are all subserved by a single IP address:

Which is to say, they are branches of just one business (or extruded pseudopods, if you prefer a more amoebic metaphor). The "IEEEconference" part of the operation is short for "Industrial Electronics and Electrical Engineers", and the possibility of a confusion with the prestigious meetings held by the "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers" is unintended and unfortunate.

However, we have only scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg. There are, in fact, other groups of conference-mill / repository / tourism symbioses. "AllConferenceAlert" lists hundreds of Scrabble-bag-named and equally-phony excuses to visit New Zealand (to pick a tourism destination at random) each month, churned out from a different network of production lines. In this case, "Academic Research Library" is the Potemkin Write-Only Archive for pretend-publishing the proceedings.

One could excuse all this, since the money-losing victim of this empire of scam is the Indian university funding system, but their use of Algerian in the logo is hard to forgive.

That dumpster fire repository is also used by ARDA International. And ASAR (the Association for Scientific and Academic Research), and "Academic World Research". These were spawned as part of an empire of congress generators and listing sites, centred on Technoarete Headquarters (which is to say Flat 4A, Girija Apartments in Chennai), largely registered by "Technoarete Research And Development Association". All are worth a visit for the quaintness of their English:

World academics since emergence of science has always been in need of excellent colloque where pioneers of science can exchange their knowledge and innovation. Cutting edge technology expands with rigorous interaction and sharing of knowledge and experience.

...but bored now, and leaving them as an exercise for the equally-bored reader. You get the general picture of the scale of spurious science. The yearly production of wholly bogus events from Indian assembly lines - all simply to facilitate and profit from the tourism needs of South Asian academia - must number well into six figures.

When assembly lines go wrong

Will no-one think of the carbon footprint?

[Thx John Chen for inspiration and lynx]