The wonder of the tundra #3: Adventures in the book trade

Wait, what? Five days after the nominal date for arriving on the shelves ($140 reduced 15% to $119), a book remains unavailable from the publisher or the usual on-line sources... but Tundra Books can provide a second-hand copy marked down to £282. Perhaps on-demand publication has advanced to the stage of printing used copies.

The book-shaped artefact in question was to have been the subject of a footnote or an Updatage to a recent Riddled episode, but TL;DW. It is totally a sober, balanced weighing of evidence and not a regurging of stovepiped antivax mendacity, despite the second editor's tendency to regard vaccines as the modern equivalent of the Holocaust.

Library pixies ejecting an unwanted book

The Riddled staff are wondering about the market sector that Elsevier thought they were targetting. It may be that they were under the impression that they were handling a scholarly compilation of recent advances on a topic of academic contention, rife with vying researchers who would be queuing for their copies -- or urging university libraries to acquire them. The Riddled library pixies were scornful of this suggestion. $119 is a lot to pay for a 480-page trade paperback with a shiny cover, which is to say an overpriced airport novel. Even if Controversies in Vaccine Safety had included ten detailed exegeses of the intellectual debate, it would still be plenty to pay for a ten-gloss battle.

A due Diligence

Due diligence would have disabused Elsevier of that notion. Contributors to the tome include Vinu Arumugham (on "Vaccine Induced Allergies") whose scholarly credentials consist of falsely presenting himself as a med. student, and paying the egregious shitweasels at OMICS to place on-line one of his essays in cherry-picking. Other, similar exercises are self-published -- if that is the correct term for "listed at Researchgate".

Arumugham's keystone dictum is that all food allergies ensue from prior exposure to the food proteins that Big Pharma adds to vaccines, although this is accompanied by a bodyguard of ad-hoc secondary hypotheses designed to shelter it from harsh disconfirming facts. He has promoted the resulting belief system on discussion boards and skeptic blogs across the Interlattice, with the nyms of APV and Vinucube [possibly chosen as a hommage to the legendary TimeCube]. The commentariat at Respectful Insolence have watched the evolution of his scholium of thought from the beginning, with the multiplication of auxiliary hypotheses... they hope that success will not spoil him, and that he will remember his roots now that he has busted through into the Big Time.

Big Time

More detail on other contributors here and at OggiScienza. But we shouldn't forego the opportunity to point and laugh at David Lewis, Wakefield acolyte who provides the closing Chapter 27 (on "The role of institutional scientific misconduct").

Lewis is best-known for pimping a set of bowel-biopsy pathology reports that had somehow been left in his possession, in the belief that they would vindicate Wakefield's "MMR-Vaccine-causes-autism" grift, when in fact they provided proof of his fraud (for this well-meaning dumb-arsed exercise in rat-fucking, Lewis is respected in antivax circles as a 'whistle-blower'). He put the cherry atop his reputation by arguing that journalist Brian Deer is really a cats-puppet and a sock-paw for Big Pharma's war aganst Wakefield -- for there was no way that a mere journalist could understand so well the medical complexities of the accusations against Wakefield.
Lewis' own qualification is in sewage management.

You can't buy that book here, sir

Ideally, then, Brian Deer would be the reviewer for Controversies. But as was noted supra, publication has been delayed... for a few weeks, according to one supplier, though the publishers have elsewhere been quoted as intending a permanent delay.

There remains only the mystery of Tundra Books' used copy for sale. Nick Brown has reported another occurrence of this Amazon affiliate -- a residential address in Seville -- trying to sell a purportedly-used but marked-up copy of a book not yet in physical existence. This seems to be part of their business model.

One possible explanation involves the words "stupidity tax"... a scam that only becomes apparent when there are no extant copies of the new copies they on-sell, ostensibly pre-loved and doubled in price. But I prefer to believe that they are borrowing (or will borrow at some point in the future) the Riddled time machine.

I remain unconvinced that the city needs a theme bar inspired by the early-Renaissance 'Urine Wheel' tradition

As is always the case, no-one listens to Uncle Smut.

Executive orders concerning trade in the Oval Office

"By the 'Quid-pro-Quo' Presidential Order of March 31, 2017, acts that were previously known as 'Bribery and corruption' shall henceforward be officially described as 'Trade'."

Bonus senility:

Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?

Any number of months have passed since Another Kiwi informed the eager Riddled readership about the exciting and lottery-based nature of drinking the tapwater in Havelock North. Now you are probably asking yourself many questions, like "What's really in these Cornish Pasties from Mrs Miggins' Pie Shop?" and "How about an update?" For AK has been silent on recent developments in the story, and it may be that he has been nobbled or his silence has been bought by Big Water, although I am more inclined to suspect the involvement of Big Gin.

Now we are focused here on the Heretaunga Plains, where --  if I may quote a bottled-water company --

Three major rivers cross the plains; the Ngaruroro, the Tukituki and the Tutaekuri.

But no-one of any sense drinks water from these rivers because before they pass by the Cities of the Plains they trickle through dairy-farm country. Suffice to say that "Tutaekuri" translates into the English as "dog shit". I am not making this up. Instead we rely upon artesian wells and akvavit, in Hastings at any rate (how they cope in Napier does not bear thinking about).

By "Recent developments" I refer of course to the GNS report:

Yesterday Hastings District Council released a report from GNS Science, which revealed water - some as young as a month old - had been found in its bores.

"Water in the bores", you are thinking, "that sounds good, it's the very thing they're looking for, like finding a lump of coal in a coal mine", feel free to think this in a Peter Cook voice. But a word was elided there... they refer specifically to under-aged water finding its way into the pipes, and in this particular situation, it seems, when dealing with water, fresh is not necessarily best. Water improves with age, in the manner of wine and Old Scythe-Sharpener Beer-Flavoured Beverage and AK's jokes, preferably decades. So this is not a desirable situation.

"Clearly what it means is that for the first time we can now show it is new [water], something has dramatically changed in the aquifer and there is new water entering what were traditionally very secure supplies."

Borewater may be hallucinogenic

The reason for the change is uncertain.

this could suggest levels of water abstraction - the taking of water from the aquifer for irrigation, industrial use, municipal water supply and other purposes - might be having an influence on the aquifers...

In retrospect it could be that Hastings was not the optimal location to set up a $2mill factory pumping out 900,000 m³ / year from the aquifer to ship to China for the bottled-water industry.

Timely Oglaf is timely

Last night's "Notochord homologs in the Pterobranchia and Haiku Slam Night" at the Old Entomologist turned somehow into a brainstorming benefit night, as we thought of new illustrations that the Miracle Water company might want to use on its labels for future shipments.

AFTERTHOUGHT:

Oh, Edmund, can it be true, that I hold here in my mortal hand a nugget of purest green?

Click to embiggen

1. We are not in the habit of classifying chemical reactions according to their location along the visible spectrum, but I have to say that 'green chemistry' sounds like something that the Riddled Laboratory should look into. Especially if it involves absinthe. Chartreuse, not so much.

But flattered though we are by the invitation to avail this offer and share our scientific excellences (and interact with world class professionals), we cannot help notice that the Esteemed Congress is one of a string of anal beads Esteemed Congresses organised -- by professionally for scientists! -- at the same hotel. Almost as if its only purpose is to fill a few over-priced hotel rooms in a festering apocalyptic hellhole (surely Dubai cries out for the Enema Tube of God) and extract some money from academic wannabees who cannot handle the normal 'peer-review', 'minimum standards' aspect of padding their CVs. It has reinforced our determination to get into the whole Predatory Scamference grift.

"Hemanth Kumar" would not be so sanguine with his suggestion that we 'revert back' to unsubscribe, if he had witnessed that time we put Another Kiwi in the Evolvamat with the controls set in reverse. The brow ridges were bad enough, and the gill-slits, but the Lemurian Appendix was particularly disturbing.

2. Readers, both of you, may also enjoy the “Global Biotechnology Congress”. This is a curiously Janus-faced entity; it also pimps itself out under the name of “Drug Discovery and Therapy World Congress”. The DDTWC occupies the same lecture rooms at the same time as the GBC -- with the same speakers and the same programs -- in an apparent violation of Pauli's Exclusion Principle.

It sounds all prestigious n' shit until one finds the GBC website specifying “Bentham Science” as its media partner, and promising to stovepipe the proceedings straight to a Bentham journal, Bentham Science Publishers having earned a certain fame as tireless spamming predatory scum. Closer inspection reveals the organiser of GBC / DDTWC to be Eureka Science, Bentham's copy-editing section and marketing arm, who use the same network and domain for blasting out the spam.

Naturally we wonder, as we target our own business plan and clientele, what kind of plonker falls for these scams?

Now there is a name to conjure. Dr Lee first came to the attention of Riddled as an advocate / salesman of green tea for curing cancer. In dogs. Allowing us to use the "Novelty Teapots" tag. Note that we strongly oppose the administration of green tea to animals... especially to demonic red-eyed invisible monkeys, as its side-effects include hallucinations of sober Church-of-E clergymen.

Lee is also noted for inventing a new 99%-TAQ-polymerase-free form of PCR. It has many advantages, such as identifying fragments of DNA in situations where standard methods cannot detect it, e.g. bound (in an aberrant, non-double-helix configuration) to the aluminium-salt excipients in vaccines. The DNA in this covert form travels to the brain and kills the vaccine recipient. The existence of this "non-B-conformation" is proven beyond doubt by the double-secret-probation invisibility of the DNA under other forms of scrutiny.

Lee has battled the scientific establishment with lawsuits and appellatory petitions, on account of the establishment's refusal to mandate (and franchise) his proprietary method as the standard test for Lyme Disease, Human Papilloma Virus and (more recently) Ebola. Indeed, it was the refusal of mainstream science to publish his papers that forced him to deposit them in pay-to-print jizz-bucket journals from SCIRP. He is, however, popular and much-run-after in anti-vaccine circles.*

3. If you appreciated the GBC, you'll love the 2014 CALRB Symposium... organised by the Coalition Against Lyme and Related Borrelioses. This was intended to pressure US legislators to recognise the hidden prevalence of Lyme Disease, and fund wider testing (preferably using Sin Hang Lee’s proprietary PCR technology). It attracted some attention from Chronic-Lyme skeptics. Nevertheless the advertisements paid press-releases flew as thick as lawsuits cherry petals in spring:

The Coalition Against Lyme and Related Borrelioses, Inc. (CALRB), a non-profit organization which promotes science based Lyme disease testing and research, agrees with Dr. Lee’s approach, said Kevin Moore, president and executive director of CALRB.

Moore’s enthusiasm for Dr Lee is not enormously surprising, for when he isn’t Presidenting over TOTALLY GRASS-ROOTS organisations like CALRB, he is "Media Relations Director for Milford Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory", which is to say Lee’s business partner / press agent. While the CALRB website (shuttered and blank, now that it has fulfilled its purpose) was set up by Jessica Vigliotti -- Lee’s erstwhile laboratory employee and co-author.

We in Riddled Research are impressed by this concept of taking on a press agent as one's closest research associate, and we would hire one ourselves, except Evangeline van Holsterin (chief barmaid at The Old Entomologist) informs us that her vile nephew Throgmorton is currently living in the past, having borrowed the Riddled time machine. Other applicants for the post are invited.

4. Oh Great Gazoogle, speak to us of Lee's Lyme-diagnosis business “Milford Molecular Diagnostics”!

Veritable Parade

There turns out to be a veritable parade of press releases heralding that lab’s capabilities, and lavishing praise upon Sin Hang Lee’s world-shaking accomplishments. He is especially proud to be Invited Speaker at Prestigious Meetings which prove to be bogus mockademic get-togethers, sad little money-extraction exercises from scammers and grifters at OMICS. It may well be that Lee pays the press agencies to pump announcements out through their websites every time he flushes the toilet. But his attendance at a conference is a useful gauge of its quality, so his career is not completely without value to science.

5. In further Green Tea / novelty-teapot news,

Don’t put balls of tea-leaves in your vagina.

I had been under the impression that a 'pessary' was a variety of wild pig, so it is good to be corrected on this point.

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* Dr Lee is currently back in the news, where "news" is a term of art meaning "websites of shouty people with a fondness for magical thinking and CAPITAL LETTERS". He has sent out an Open Letter to Dr. Margaret Chan of WHO, petitioning her to question the scientific consensus about the Gardasil vaccine, as it conflicts with his own science.

Evidently someone in NZ used the Official Information Act to obtain several hundred e-mails (centred on a NZ inquest in which antivaxxers blamed Gardasil for a death), and passed them on to Lee. He was unable to find any sign of malfeasance in them so his 16-page letter consists of dark hints as to what might have been in the redacted parts of the e-mails, complaints about the disrespect paid to his own unreplicated results, and unsupported allegations which Someone Should Investigate.

Understandably, the shouty people do not attempt to summarise Lee’s letter, as that would reveal its gaseous nature; they settle for hinting at its contents, a kind of meta-hint built on Lee’s own insinuendoes.

This will not be in the final exam.

UPDATE: isn't this timely? From today's fishwrap:

The backstory of this regrettably insider-baseball saga is that back in 2012 an inquest was held. The parents of a young woman were inclined to lay the blame for her death upon her Gardasil vaccinations, so they called in the Cluedo team of Drs Chris Shaw and Sin Hang Lee to run some uncontrolled tests and present their heterodox "Viral-DNA contamination, in the library, with the aluminium" theories of causation. And great was the revelling among vaccine alarmists.

Here at Riddled we do not rate for insider baseball, on account of the broken windows; it turns out to work better as an outdoors game. Anyway, various New Zealand doctors were too polite to say "This is all my bum" and found more diplomatic ways of expressing the same idea, which is why they were invited to testify at the inquest and I was not.

Coroner Garry Evans retired at the end of last year, but he must still be clearing his desk, and only now released his findings on the case. He does not even dignify Shaw and Lee's theories to the extent of citing them by name.

The dream will soon turn sour

Here at the Mad Scientist Anti-Defamation League we were intrigued by this recent paper in Frontiers Neuroscience:

Not so much by the content, which is so non-controversial that one wonders why the authors paid Frontiers to publish it. It is devoid of interesting ethical violations or explorations into forbidden knowledge, being (a) an acceptance of the mainstream position on autism (genetic origins, non-environmental, early development, yadda yadda), and (b) an exercise in spinning the authors' own previous paper (featuring the misuse of an ultrasound scanner) so as to stake out precedence over a recent report in Nature. More intriguing is the second affiliation.

Inquiring minds found themselves wondering what aspects of oneiric mastery they investigate at Dream Master Laboratory. Lucid Waking? Dream Theory in Malaya? Quests to Unknown Kadath?

If the lab is named after Zelazny's novel, it will involve the advanced neuroimaging / virtual-reality technology that allows a psychotherapist to enter and reshape a patient's dream -- though at the risk of becoming enmeshed in the dream if its narrative is sufficiently engaging, unable to emerge.* Perhaps featuring an ultrasound scanner for the neuroimaging.

Imagine, then, the depths of our disappointment upon discovering an absence of cutting-edge research, and even of analytical testing. For despite its aspirational title, Dream Master Laboratories is simply an importing agency, bringing Chinese green tea,** pomegranate extract, and milk-thistle extract into the US. Perplexingly, the trading address -- in a suburb of Phoenix, AZ -- appears to be a vacant lot.

Conceivably DM Lab is a branch, or street name, for the company Dream Master Llc (laboratory-free!), based a few blocks away in the suburb of Chandler. DM-Llc is in turn part of John Anderson's food-supplement multilevel-marketing Isagenix operation. If so, then the tea imported by DM-Lab and DM-Llc is presumably organic and anti-oxidant. Anderson's address (and that of Isagenix, and DM Llc), was used by Ruggiero to register Bacterix Llc, which is the American recension of his business trading in therapeutic yoghurt. The shared address may not harbour laboratory facilities but it looks to have many compensatory advantages.

(Anderson's main gig is in weight-loss products, i.e. low-calorie substitutes for food, but he is also a partner in Bill Andrews' herbal-telomerase immortality pills. As a child, in a church in Utah, he learned of the mission and divine calling that God had for him, which was to make a lot of money selling pills through affinity marketing).

In other Ruggiero-related news, Dora at HIVForum reports his admirably skeptical assault on the worthless snake-oil variously known as GcMAF, MAF, VDBP and EF-022. Variously sold in such forms as suppositories, injections, homeopathic skin creams, and therapeutic yogurt.

Ruggiero informs us that people had been diagnosed with cancer using an equally worthless "Nagalase" test, so their dramatic recoveries from cancer after GcMAF treatment were simply fraudulent.

It is as if he has awakened from a bad dream... a dream in which he swore blood-brotherhood with frauds, and treated cancer patients with GcMAF in Noakes' clinic after testing their Nagalase levels, while he and his students found themselves signing their names to a whole series of papers pimping GcMAF for all it is worth as a dramatic death-bed cure for cancers, autism, HIV, CFS, and cadmium poisoning.

But can he really wake up? Perhaps he is enmeshed in the fantasy... or has he just entered another layer of dream where the nightmare continues?
Perhaps his affiliation is a cry for help.

* This is a familiar trope in fiction and cinema, but it was novel 50 years ago when Zelazny published.

Dream Master is notable for the engrossingly Arthurian dream narrative Zelazny constructed, mashed up with plot elements from Parzifal and Tristan***, and I will wager many shiny milk-bottle-tops upon my certainty that Zelazny had a well-thumbed copy of Campbell's "Creative Mythology" open beside his typewriter as he worked.

** Green tea is known to have deleterious side-effects.

*** The plot of Tristan & Isolde is also recycled in Harness' Firebird. Are there any other SF appearances?

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Belatedly UPDATED with bonus Dream Theory in Malaya. Mrs Cheryl Anderson proves to be inadequately briefed on the difference between Dream Master Laboratory [fictive existence, for Export-Import purposes only] and Dream Master Llc [actual legal entity], and takes photographs in KL as Personal Executive Assistant to the former.

Let the record show that the Riddled Dream Machine was not involved in the preparation of this post.