Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! By this point you probably figured I had given up and gone to the secret flu recovery vacation hospital (recently vacated by Senate candidate James Talarico). Some of you may not have survived. But your author is here, not invisible. I was actually crossing the country, recovering from flu (better today), but dealing with unstable airplane internet (which renders rapid research impossible), laptop batteries that were draining 3x faster than advertised, no charging ports, and so on. Fortunately I enjoy a challenge. I was also closing in on the heroically named John Wayne airport. I couldn’t wait to find out whether it lives up to that name. (It didn’t. It was fine.) Although research lagged, it gave me a little more writing time before the lights went out, and so I have two terrific stories for you: first, what might really be going on behind the puzzling, last-minute lawsuit against California for refusing an equally last-minute election integrity request; and the latest, wildest, most operatic, most fraudulent covid study story to date. Thanks a lot, science.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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Yesterday, the Associated Press blandly reported, “Trump administration sues California to block state from counting alleged noncitizen mail-in ballots.”
On Tuesday, the DOJ sent Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan a password-protected thumb drive. According to DOJ, the USB drive held a spreadsheet with 20,000 voters who Homeland Security believed may potentially be illegal aliens. Since California law requires every registered voter to automatically get a mailed ballot, at least 20,000 ineligible voters may have gotten one.
Even for Democrat critics who keep sneering “super rare,” 20,000 would be a lot.
So DOJ wanted Registrar Logan to temporarily “sequester” any cast ballots or mailed ballots from anyone on the list, pending further review, until we can get this thing sorted out. It should have been a boring interagency request.
But this boring interagency request did not go smoothly. It ran into resistance. It found fear.
Registrar Logan quickly became terrified by the DOJ’s USB memory stick. He didn’t want to touch it. He didn’t really even want to look at it. He let it lie on his desk, right where it had dropped from his nerveless fingers, on top of this week’s “Daily Worker” personals section. He considered calling in the LAPD Bomb Disposal Squad and getting a robot to clear the memory stick off his desk.
“Election offices do not just stick thumb drives into their technology, for very good reason,” Logan told the AP. It seems he suspects the DOJ may have sent him a spyware stick, raising profound questions about his mental health and where this country is headed.
The DOJ’s letter tried to reassure Registrar Logan. It tried to reason with him. It clarified it was not asking for anyone’s vote to be canceled, just for him to segregate the ballots of suspected noncitizens on the list until they could be verified. They wanted to be sure. “Even one noncitizen vote cancels out the ballot of an American citizen and undermines our elections,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin explained.
After deliberations were interrupted by the state’s official lunch siesta, California’s officials regrouped and returned a formal reply on state stationery, which stated, and I quote: “No, amigos. ¡Se imposiblé! Lo siento mucho, vaya con Díos, y mucho amor. ¡Viva Mexico!”
Yesterday, following the letter’s 48-hour deadline, the DOJ sued California.
🗳️ California’s oleaginous Governor Gavin “Coiffure” Newsom reacted … with sadness. “This is a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day.”
But his bleating revealed more than he intended, I think. What did he mean by, “suppressed?”
Who, governor, would be ‘suppressed’? How suppressed? Because it seems like he’s suggesting that illegal aliens might be discouraged from voting —illegally, mind you— owing to their legitimate fears of getting arrested and shipped back to the barrio. To Gov. Newsom, that is “intimidation” and “voter suppression.”
To everyone else, that is excellent work.
In other words, the DOJ’s lawsuit is probably much less significant for any prospects that a judge will do anything useful at this point, three weeks out. On the other hand, it is a very helpful message. It broadcasts to the ‘immigrant community’ that the DOJ has a list. And, after all, the list has at least 20,000 names on it, and nobody knows exactly who that includes.
If any illegal alien on that list casts a ballot, it could be quickly found out. It might take two days, two weeks, or two months. But it could easily be interpreted as an invitation for an ICE visit. In that sense, I think Newsom is right. This might suppress voters. Illegal voters.
Though many noncitizens seem to hold strong opinions about U.S. politics, just as we citizens do, they might want to consider sitting this one out. If not, they should at least remain dignified when border patrol shows up later. Take their medicine like hombres.
🗳️ In related news, yesterday the Carolina Journal reported, “10 noncitizens indicted for lying about citizenship, illegally voting.” The ten, who “appeared in shackles before a magistrate judge,” included “three natives of Germany, two of Jamaica, and one each of Canada, Haiti, Panama, the former Yugoslavia, and an illegal alien from El Salvador.”
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This week’s news cycle delivered another ‘peer-reviewed’ jab study that turned out to be faked. Don’t be shocked: the balloon of guilt once again exploded all over the lone doctoral student, who quit science in disgrace, leaving the tenured professors blameless. In more than one way, this story is a tragic opera. on Wednesday the journal Science Translational Medicine reported, “Retraction of the Research Article “SARS-CoV-2 S2–targeted vaccination elicits broadly neutralizing antibodies.” (Hat tip toReact 19’s diligent team.)
This was not a minor study. Cited as authoritative in eighty-three other studies, it had twenty-one authors including PhD student Kevin W. Ng, his supervising professor, and over a dozen more from the prestigious Francis Crick Institute in London.
This makes the second paper to be retracted this year with Kevin’s name attached; now a third is under review (published in Nature). Only Kevin went under the bus; and having gone down there, he is accumulating scandals faster than a teenager finding something to do on chore night.
💉 I am quite sure you well remember the smug arrogance with which the pandemic’s white-coated fraudsters assured all of us ignorant rubes that the jabs were completely safe and effective because of all the gold-standard studies, which they inartfully referred to as a homogeneous blob —with much waving of hands— collectively called “the science.” And The Science, in its turn, had an insectile face— that of human cockroach Anthony J. Fauci.
Here’s what all those experts always knew but never told us: studies that sound great at first often explode in disgrace. Not just crackpot studies from fringe epidemiologists, but peer-reviewed, top-tier, pharma-funded, 21-author, 83-times-cited studies from one of the most prestigious labs in Europe. This one stood for four years with fake data, and not one of Kevin Ng’s twenty co-authors noticed. Neither did the peer reviewers, the journal editors, or the 83 other scientists who cited it in their own papers, a magnificent masterwork of fraud spanning the globe.
There’s no such thing as a ‘gold standard’ study. Studies aren’t made of gold. Studies are called papers. And some papers turn out to be worthless checks.
What the experts definitely did not tell us was that inevitably, some of the pandemic’s rushed covid studies would later be quietly fed into the academic wood chipper —four years too late to save anyone— like this Crick Institute vaccine study. The Institute itself found, and I really do quote this time, “fabricated data are present … falsified images are present:”
It was big of Kevin to “admit responsibility” for all that fraud. Doing so saved his co-authors much inconvenience.
💉 I hope you’re sitting down. Retraction Watch’s ever-expanding list now exceeds 700 retracted Covid papers. Seven hundred! It’s become so commonplace that one more fraudulent covid study doesn’t make any news anymore, not even the science mags. It just is. It’s apparently an unremarkable fact of life, a force of nature, like how my city’s councilmembers can’t stop aggressive panhandlers occupying intersections, or for that matter, complete a grammatically correct sentence.
To the extent there is any, the scrap of good news is that 700 retracted covid papers shows the system is working. Granted, it is working slowly. And it is working too late to be any good to people who were forced to decide on short notice during the pandemic whether to take the shots or find a new job. But at least science is policing itself.
Or, is it?
💉 Let’s stare for a little longer into the ethical void where this retracted paper used to be, so that we can learn more about how the scientific sausage gets made. Remember— the Crick Institute found that the study included fabricated data and falsified images. It wasn’t incorrect data. It wasn’t any data accident. It wasn’t a silly blunder, like that time the absent-minded professor accidentally knocked over his chocolate sundae without noticing and black syrup dribbled right into the quantum teleportation serum.
No. In this case, it was fraudulent data.
Fraud means purposeful deceit. Intent. In any other realm of human commerce, intentionally deceiving someone in a commercial context would be considered a crime.
But when it comes to intentional fraud in scientific studies, this is not a crime. There’s not even a fine. We allow this because the academy supposedly polices itself. (Stop laughing.) They assure us that being exposed for academic fraud results in harsh and meaningful professional consequences. Maybe something like a “quick and devastating takedown.” (Just saying.)
So let’s see how well the academy policed itself in this case.
First, the rules. The rules require all named authors to meaningfully participate in the research, drafting, and supervision of any study bearing their name. Individual journals add their own rules; in the case of this study, each author was required to keep a copy of the data (they didn’t). There are even more rules for co-authors, and at the end of the day, leave little room for wriggling out of joint responsibility for papers you put your name on.
On paper, the ethical rules look just like you would hope. So you might fairly be wondering how Kevin Ng’s 20 co-authors slimed their way out of this meltdown.
💉 Personal accountability is always tricky. Humans make rules for others; humans want grace for themselves when things go sideways; so humans tweak the rules. So as ever, even though a massive superstructure of ethical rules hangs over publishing academics, there’s an escape hatch. A loophole. The fine print.
It turns out that, when a credible claim of academic fraud arises, journals assign the investigation to the sponsoring institution. On this covid vaccine paper, nineteen of twenty-one authors were with the Francis Crick Institute. So Crick investigated. Unsurprisingly, it found 20 of its senior academics to be completely innocent.
I am confident you are relieved to know they had nothing to do with it, and couldn’t possibly have prevented this from happening.
Retraction Watch said hey … wait a sec. How could it be, with all the ethical rules attached to co-authorship, that no one else shared any responsibility? That seems weird. It requested a copy of Crick’s investigative report. The Institute responded promptly and in full, by not responding at all.
The short, carefully scripted, one-paragraph article that began this section is all it has to say. Otherwise, you can talk to its lawyers.
What we do know is that, for purposes of this fraudulent COVID vaccine paper with its fake data and its made-up graphics, one PhD student “admitted responsibility” and got the career axe: Kevin W. Ng, the lowest guy on the 21-headed totem pole. They made him admit it (they probably even made him say it was not under duress), and installed him somewhere down under the bus’s undercarriage.
As a lawyer I couldn’t help noticing that the nebulous words “admitted responsibility” were not the same as Kevin saying “I did all the fraud by myself.” Admitted responsibility is a half-step from “I agreed to take the blame.”
As for the 20 other, more senior scientists who supervised Kevin, who supposedly checked his work and diligently helped to author the widely cited Covid paper… well, Crick gave them the green light. “There was no evidence of malpractice by any other authors of the paper,” it concluded. (No evidence!) Whew! They are all in the clear! Nobody had noticed anything! How could they! They were duped! Tricked! They never saw it coming!
They were guilty only of being too trusting.
In the post-credit scene, after taking one for his team, Kevin quietly disassociated from the Crick Institute and Rockefeller University, surrendered forever his dream of becoming a famous bioscientist, and fell right into a whole new career. You won’t believe how he’s earning his living these days.
Ready for this? Kevin W. Ng is now a freelance music reporter for the New York Times. I promise I am not making that up.
That’s not even the strangest coincidence. Behold how Retraction Watch’s October 14th article described it: “Ng has pivoted away from science and now covers classical music, according to his website, an archived version of which lists his research and affiliations with Rockefeller and the Crick. Ng wrote an article on Giacomo Puccini’s opera ‘Turandot’ for The New York Times earlier this year.”
Um. Turandot is the opera featuring the aria ‘Nessun Dorma’ (literally, ‘none shall sleep’), which plays over the dramatic finale in the 2002 movie The Sum of All Fears. In the scene, framed by stirring opera music, the ‘white hats’ take out the bad guys worldwide all at once. Q’s Anons have linked that to the Trump Administration, and the President has leaned into it, playing the piece at rallies and the GOP nominating convention.
That’s the opera Kevin W. Ng, covid fraudster, patsy for the Francis Crick Institute, reviewed for the New York Times in his new music journalism job. I keep telling you that we can’t make this stuff up. So now you see why it is fair to call this story operatic.
What’s next? I’m all out of time, so you guys take it away in the comments.
Have a fantastic Friday! Tomorrow and Sunday I’ll be hotel blogging, but solo, which is much closer to optimal conditions. Flu is in the mix but I’m close to the finish line. I’ll let you know whether John Wayne airport lives up to its name.
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Was worried about you!!!
In college, I worked in an AIDS lab melting chemicals in some machine and writing down numbers. Had NO idea what I was doing, but had to do some 'research' to get into vet school. At the end of my term, the professor in charge asked if I wanted to be listed as an author.
I told him I didn't understand any of what I was doing, just followed directions and felt it would be dishonest to take credit. He was surprised at that.
I could have had my name on AIDS paper and called myself and AIDS researcher when I knew NOTHING.
Yeah...science ain't all that.
The entire point of automatically registering people (citizens and non-citizens alike) is to ensure a ballot gets printed for that person, then mailed out into the Æther. I wrote up a whole article about Oregon's DMV nightmare, but it's standard operating procedure in blue mail-in states.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/an-inside-look-at-oregons-dmv-nightmare
DMV workers are supposed to confer with a co-worker about documentation, and once they decide that documentation is insufficient to establish citizenship, they're supposed to enter that into the computer.
Instead, we're supposed to believe that it was a "mistake" the workers failed to enter that information into the computer, thousands and thousands of times all over the state.
The excuse doesn't even make sense, but nobody in Oregon is interested in actually diving into the issue -- it's working exactly how they want it to.