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9/11 truthers were all atwitter when Steven Jones announced he along with Kevin Ryan, Neils Harritt and Tony Szamboti had gotten a paper accepted in a “Peer Reviewed” science Journal. A first for the conspiracy theorist promoting the idea a super duper double secret nano thermite had brought down the World Trade Center.

Unfortunately debunkers soon pointed out the science journal in question was Bentham Open Journals, a for all intents and purposes a vanity publisher. You pay, they publish. Not exactly a REAL peer reviewed publisher of hard core science information. This did little to get the tin foil hat wearing conspiracy huckster taken seriously by scientist who know what they are talking about.

The dubious quality of Bentham’s peer review process has been brought into clear focus by a graduate student at Cornell University. They got a paper accepted by Bentham that consisted of nothing but computer generated nonsense.

In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].

The writers of the paper even dropped a hint of the hoax by giving their institutional affiliation as the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, or CRAP.

CRAP paper accepted by journal – opinion – 11 June 2009 – New Scientist.

This is not the first time “pay-to-play” journals have been had. The Cornell students withdrew the hoax paper, Why? Because they are students, and Bentham wants $800 to publish.

The 9/11 Truth movement dies a slow but humorous death but does provide a good laugh from time to time.

admin 9/11 Truth, Hoax

As much as I think the Patriot Act is a oxymoronicaly named corrosion of our freedoms, the hysteria over the story of the North Carolina teen supposedly held under the act without legal counsel is proving to be untrue.

FBI agents investigating a February 15 bomb hoax that evacuated the mechanical engineering building at Purdue University traced the phone call to the juvenile’s Oxford, North Carolina home. They served his mother with a search warrant and arrested the teen. He does have an attorney and will get his day in court.

The claim that the boy is a victim of USA PATRIOT, though, appears to have been cut from whole cloth. While there’s plenty to criticize in that post-9/11 law, it doesn’t contain any provision that abrogates a defendant’s right to a trial. It’s also not responsible for making it illegal to phone in a bomb threat. That’s been a federal crime since 1939.

Bloggers, TV, Go Nuts Over Misleading ‘Patriot Act’ Arrest Claim | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Blogs and talk radio on the left and right have been howling over the original rumor, but strangely quiet now that the story is proving to be over hyped fear mongering. These so called news sources play to the popular conspiratorial viewpoint, people eat up claims of big bad evil men taking away your rights but suddenly become deaf to the real story.

This is one of those stories that when I first heard it set off my bullshit detector. It didn’t sound right, and sure enough the truth is far less ominous than the ballyhoo.

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davekyte Distortions, Hoax 911, conspiracy theory