In October 2004, the once respectable British medical journal, The Lancet, published an article in which it vastly overestimated Iraqi war deaths. Those who contended then that the article’s timing was purposeful, and was intended to affect the American elections, were pooh-poohed. I’ll concede, for the sake of argument, that the 2004 article’s appearance immediately before an election might just conceivably have been accidental. However, since the The Lancet is doing precisely the same thing again — publishing an article a month before American elections that hysterically inflates Iraqi deaths — I think any reasonably intelligent person has to conclude that the British publishers are intentionally meddling with the American electoral process.
At Decision ‘08, you can read a compelling post about the bizarre numbers, the suspicious timing, and the weird intellectual backdrop for the article. (Great tip, Mr. Paragraph Farmer.) Then, at LGF, you can see a video of the Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, giving an impassioned anti-War speech a convention in England, where he shared the stage with that feline luminary, crook and nutcase, George Galloway.
Way back in the 1970s, when I was a graduate student in the health sciences, Lancet was already known as the “comic book” of “professional journals”. Most of the papers were anecdotal and absolutely lacking in any peer-review standards. It was a joke back then, it is a joke now.
Sadly, The Lancet isn’t the only one. Since the ’70’s almost every “scientific” journal has similarly lost its integrity and bowed to political correctness. How like the dark ages, when the church put the kibosh of scientific thought, the world has become.
Everything old, is new again, erp. History is cyclical, because humanity is rather neotenous. Base word neoteny.