Us and crows. Gleaming baubles always attract the most, whatever the sheen really means. Then there’s that whole avoidance-of-hard-work thing. That too.

When I was back at university during the nineties I spent an enormous amount of time going over a huge number of papers covering a huge range of sciences and I was not only shocked by the standard practise of tossing aside between 20 and 40% of results and in some cases as much as 60% as spoils even though spoils effectively means experimental contamination [certainly something no cryptozoologist'd be allowed to get away with] but whenever I followed the chain of various quotes all the way back to their sources I found not only’d a huge number of papers been merely referencing quotes third fourth fifth or even sixth hand removed but those quotes in their original contexts often had totally no bearings on the papers quoting them or even worse on many occasions actually meant precisely the reverse of what the papers quoting them claimed.

Asking around I mostly got fobbed off with explanations that sounded like gibberish to me but one or two lecturers actually admitted they were so often run off their feet they had to depend on research assistants to do that sort of thing many of whom were even more run off their feet but some of whom of course were quite simply lazy bastards.

Though as one lecturer admitted to me sometimes researchers in inimicable fields loan assistants to under pressure rivals on the basis of giving students wider research experience though there’s always the suspicion they’re really there to spy so inevitably when things sometimes go awry it’s not that difficult to find oneself wondering about industrial sabotage.

Could Melba Ketchup therefore’ve been simply the victim of some lazy bastard who couldn’t be bothered to do their job properly or could an infiltrator’ve deliberately set out to discredit her work and if so will she be able to KETCHUM**?

*yes I know it’s Ketchum but I can’t resist Ketchup
**especially since it allows me to slip in that Ketchum gag!

Sharon, Editor
DoubtfulNews.com

That being said, I am so glad for the ‘internet peer review, peer review’ and those bloggers/researchers who know how to address the evidence while refusing to engage in any character attacks.

That old saying ‘Not all the people can be fooled all the time’ and with so many eyes and (to varying degrees) experts on the internet if there is a flaw someone will find it.(This goes along with your article regarding the hoaxed video) I guess it would fall under the ‘none of us is as smart as all of us’ school of thought. Each of us has our own little database of knowledge and passion and when harnessed by the thousands it can be a wonderful thing.

This entire episode is such a quagmire, that I feel it’s impossible to make an honest assessment until much more time has gone by, and “dust” has settled.

So far, I have to say I’m more than a little dubious about the entire effort.

Eric