It’s quite unusual for big artists to even mention BitTorrent, but Lady Gaga doesn’t mind requesting a torrent.

Earlier today she asked her fans to send a torrent (or YouTube) link of the Top Chef Just Desserts finale.

Apparently Lady Gaga knows a thing or two about BitTorrent. But does this also means she’s okay with fans pirating her music?

One thing’s for sure, the RIAA disagrees.

Linkage.

(Reuters) — A Tibetan Buddhist monk doused himself in fuel and set himself ablaze in far western China on Tuesday, the tenth ethnic Tibetan this year to resort to the extreme form of protest, an overseas advocacy group said.

The Free Tibet group said the latest self-immolation happened outside a monastery in Ganzi in Sichuan province, about 150 km (95 miles) south of Aba, the site of eight of the last nine self-immolations since March to protest against religious controls imposed by the Chinese government.

In a statement emailed late on Tuesday, Free Tibet said it had no information about the monk’s name, whereabouts, or whether he survived the incident.

Nor did it specify its sources.

Government officials, police and workers at several hotels in Ganzi, called Kandze by Tibetans, told Reuters they did not know about the reported self-immolation.

“I don’t know about this, and even if I did, I couldn’t be loose-lipped,” said an official in the Ganzi county office.

Most people in Ganzi and neighboring Aba are ethnic Tibetan herders and farmers, and many see themselves as members of a wider Tibetan region encompassing the official Tibetan Autonomous Region and other areas across the vast highlands of China’s west.

The string of self-immolations, at least five of them fatal, “represents a wider rejection of China’s occupation of Tibet,” said Stephanie Brigden, the director of Free Tibet, which campaigns for self-rule for the region.

The group reported “significantly increased numbers of security personnel including in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, hundreds of kilometers away from where the self-immolations have taken place.”

For the Chinese government, the protests are a small but destabilizing challenge to its regional policies, which it says have lifted Tibetans out of poverty and servitude.

China has ruled what it calls the Tibet Autonomous Region since Communist troops marched in 1950. It rejects criticisms of rights groups and exiled Tibetans and has condemned the self-immolations as destructive and immoral.

“Encouraging some people to use this kind of extreme and cruel means to injure themselves is a type of violent terrorist act,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a regular news briefing.

Jiang did not confirm the latest incident but said the protests were out of sync with the wishes of people in the region.

“I think a few individuals inciting a few ignorant people to violate the law and damage local social stability cannot represent the broader desires of the local people,” she said.

In March 2008, protests and deadly riots against the Chinese presence spread across Tibetan regions, triggering sometimes deadly confrontations with troops and police.

Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who China condemns as a supporter of violent separatism for his homeland, last week led hundreds of maroon-robed monks, nuns and lay Tibetans in prayer to mourn those who have burned themselves to death or been imprisoned.

The Dalai Lama denies advocating violence and insists he wants only real autonomy for his homeland, from which he fled in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

But the Chinese Foreign Ministry has said the Dalai Lama should take the blame for the burnings, and repeated Beijing’s line that Tibetans are free to practice their Buddhist faith.

(Reporting by Chris Buckley, Sabrina Mao and Michael Martina; Editing by Yoko Nishikawa)

Here are a couple of more recent subjects from r00t3rz on the same subject:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/20/us-china-tibetans-burnings-idUSTRE79J1IT20111020

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/18/us-china-tibetans-protest-idUSTRE79H0H020111018

And here’s a fun little article about the history of Tibet’s occupation from Free Tibet.

                                                              FR33 T1B37

OR I WILL HUG YOU
 

~*TTFN~*

both ears open
you can’t make me hate myself
strive
sign language — glossolalia
I’m not crazy
I created the universe.

I’m still trying to muster my thoughts, as the overall experience was fairly overwhelming… But at the long and short of it, the night before I sat down to write this article, I ate LSD for the first time in about eight months, and I may or may not be the creator of all reality. And we may be fighting a cosmic, timeless battle against a mindless hive of swarming insectoid evil. But, ah, more on that later.

First I suppose you need to know that this is not the first time I’ve been contacted by god, or gods. The first time I was much too young, and foolish in my preparations (or lack therof). I pushed a hole into the fabric of the things-which-were, and started out into the expanse. To my ever lasting surprise… Something stared back. Something out there suddenly realised that I was awake, that I had switched on that little bit. Of course, that wasn’t where I was supposed to be at that point. I wasn’t ready, and I didn’t know it — Which is a most dangerous state to be in, blundering blindly into events of great cosmic significance… And I paid for it. I had to be restrained by seven or eight guys and force-fed antipsychotics at a festival out in the bush while I frothed and fought. it was ugly, it was traumtic…

But it was real. Everything I’d been dreaming, wondering, experimenting with… it was real. This was fucking confirmation man, that shit was not what it seemed on the surface.

I was told a lot of things that day, many of which made no sense at the time, but as life progressed, the meanings unfolded… There’s a lot of things which still don’t, but everything will be explained in time, I’m sure.

Fast forwards back to last night, I ate a couple of tabs in the company of my best mate of a few years or so, now. He’s been doing this nearly as long as I have, we went to highschool together, we’re both psytrance DJs, we love music and we’ve been through some pretty unbelievable shit. He hadn’t tripped in a very long time either, so this was to be a special night for the both of us.

We were out the back of my place, sitting on garden chairs when the drugs began to take hold. Chain smoking and just talking, laughing and mostly just sitting there in long pauses of comfortable silence. Once it began to get cold we moved inside to listen to some music.

Boom!

“Wow, holy shit. It’s bright in here. jesus, this is some strong board. I am barely see…”

He suggested a couple of tracks I wasn’t familiar with, so I downloaded an album or two and audiogasmed for a little while. The albums went in the play queue, and we went back outside for another cigarette.

Sexuality is something which has never really troubled me. I always thought I was straight, and over the years I’d experimented a little (usually while under the influence of some fairly serious doses of MDMA) with guys, and enjoyed it, but never really found myself troubled by the thought that I might be gay. Now, don’t stress. This isn’t going to turn into a “How I got super high last night and fucked my best mate” story.

Anyway, he said he had a headache and wanted to go and lie down. So we both went back inside, and I went to my computer, logged onto tumblr and put some music on again.

Now, God has always seemed to have a special hard-on for my computer. The second time I encountered Him, it was when I was living with my now ex-girlfriend, almost a year ago. I spent the night then, laying in bed while God created music and patterns to explain things as he spoke through the person I loved — This was not what you would call new behaviour for her, as she had more then once in her life (before we were together) considered herself possessed by various demons or to be otherwise a mechanism for divine intervention.

I thought she was crazy. Until that night, I mean. She who had often chanted glossolalia and spoken of her unflinching connection with God… That was the first night I discovered I had faith. I believed. There was a higher power out there, and he a had a plan, and I was important to it. That was the important message there. But the little messages — The small, important things that went with that — I was too proud to really pat attention to. Still not ready.

Between then and now, A lot of bad shit went down. I got heavily into meth, I turned on a lot of my friends, I turned my back on my family… Don’t worry, this isn’t an addiction sob story either. The short version of that is, I nearly got myself killed trying to play psychedelic-vendor in the amphet world. They didn’t play by my rules, they didn’t play by anyone’s rules. So that world took me, and skinned me, and ate my fear.

It was only because of the love my family and friends had for me that I survived that time of my life.

So the past six months has been healing from those wounds, and remembering how to care, and to be a good guy, and all that. I went back outside for a cigarette, and got lost in thought again. Both times prior that I had met god, it was when I was with my previous girlfriend, A. I thought I loved her, she thought she loved me. it was beautiful, it was intense, and it eventually got very ugly as meth got between us both and under our skin — Love became distrust and I used the shard as a crutch to isolate myself from her.

If I’d only been brave enough to admit the truth to myself back then, I could have saved us both a lot of heartache, I’m sure. Both of the times I met god before, I spent hours trying to convince him — and myself — That I was straight, and that I loved her. I was conflicted. I was uncertain. I was afraid.

Not this time, though. I’d had enough time to really think about it, and come to terms with what it would mean. So, again outside for a cigarette, I admitted it aloud for the first time.

“I think I’m gay.”

The sky smiled, and my mind began to run in circles, loops, back and forth, trying to come to terms with the acceptance. After a few minutes of that self indulgent panic, I got a grip of the trip and sat down again. I realised how that as much as I loved A, I also loved B, the friend who was tripping with me. He’d always been there, we always got on perfectly, he knew me better than almost anyone. So I sat there for about twenty minutes chain smoking, thinking about how I loved him, and what that meant. He came outside then, and joined me for a cigarette.

We didn’t say anything at first, but my mind was still racing. Do I tell him? How do I tell him What will this mean?

Part of my brain was screaming to just tell him, to get it out in the open. The other half, though, was just apologising, over and over again; “I’m sorry, I can’t tell him that, I don’t want to change things, I just want him to be comfortable…”

The second that thought creased my brow, the music changed. There was a complicated little fanfare, the track changed for a moment — a sample, processed and filtered but still clearly legible, “Hallelujah!” — BOOM BOOM BOOM.

That neat little breakdown in the track pinned what I was thinking and made me realise what I was saying. I Just wanted him to be comfortable. I loved him, sure — The same way I’d loved A. But that wasn’t romantic love, that wasn’t sexual love. She and I had failed because we loved each other as people, not as boyfriend and girlfriend. In the spirit of the word; ‘namaste’ — The divine in me recognises the divine in you. I loved them both as my best friends, who had been through things with me that nobody could ever understand. And nothing more — Trying to make something out of that was what had driven A away from me, I wasn’t going to push away the other person in the world who really got me because I was confused and grasping at straws to explain things. I wasn’t gay. I just loved my best friend like a brother.

Whether I was gay or not was suddenly irrelevant. Being gay didn’t mean that I had to make a move on my best friend, or be torn by indecision. Get ahold of yourself, man! gay, straight… It doesn’t change who you are. I am me, and you can’t make me hate myself. It doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy sleeping with girls, beause I do. It doesn’t mean that I only want to sleep with guys, because I don’t. Anything else is just semantics — Life is about living, enjoy sex wherever you want to. It’s not perfect, but it is beautiful.

Another breakdown. Like that little riff in zelda when you discover the important tool, the music stepped up a notch, the beat took on a more complicated time signature. Ben had gone to lay down on the couch in the loungeroom with a cold compress on his forehead, I was now alone in my room with the music.

I thought about what I’d said to myself again. You can’t make me hate myself.

The music. The music kicked again, and I realize :

It’s you again, isn’t it? I smiled, and God smiled back from the speakers.

Settling into a more comfortable position on the bed, I felt myself calming, relaxing — I was in control here, everything was on track. This was important. Tonight was important.

It’s not… Easy to describe what happened next. A lot of the events tend to blur into one another, and I don’t clearly remember how they started and how they flowed from one to the next. But I lay there, thinking about what I’d realised already, and how it changed things. What it changed, if anything. I was gay, or I wasn’t, and I was okay with that, but it wasn’t what tonight was about. My hands were moving — I felt like I was shaking hands with myself, locking fingers, watching shapes forming from the trails they left wherever I reached. The music, relentless. Inspiring, complicated. And then I fet thoughts welling up in my head that were mine, but weren’t. That were not spoken in any voice or heard in any real language, but just known. I looked down again, and realised that I had been echoing these thoughts in my hands. I was silent, not speaking, but signing. I have never known sign language, but I’ve often wanted to learn. And yet, as I lay there in bed, my hands moved like they had a life of their own. Without having a conscious grasp on the language, I couldn’t tell you now if I “recognised” it as as the words the patterns and gestures represented. But I knew it was right. Logically I had no idea, but I knew.

And that’s faith — The confidence and strength in your beliefs without logic to back it up. I am a scientific person — I believe in the scientific method, and peer review, and logic almost above all else.

Almost.

And then, once more, blinding realisation. All that matters is that I’m happy. Relationships come and go, sexuality waxes and wanes. Life is about living, don’t worry — be happy, and have great sex. I’m not gay. I’m not straight. I’m just me. And nobody can ever change that.

Language… Began the thought. It might even have been a phrase spoken in the music? It began in my head, or in the speakers

Language is universal. Language is a way of moving feelings across human distances. Music is a form of language, a way for you to condense all that joy you feel and synchronise it into a packet that you can broadcast into a room full of people, so everyone can experience that joy. Without spoken language, how do we communicate? With thoughts, pictures, signs, music. And electronic music — The beat, the bass, the driving rhythms and complicated, fast synths… Anybody can understand that. japanese, french, australian, young, old… Everybody knows what it feels like to want to DANCE.

And as the thoughts unspooled in my head, I watched my hands explain the universality of language as music, and how all forms of music had the potential to speak and to unite and to sing and to create, to bring together people of all backgrounds.

The music was like black polished chrome, and it came over the summer like liquid night

Music was the plan. Music was the language for all of humanity, and in all its genres, subgenres, tastes and variations — Each of them like a language unto themselves, but still a language without borders…

And now, as I listened to the music, I could hear things differrently. I could hear what was, and what wasn’t. Was could be, and what should have been. I could hear the harsh tones, that didn’t fit, and the warm, resounding kicks that swelled to fill the void.

I’m not sure how it started. But there was a sudden moment of realisation that the music was suddenly about so much more then something to listen to. The music was reality itself, and each many-layered multifaceted moment was an expanse of time and space laid bare for me to investigate and to work my head around. And I could see… darkness. There was an ugly repetition to some of the sounds, it was hollow, lifeless. Cold and gleaming. I didn’t like those sounds. They had their own language, and it was the language of fear.

I looked down at my hands again, and my skin was suddenly blackest night sky, awash with stars. The darkness of my room was replaced with white and I watched my hands become the sky, each star of light that flecked my skin infinitely connected to the other, and with the music. I watched as the light bled out, and arced around my fingers, forming tiny arcs and knots of colour in the darkness. And I could isolate the sounds that I didn’t like, the ugly tones, the harsh fuzz and the nasty frequencies. And as my hands writhed and danced, the music screamed and I finally caught one of those stars between my fingers. I could feel it. It was cold, and it was buzzing. It writhed, trying to escape by grasp. The music bucked and spasmed, because it knew I had found it.

“Who are you?” I demanded, stretching the star between my fingers. I twisted the cold black energy, trying to look closer. It spun around my filgers like spider’s silk, trying to knot them closed, trying to clench my hands together, to freeze them in place. It was like a great and terrifying paralysis, two huge clamps pinning my hands together and forcing me into muteness. Then, in the blackness, I saw, just for a moment — the buzzing of wings. An insect. At the core of the darkness, an insect. The root of all my fear, the root of the distrust in the world, the root of the poison which had turned so much music into a mechanism to subjugate others. Insects.

My voice, I found it again.

“I am god… You are insects.”

Only it wasn’t my voice. My hands spoke it, and the sentence had a kind of power to it, and the music knew it too. My fingers struggled like digging themselves out of half-set concrete, and I felt the power surge behind my eyes.

You are the forces of darkness, uncertainty and doubt. You are everything I loathe, you are everytyhing that fights for selfishness and cowardice. You have cowed me in the past, but no more. You are insects, I am god. And I am not afraid of you.

WHAM. The paralysis, redoubled. Pressing down on my chest, squashing my hands into the mattress. This was it. The time to fight. The time to show them what fear and fury really mean. I could feel a million cold points trying to push me harder down, and even as they did so, two million hot voices in my ears spurring me to resist. The darkness threatened to engulf my vision, everything sweeping to blackness as every terrible terrified memory in my past began to reappear, all the moments I tried to block out swelled at the seams, trying to bend me to the will of fear.

And then, when the darkness seemed all-covering, like a web that covered me from head to toe, a blinding spray of diamond mist burned into life for a second, like a million tiny aluminium fibres igniting all at once — And in the intensity of each tiny point of warmth, I saw the face of someone that loved me, and of the people I loved. And their voices, swelled in my head.

I AM NEVER ALONE. I WILL NEVER BE ALONE.

The weight on my chest was suffocating, my fingers ached like they were in boiling water. But I struggled, and I fought, and my fingers found the air again, and in that freedom, I found my voice. My fingers danced…

No matter how dark things will ever get, or how many forces of evil bring their nasty selfishness to bear on me, to try and squash my will. I will never be alone. And that is why I will always triumph. Because I am loved, and I can love, and you can never understand that. Love is the binding armour, the strength of light and the god kick, love is the subwoofer, love is everything that empowers. I am god. I am love. You are insects, you are fear.

And I am not afraid of you.

In that instant, my muscles turned to liquid gold. My every nerve crackled with power, and I watched my hands ignite with multicoloured fire, every millimetre of my skin a moving, kaliedoscopic jewel-like fragment. I sat bolt upright, dragging the darkness off my chest, and held it in both hands.

I am not afraid of you!

And as the darkness turned in my grasp, like a fish out of water, struggling in the hands of its captor, I began to see more and more of its shape. The music expanded, every point and note and tone visible simultaneously. And the darkness expanded, like a dissection, or when a computer program is decompiled — and I could see the layers of deception and fear, and lies, and shadow that was in my grasp, and what it was made from. As I peeled away the layers of chitin and gleaming exoskeleton, I began to realise just why the darkness was so afraid of me.

The darkness was a mask — And who wears masks?

People who have something to hide!

And as the mask dissolved, I felt a great tug, like one does in the bath when the plug has been unexpectedly pulled. Something was withdrawing, something was afraid, because suddenly — I had the fucker right in my grasp. Something was hiding from me. Something that didn’t want me to find it.

WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO HIDE?

And now, my voice filled my lungs as well as my hands, my human voice, and it followed the darkness down the rabbithole it was trying to escape through. I could feel it, this palpable hole in reality again, I had seen this before! But I wasn’t ready last time.

But this time… I was so much more then ready. I was born for this. This was why I was here. I had found the FEAR, the source of all misery in the unvierse, and I had tricked the sneaky little shit into showing itself

And now that I had seen it? I could follow it. I forced open the rabbit hole , reaching through and grasping at anything my fingers could reach. I was seeing in nine dimensions — The traditional three, my human body, my arms snaking into the air above my bed. And then, six, or maybe even more — overlaid, expanding, depth beyond depth, a vision of things that could not exist, that did not exist! I could see it all, an incredible tapestry of meshing gears, jewels and time. And I realised, this was beyond human existence. This was beyond the universe. What I had found here was the space OUTSIDE of existence, where all things came from. The howling void, where fear lived. I was reaching back to the cold emptyness of the universe before the big bang, and I found the ancient, uncomprehensible evil that dwelled there.

But I could feel my grip slipping. I was god still, but in the body of a man not built for this kind of pandimensional combat. I now had the brunt of an infinite cold suns picking at my fingers, trying to loosen my grip. I could feel it slipping. But suddenly, I knew what had to be done. Smiling, I looked fear in the eye. With my last ounce of strength, I reached into myself, and found the love that had given me the power to make it this far. Extending my hands, I turned my mind to project, and everything just… stopped.

Frozen in time for a moment, nothing happened. Then my fingers began to vibrate. My arms shook, my body writhed as I poured out my heart, my soul and my love through this hole in time and space, and into the void I created light.

The power, so full in my eyes, now streamed into the nothing. And from nothing, there came creation. The darkness spread, and the seed of love took root. The darkness spoke in tongues, sowing fear and hate and cowardice. And I answered, in the only language I knew. Music. Drawing on all of my tastes, my love, my music, I planted the seed that would one day defeat the fear. I gave the darkness jazz, and rock & roll, and Bach. I gave the darkness trance, and drum and bass. I gave the darkness everything I had.

I am god, you are insects. And now you’re going to listen. Pay attention, cos I’m only going to say this once.

And from my fingers streamed the fire again, between each fingertip an invisible, but blinding strand of music. Everything I knew, everything that had been. Came from my fingers. Weaving them together, the strands egn to knot, splintering and thickening, sending new roots out from where they touched. Have you ever played cat’s cradle? with the pieces of string in your hand? it was like that. Every piece of string intermeshed and knotted and wove and then expanded, creating every possible incarnation of music, every subgenres, every style, very tiny resurgent movement that ever flourished in a backalley beat club, or in every island nation’s drums. All music, infinite. Creation.

And then, my grip waned. I flexed, and smiled. I blew the darkness a kiss — The final touch, love, to enter the music and give it life. Then I let go, and collapsed, shaking, sweating, back onto the mattress.

The trip continued for several hours beyond that, but that’s a story for another day…

You want to play the game — because it’s a game to you people. Funtime friday, hit the couch and babble. Drop a tab or five, pass out before sun up and burn out before eighteen.

Are you sweet?
Are you fresh?
Are you strung up by the wrists?
We want the young blood!

I can smell fresh dollars in your bones, boy. I know why you’re here. Morbid curiousity, and a fatalistic desire to stand out in a sullen parade of septum piercings and dynamite bangs. We are your Hell’s Angel, wiry and tired with bitter, electric tongues. We sit and we smoke in a strange nuptial hymn of the hivemind, constantly prowling for another square scalp to add to our collection — They line our beds and we cling to them for warmth, every scrap of memory of those times we faced down with high society and came away, smelling of ganja, sweat and triumph.

You long to trace every jackboot scar on my spine with your lips, and revel in every night I spend sobbing myself to sleep, flashed and trapped in the memories of mind-riots past.

God, those were the days. You’d wake up in the morning, pick at the scabs your clawed raw the night before and infect yourself with something good and contagious then go out and spit on cops and bus drivers till the seconal kicked in.

Shit, was that me just saying that? None of that shit is me. Don’t listen to this raving madman, he’s an alien here — The big bad pusher man, in your scene, RUINING your party by ‘commercialising’… some months after, mind you, we all started paying twenty bucks at the door apiece to dance on public, ungated property.

Are you fracturing?
Are you torn at the seams?
Would you do anything?
Fleabitten, motheaten?

You don’t want a part of this. The rivets are splitting and spokes fraying — Somewhere I can smell insulation cooking off, a pungent brown smell. I’m sure one of the pistons rings is cracked and the boiler leaks steam. Anyday now the MOSFETs will start popping like cherry bombs and this whole transmetal riot machine will come crashing to a hard, knifing over an abutment and gearing great tracts of tarmac up like a gathered rug on the floorboards as your secret lover beats a hasty retreat out the back.

The numbers are piling up — and someday soon it’s gonna blow. we’re on a doomed helltrain and my fingers are burning.

We suck young blood
We suck young blood

with all the maternal spirit and warmth of a woodchipper we eagerly welcome the newcomers — line up, pay the man and roll in the dirt pretending to be enlightened. sucking that inky media dollar, fondling that glass tit.

Won’t let them creep in on me
Won’t let the nervous bury me
Our veins are thin
Our rivers poisoned

That’s the only answer you ever find at the bottom of a trip, at the end of your wits.

There are no answers

All you have are more questions

Like when the hell will this soldier have the peace of mind to sleep at night

Without a mouthful of reds and gin?

That was from this article, and here are a few interesting quotes taken from it:

Dr. Alan Blum, former editor of the Medical Journal of Australia and the New York State Journal of Medicine, agreed: “This whole popularization and commercialization of peer-reviewed medical journals is sickening. There are very few truly independent publications left – that is something that I think the public doesn’t understand.”

The proliferation of “herd journals” and the distracting influences of popular news media have diluted the integrity of science research and publishing, Blum said.

Dr. Jerome Kassirer, editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine from 1991 to 1999, said the purpose of a medical journal is “to provide information to doctors. Period.”

“There is a tendency for medical editors to want their papers to be published in the New York Times,” Kassirer said. “We never had that as a consideration – I never cared. I never paid attention to whether there were ads or not.”

He acknowledged that medical journals have “evolved enormously” in the past decade or so. “The major problem is it’s becoming more and more difficult to support them. Circulation has dropped.” 

While former editors were eager to raise awareness about the troubling trends, the current editors of some of the major medical journals – including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet – declined to comment.

A spokeswoman for JAMA, however, referenced a 2008 editorial on the adverse effects of industry influence: “The profession of medicine, in every aspect—clinical, education, and research—has been inundated with profound influence from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries,” the JAMA editorial began.

The experts and data paint a compelling picture of the vulnerable state of science. The combination of two phenomena – the increasingly powerful financial influences such as pharmaceutical companies and the struggling business of science journals – has coalesced to create a perfect storm.

Opportunity for exploitation and manipulation thrives, experts said. Poorly funded scientific researchers under pressure to publish may fudge a bit of data to keep their study afloat. Similarly, medical journals trying to navigate a more competitive media landscape may lower their standards and yield to the influence of money.

“We might be putting too much faith in medical journals,” Blum said.

 

.…

 

Kassirer said authors generally retract their own papers. “It takes a lot to retract a paper, because it’s the author’s paper,” he said. “It’s hard to identify fraud, and the editor can’t be a detective. I always believed that when I get data from an author it’s true, it’s been scientifically tested.”

The retraction came less than a week after the General Medical Council concluded its damning investigation of the study, which began in 2007 and was the longest in the council’s history. The investigation identified several financial and scientific conflicts of interest.

“[Wakefield’s] interpretation could’ve been strongly influenced by money,” Kassirer said. “Money is a powerful stimulus.”

 

Other interesting articles on the subject of scientific misconduct, fake journals, medical establishments being bribed, etc…

http://www.naturalnews.com/028194_Scott_Reuben_research_fraud.html

http://www.physorg.com/news182114306.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/education/21harvard.html

http://scientific-misconduct.blogspot.com/

http://www.economist.com/node/16886218

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=scientific-misconduct-estimated-to-2010–08-17

http://www.scq.ubc.ca/research-fraud-trust-and-money/

I expect I might update this post with far more information as this is a huge subject that is not looked at nearly enough. The faith that people have in modern medicine & science is somewhat sickening, especially for someone that has a passion & interest in it. It’s almost like finding out that not only is Santa Claus not real, but that you have to return all you presents because of this. WTF mate.