Vaj's dishonesty continues to infect this forum. His lies are most egregious when he's been caught in a falsehood and is trying to exonerate himself, as in this case.
His very deliberate misrepresentations of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, intended to put TM research in a bad light because TM has published one article in the journal, are quite directly parallel to the misrepresentations of the climate-change deniers with regard to the hacked emails. Hard up for evidence to support their perspective, in both cases they have to resort to inventing it--and hope that their audience will be too lazy and credulous to check up on them. Vaj has repeatedly referred to the Journal of Scientific Exploration as "a UFO journal" (or "UFO journals," to make it sound as though TM regularly publishes in many such journals). Up till now, he hasn't actually named the journal, knowing that if he were to do so and anyone were to check up on his claim, they'd realize it was a lie. But apparently he *did* read my latest post pointing out that he was lying, or someone told him about it, so he figured he'd brazen it out by naming the journal and then telling a bunch of detailed lies about the nature of the journal. That's a standard technique of malicious propagandists: citing what they purport to be documentation of their false claims that actually doesn't support the claims at all. They figure folks won't other to check but will just assume that if the propagandist provides a citation, it must be because it backs up what the propagandist has said. Which is exactly what Vaj did: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <vajradh...@...> wrote: <snip> > The current issue has papers on the Loch > Ness monster and several UFO papers. > It's always a hoot to look at when you > need a good laugh. And of course MUM > "researchers" publish there now. > It looks like they've finally found their > niche in the scientific community! > http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal.html In fact, TM researchers have published there *once*. There's no indication whatsoever of a trend, contrary to Vaj's knowingly disingenuous implication. And in fact, Vaj has no idea what's in the current issue, because its contents aren't listed on the Web site. The latest issue whose contents are listed is the third issue for 2008 (the journal is a quarterly). Maybe Vaj was hoping folks wouldn't notice if he described the contents of the *first* issue listed, published in 1987, and said it was the current issue. And even so he misrepresents the contents: there was *one* article on the Loch Ness monster and *one* article on UFOs. (Another malicious propagandist's trick is to use plurals when referring to a single instance.) Neither paper took a believer's stance. Both were scholarly analyses of available materials on their topics (the PDFs of the articles are available on the page). The other articles in the first issue: "A Brief History of the Society for Scientific Exploration"; "Alterations in Recollection of Unusual and Unexpected Events"; "Toward a Quantitative Theory of Intellectual Discovery (Esp. in Phys.)"; and "Engineering Anomalies Research." PDFs for all these are available on the page. The last issue listed for which PDFs are available is from 2007. The last issue listed containing an article on UFOs is 2006 (and that was simply a historical review of the information that has accumulated, pro and con.) But let's look at the titles of the articles in the most recent issue listed, the third for 2008: Unusual Atmospheric Phenomena Observed Near Channel Islands, UK, 23 April 2007 The GCP Event Experiment: Design, Analytical Methods, Results New Insights into the Links between ESP and Geomagnetic Activity Phenomenology of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine Use: A Thematic Analysis Altered Experience Mediates the Relationship between Schizo-typy and Mood Disturbance during Shamanic-Like Journeying Persistence of Past-Life Memories: Study of Adults Who Claimed in Their Childhood to Remember a Past Life Gee, nothing about UFOs or the Loch Ness monster. In fact, of the approximately 500 articles the journal has published since 1987, around 25 have been about UFOs--5 percent. (The frequency of such articles has declined steadily over the years.) In Vaj's mind, 5 percent is enough to smear JSE--and the TM researchers--by calling it a "UFO journal." No wonder he didn't name it for so long. Now he thinks he can wiggle out from under that lie by identifying the journal and *lying about what it contains*. I've looked at a bunch of the PDFs available on the article listings that deal with some of the more far-out phenomena. None that I've examined credulously promotes the phenomena they deal with. At most, they analyze skeptical debunkings and point out where they're inadequate to explain the phenomena. Many of the articles are purely sociological; the Loch Ness monster article in the first issue, for example, categorizes the reports found in different media (newspapers, magazines, books) as to their relative levels of belief in the phenomenon, as well as their accuracy as to the hard facts involved. The conclusions of the study are that newspaper articles are the least credulous, as well as being the least accurate; and that books are the most credulous *and* the most accurate. Anybody who actually *reads* any of the articles will see that they're not gee-whiz endorsements of unusual phenomena; they're serious scholarly attempts to examine the evidence for them pro and con. Some of the papers are of the type you'd expect to find in Skeptical Inquirer, in fact: one, for instance, debunks several published scientific studies on crop circles that purport to document anomalies that rule out human origin; another debunks "spirit photographs." There are also papers that reflect on how people deal with anomalous phenomena. One from 1988 by Bauer, for example, is titled "Commonalities in Arguments over Anomalies." The author makes an interesting point: "The study of anomalies...can usefully bring to our attention the substantial areas of ignorance that subsist at the edges and interstices of established knowledge." This statement epitomizes the purpose and approach of the Journal of Scientific Exploration. If you want to call that "pseudoscience," you're only revealing your own intellectual rigidity and lack of curiosity. Or, of course, your desire to smear a movement you have a grudge against.
