The Daily Fake

[jeenam]

Imagine the goddamn amount of mental gymnastics to believe an egg would just stay on the surface, untouched, unbroken, undisturbed for "70 million yrs".......

To think there’s mfs out there dumb enough to believe, physically hurts my brain

Video Title = FOSSILS ARE NOT MILLIONS OF YEARS OLD (MADE IN 24 HOURS)

 

[Frostychud]

My web browser is constantly recommending science and history articles to me. Occasionally one is so juicy I have to share it here. Apparently we're now being told that some kind of cosmic object is hurtling towards Earth...or something.

I have no idea what's above our heads or what shape the Earth is. NASA feeds us all sorts of silly fantasies, but presumably they are very interested in what actually happens up there, and know a lot more than we do.

Many in the skeptical community argue that the "science" of astrophysics is just disguised Kabbalistic mythology with its magic numbers and neoplatonic pantheon of demigods.

(Let me remind everyone again that the linchpin of astrophysics, the "speed of light", just happens to be identical, to the 7th decimal place, to the latitude of the Great Pyramid. No, not because "ancient aliens" encoded it there "12,000 years ago", but because Egypt-worshipping occultists, who know well that there is no such thing as the speed of light, think it's funny to mock us with this winking reference to the monument that represents their "Great Work", and which was probably made of poured concrete in the last four hundred years.)

We get in-your-face occult numerology from the starting gun, with references to both York (13) and Scottish (33) rite freemasonry:

So this con is being pushed by a Harvard astrophysicist. Who is Avi Loeb?

Creepy photo, check the triad claw he's doing with his left hand.

This guy was the head of the Harvard astronomy department for nine years, presumably one of the highest positions in the field. According to Wikipedia, he got his start in the Talpiot Program in Israel. What's that?

Ah, it means he's a spook working for the Israeli secret services.

That's actually on his Wikipedia page. I don't know what to say. I remember when the only people claiming stuff like this were rando "ex-CIA" grifters on conspiracy sites, not Harvard astrophysicists. It seems like these people are ready to drop the facade and dissolve their fake physics, which presumably costs a lot of time and money to maintain, back into the esoteric cosmology from which they derived it in the first place.

Savor it. The former head of Harvard Astronomy is inventing fake space objects with 13's and 33's everywhere and telling us that the Jewish Messiah is a space alien. How long until the rug is pulled and they announce to us directly that goys are simply not allowed to know anything anymore?

 

[jeenam]

This one isn't history related, but I found the images provided in the post to be, uh, laughably meaningless.

NASA really wants you to know that 3I/ATLAS is an interstellar comet

Check out the 2 images of the comet they provided in the post. Definitely looks like a comet to me /s

 

[feralimal]

Of all things, one of the hardest to fake really ought to be philosophy. In the realm of ideas, it really shouldn't be that likely that anyone is faking their treatises/writings. But here is an article detailing admited faked philosophy:

From the pseudo to the forger: the value of faked philosophy | Aeon Essays

It may not have come as a surprise to those familiar with Lewis’s work that ‘Bruce Le Catt’ was not the pseudonym of an astute critic, but of Lewis himself.

Lewis was not the only 20th-century philosopher to publish using an invented persona. The contents page of the book Explaining Emotions (1980), edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, features the essay ‘Jealousy, Attention, and Loss’ by one Leila Tov-Ruach, listed on the Contributors page as ‘an Israeli psychiatrist, who writes and lectures on philosophic psychology’. Some readers might have noticed that this is a rather unusual name – a pun on laila tov ruach or ‘goodnight wind’ in Hebrew – and might have had their suspicions confirmed by the fact that there is no discernible trace of this psychiatrist elsewhere on the medical or academic record. Indeed, as an erratum on the University of California Press website drily notes, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and Leila Tov-Ruach are indeed one and the same person.

Its always interesting to hear about the admitted fakes - who did it, the names, etc.

While it might seem odd in the world of contemporary journal publication, smuggling ideas under someone else’s name is rather more common in the history of philosophy than you might think. Medieval philosophy in particular abounds with texts that blur the boundaries between anonymity, pseudonymity and straightforward authorship. Consider the various ‘pseudos-’ – from pseudo-Augustine, pseudo-Aristotle, pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite – that proliferated in the late antique and medieval periods. Many of the medieval scholars used this kind of device to invoke the authority of an older figure for their ideas; humble monks who wrote (if writing under any name at all) under the names of the mighty dead to gain intellectual clout and authority.

Thank god for modern historians who are able to guide us to the true writings!

In addition to an Israeli psychiatrist, Rorty also tried her hand at writing as a Chinese Platonist and, in her edited collection Philosophers on Education (1998), she explains why she chose to write her article on ‘Plato’s Counsel on Education’ under the name of Zhang LoShan:

Ever since teaching a course in the history of philosophy in the People’s Republic of China in 1981, and finding students and colleagues there passionately interested in Plato, I had been trying to see him through their eyes, with their preoccupations … Although I wrote that essay, it is, in a perfectly straightforward way, not strictly speaking mine … It is an experiment I strongly recommend to all serious scholars: surprising features emerge from the exercise.

Now onto the main character in the article, "Zera Yacob", lol:

But none of these examples, from philosophical felines to pseudo-Augustine or imaginary Chinese Platonists, is quite as perplexing as that of the Ḥatäta Zera Yacob. The Ḥatäta, or ‘enquiry’ (the root of which, ሐ-ተ-ተ, in the ancient Ethiopian language of Geʽez literally means ‘to investigate, examine, search’ ) is an unusual work of philosophy for a number of reasons. It is not only a philosophical treatise but also an autobiography, a religious meditation and a witness of the religious wars that plagued Ethiopia in the early 17th century; it presents a theodicy and cosmological argument apparently independent of other traditions of Christian thought; it employs a subtle philosophical vocabulary that is virtually without precursors. Finally, and most perplexingly, the progenitor of these ideas, the Zera Yacob who is the subject of the autobiography and gives his name to the title, may never have existed.

Jeez. Zera Yacob. Sounds like Jacob.

This is the summary of his philosophy:

His answer is remarkable. The only thing that can decide between competing religious claims is something that every human has inside them: the god-given faculty of lebbuna (variously translated as ‘reason’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘understanding’) that allows us to perceive what is right and wrong, good and bad by means of it being attuned to a kind of pre-established harmony between the creator, creation at large and this faculty itself. Lebbuna is common to kopt and ferenj, man and woman, young and old: truth and goodness is accessible to all, equally.

Well, this at least is good stuff, in my opinion.

When the civil unrest ends with the death of the emperor, he returns to society, settling in the town of Enfraz where he finds work and eventually an intellectual disciple in the form of a youth named Walda Heywat, who urges his teacher to write down his reflections before his death.

Walda hey, what?

Side quest: what does Walda mean?

Walda is a German name meaning "ruler" or "ruler of the forest". It can also be used as a variant of the name Valda, which means "ruler of the world".

from Walda

Ruler of the world hey what?

Once again, I can't help but think this is all done with a sense of humour.

Then in 1920, an Italian Orientalist named Carlo Conti Rossini published an article in the Journal Asiatique, claiming that, far from being a masterpiece of 17th-century Ethiopian thought, the Ḥatäta was in fact a forgery, composed by the man who had claimed to discover it: da Urbino. Conti Rossini had been tipped off by an Ethiopian convert to Catholicism that da Urbino had been scheming with local scholars to create ‘heretical’ and ‘masonic’ works to undermine Catholicism and Ethiopian orthodoxy alike.

Urban, count red.
but...

Conti Rossini was the pre-eminent Ethiopianist of interwar Europe, and his arguments were eventually accepted by almost all scholars, including those who had spent so long translating and commentating upon the work. But Conti Rossini was also a colonial administrator in Italian East Africa, and a supporter of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, even going so far as to publish an article in 1935 titled ‘Ethiopia Is Incapable of Civil Progress’, arguing that the country could, indeed should, be colonised by a ‘civilising’ power, explicitly invoking his refutation of the Ḥatäta as part of his argument.

So because he was able to refute (smear) hatata, that means that Ethiopia could be colonised.

The argument has raged for more than a century now, with new arguments being made on both sides. Claude Sumner, a Jesuit missionary who called himself ‘Canadian by birth, Ethiopian by choice’, made a passionate case for an Ethiopian authorship

The French historian Anaïs Wion has produced an ingenious argument against an Ethiopian authorship in her series of articles The History of a Genuine Fake Philosophical Treatise (2013), building on the argument of Ethiopian scholars like Alemayyehu Moges and Amsalu Aklilu.

Finally, the late, great scholar of Ethiopian manuscripts Getatchew Haile reversed his position, held for half a century, that the work was a forgery in a paper published shortly before his death in 2021. It is no exaggeration to say that today, as interest in the Ḥatäta begins to peak once again with a series of new books, podcasts and the publication of a new translation of the Ḥatäta, the question of its author’s existence is in limbo.

The names...

Will no one tell 'us' what the truth is? Lol. (The answer is 'no'.)

But what is a ‘mere forgery’ anyway? If you forge a passport, you are creating a fake document that permits you to cross borders as if it were real. If you forge a work of art, you are creating a convincing (and therefore lucrative) fake that can be attributed to a known artist and sold as if it were genuine. But what might the forging of a work of philosophy be, beyond attributing the work to someone else, à la pseudo-Augustine or pseudo-Aristotle? If faking a painting gets you something and faking a passport gets you somewhere, what does a fake work of philosophy get you?

Now the article goes all meta... My answer to the question: 'What does a fake work of philosophy get you?' is 'social credit'.

In all, a fun article - its always enjoyable to read the mouthpieces of fakery explain about the fakery.

 

[greatscot]

History, as far as I can make out, is what's expedient in service of agendas. It's purpose is to conjure some sort of 'timelessness spell craft' on people, where history is invoked like it's ye olde magic from the source. If we think it was 'ever thus', we will act differently to when we think something has been sprung upon us.

I think Orwell was into something when, in 1984, he stated:

Not only that but 1984 has a hidden message. Big Brother in the novel is literally Hitler. He was implying Hitler is a British Agent

 

[iskander]

Not only that but 1984 has a hidden message. Big Brother in the novel is literally Hitler. He was implying Hitler is a British Agent

More than a decade ago, Hitler's Wackopedia (sic!) entry still mentioned a visit to the UK in the late '20s, for about a year. Allegedly visiting a relative.
And I might add a chapter title from his (in-)famous book here, which goes by "Together with Grerat Britain against the Bolshevism".
And of course the strange flight of Rudolf Hess to the UK, in the middle of the war, allegedly for peace negotiations.

On a related note, some other very influential persons (all in a not so positive way) lived in London for several years, allegedly in exile. Amongst them Herschel Mordechai (a.k.a. Karl Marx), Vladimir Lenin, and Lev Bronstein (a.k.a. the "Snowball Pig", a.k.a. Leo Trotzky).

 

[feralimal]

Herschel Mordechai (a.k.a. Karl Marx)

Herschel Mordechai was Marx's father, according to the bastion of truth:
Heinrich Marx - Wikipedia

Heinrich Marx (born Herschel HaLevi,[inconsistent] Yiddish: הירשל הלוי; 15 April 1777 – 10 May 1838) was a German lawyer who was the father of the communist philosopher Karl Marx, as well as seven other children, including Louise Juta.

 

[Frostychud]

More than a decade ago, Hitler's Wackopedia (sic!) entry still mentioned a visit to the UK in the late '20s, for about a year. Allegedly visiting a relative.
And I might add a chapter title from his (in-)famous book here, which goes by "Together with Grerat Britain against the Bolshevism".
And of course the strange flight of Rudolf Hess to the UK, in the middle of the war, allegedly for peace negotiations.

On a related note, some other very influential persons (all in a not so positive way) lived in London for several years, allegedly in exile. Amongst them Herschel Mordechai (a.k.a. Karl Marx), Vladimir Lenin, and Lev Bronstein (a.k.a. the "Snowball Pig", a.k.a. Leo Trotzky).

Stalin too - supposedly he robbed banks in London. Hitler's sister claimed he spent many months in Liverpool (I think) around 1911. Maybe it was even closer to a year. Also, Wittgenstein (Jewish, a scion of the 2nd richest family in Germany) supposedly attended school with Hitler and also ended up in London. Presumably Wittgenstein was at a prestigious private school - how did Hitler, from a modest family, end up there?

 

[iskander]

Stalin too - supposedly he robbed banks in London.

I think not.
He participated in bank robberies in the Tsarist empire, and was in Austria / Hungary (Vienna) for about a year. But otherwise lived inside the Russian empire.
What the Wackopedia page doesn't mention are the rumors that he had been an Ochrana agent, tasked to infiltrate the communist movement.

 

[Frostychud]

I think not.
He participated in bank robberies in the Tsarist empire, and was in Austria / Hungary (Vienna) for about a year. But otherwise lived inside the Russian empire.
What the Wackopedia page doesn't mention are the rumors that he had been an Ochrana agent, tasked to infiltrate the communist movement.

In Greg Hallett's book on Stalin, he describes a secret trip Stalin made to London -- he's an unreliable source -- claims Stalin was an agent being run by Churchill. (I uploadee the PDF of Hallett's Stalin book in another post years ago, search in my post history of you're interested, it's a wild read.)

 

[feralimal]

Greg Hallett

He is unreliable, for sure. Aka the self-professed king of England.

 

[iskander]

In Greg Hallett's book on Stalin, he describes a secret trip Stalin made to London ...

A secret trip, which is obviously the same as "anonymous sources in the administration" that so-called journalists cite when they make something up. Just create a figleaf of legitimacy.
One can see the relation between Stalin and the British empire by the literary hitpiece they ordered as soon as "their man" Trotzky was booted from government. Written by one of their (confirmed) MI6 agents named Eric Arthur Blair (a.k.a. George Orwell), and named "The Animal Farm".
Trotzky and the Trotzkyites are the direct predecessors of the neocons, to a large extend even hereditary. They just dropped the communism pretense, but the ideological core and methods remained the same.

 

[ViniB]

Of all things, one of the hardest to fake really ought to be philosophy. In the realm of ideas, it really shouldn't be that likely that anyone is faking their treatises/writings.

Well it depende. Everyday i notice in history and philosophy related discussions the works of plato, but was he real?? Plato literally means broad shoulders (bodybuilder of the past?)

 

[feralimal]

Well it depende. Everyday i notice in history and philosophy related discussions the works of plato, but was he real?? Plato literally means broad shoulders (bodybuilder of the past?)

Yes, whether Plato the man was real is definitely a valid fakery question.

What I think that post was getting at was the 'how'. Some admitted process gives us "Plato's works", whilst no one has no idea if Plato existed. There are a bunch of monks, picking up some work or other, then editing it, as if they were the man himself, with other curating experts years later accepting or refusing certain edits. My point is that there's no way to pull the real 'Plato' out of that mess, if he even existed.

The process explained is not a process that leads to truth, although the works are presented as that. What we see is the process whereby some version of history (or philosophy) is provided to people. It's nothing to do with truth or reality, it's just some version of some narrative. Different edits and different curation would give a total different output.

 

[ViniB]

Today's article is perhaps not a "fake" in itself, but it retroactively qualifies a lot of prior work as fake.

Scientists have apparently just discovered a new form of magnetism:

Altermagnetism: A new type of magnetism, with broad implications for technology and research

Altermagnets have a special combination of the arrangement of spins and crystal symmetries. The spins alternate, as in antiferromagnets, resulting in no net magnetization. Yet, rather than simply canceling out, the symmetries give an electronic band structure with strong spin polarization that flips in direction as you pass through the material's energy bands—hence the name altermagnets. This results in highly useful properties more resemblant to ferromagnets, as well as some completely new properties.

My understanding of the difference between Maxwell's equations, as written in their original quaternion notation, and Heaviside's "translation" of them into conventional notation, is that the Heaviside equations treat opposite vectors as canceled-out zeroes and discard them, whereas the original equations somehow kept this polarity. Here we see something similar, if I'm not mistaken: the opposing vectors cancel out upon first inspection, but on another level, unseen until now, their polarity also generates a subtle surplus phenomenon. Einstein did NOT know Maxwell's original equations, only Heaviside's reduced versions, and apparently this is common.

"That's the magic about altermagnets," says Tomáš Jungwirth from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, principal investigator of the study. "Something that people believed was impossible until recent theoretical predictions [showed it] is in fact possible."

Here we encounter once again the weird epistemological blind spot at the heart of institutional science. Scientists seem incapable of stopping themselves from decreeing things "impossible" in advance because the mathemagic told them so. What arrogance. And then one day, oops...uh actually there's another form of magnetism we never saw because the equations told us it was impossible, please forget we ever said that. But this time we really know what's impossible, trust us! They're no better than the economists with their worthless Nobel Prizes. I call it the neurotic fantasy of epistemological closure, and scientists, who ought to be the last people to fall for it, seem, thanks some uncanny constitutional short-circuit between their professed ideals and their obsessional personality types/emotional needs, inevitably to begin to believe that even if they don't know everything, at least they know more or less where the line between possible and impossible lies. Pure hubris!

Murmurings that a new type of magnetism was lurking began not long ago: In 2019, Jungwirth together with theoretical colleagues at the Czech Academy of Sciences and University of Mainz identified a class of magnetic materials with a spin structure that did not fit within the classic descriptions of ferromagnetism or antiferromagnetism.

"Altermagnetism is actually not something hugely complicated. It is something entirely fundamental that was in front of our eyes for decades without noticing it," says Jungwirth. "And it is not something that exists only in a few obscure materials. It exists in many crystals that people simply had in their drawers.

Not "decades"...forever.

So how many other mysterious properties do those household crystals possess? How many other "fundamental" forces and processes that were "right in front of our eyes" are today dismissed as impossible on prima facie grounds by the same arrogant science scum who claimed they knew everything there was to know about magnetism?

Since it looks like you're really into magnetism as i am, here's some really cool information i discovered

There’s this book from "1895" titled Ancient Magic, Magnetism and Psychic Forces. The key to power, by an L. H. Anderson

From what i could find it basically says that all true healings are magnetic in nature and the key for psychic habilities

The author is suspicious, aparently he is the founder of the national hygienic and hypnotic institute, that is housed at the Chicago masonic temple, so most likelly this guy was a freemason

 

[feralimal]

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

This is acknowledged fakery (of a made up illness called 'Bixonimania') that illustrates how easy it is to perpetuate nonsense, because no one checks anything. It's spoon-feeding all the way down.

Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024.

Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.

the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers.

Osmanovic Thunström had reservations while developing her experiment; she worried about the risks of seeding a fake illness into the scientific literature.

She really shouldn't worry too much about it...

The article also addresses talking points such as misinformation, ethics committees, and other nonsense designed to create an illusion of reality and checks and measures around the scientific endeavour.

 

[ViniB]

‘Kraken’: Scientists discover 19-metre-long apex predator octopus

The kraken has been discovered!! But oh no, it's not from a fairly recent past, it was actually from "80 million years ago"

Alright, sarcasm aside, a beek has been found and the fraudsters literally created an entire new creature, again

 

[Breizh]

NASA is apparently developing the next generation Mars helicopter. Clearly this is a show with an XL budget but we already know that.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBJNtvAyt9g

 

[Breizh]

Apparently these ancient tree xylem were formed by a volcanic eruption around 60m years ago.

— "Globally significant volcanic event formed Giant’s Causeway, scientists find"

Geochronologists say Antrim coastline’s basalt columns developed over 5.5m years – 8m less than thought

Now, scientists have revealed it was intense volcanic activity during a “major globally impacting volcanic event” – and not a legendary battle between two destructive giants – that led to the formation of the coastline’s 40,000 distinctive interlocking basalt columns about 60m years ago.

theguardian.com/.../globally-significant-volcanic-event-giants-causeway-scientists