The Jellyfish, the Watchdog, and the Genome

When people and states abuse research for personal and propaganda

Someone created a scientific journal. They are the sole author. They are the sole editor. They are the sole reviewer. The journal has published papers claiming that fungi are secretly jellyfish, that stinkhorn mushrooms are surviving organisms from 600 million years ago, that the author’s personal genome contains “quantum-active” architecture, and that living organisms unchanged for 1.9 billion years were recovered from a ditch in Boston.

Each of these claims would individually be the most significant biological discovery in decades. She’s making all of them at once. In a journal she built on her own website.

It’s called The Journal of Decolonized Ecology and Evolution. The name is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Here’s the problem. She published the papers on Zenodo and OSF — legitimate open-access platforms used by real researchers. They got DOIs. Digital Object Identifiers. The little number that says “this is a real academic thing.” And because they have DOIs and sit on recognised repositories, Google Scholar indexes them. Type “jellyfish genetics” into Scholar and you might land on a paper arguing that humans share neural networks with cnidarians, sitting right next to actual peer-reviewed research.

The system can’t tell the difference. It wasn’t designed to.

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Peer review exists for a reason. It’s expensive. It takes months. Reviewers are unpaid. Journals reject most submissions. The whole process is slow, frustrating, and occasionally maddening. I know — I’ve got a paper under review right now and the waiting is killing me.

But the cost is the point. Peer review is a filter. It doesn’t catch everything and it sometimes blocks good work. But it exists to impose a cost on publishing, so that what comes out the other end has at least been checked by someone who didn’t write it. Remove the cost, you remove the filter.

Open-access infrastructure — Zenodo, OSF, DOIs — was built to lower barriers to publication. That’s a good thing. Researchers in under-resourced institutions needed a way to share work without paying thousands in journal fees. The platforms were designed to be open. They were not designed to be quality filters. They’re archives, not publishers. Giving someone a DOI is like giving them a tracking number at the post office. It proves the package was sent. It says nothing about what’s inside.

The self-published journal exploits this gap perfectly. It captures the appearance of scholarship — formatting, citations, DOIs, institutional-sounding name — without paying any of the costs that normally produce that appearance. The rent extracted is credibility and discoverability. Google Scholar does the distribution for free.

And calling it “decolonized” is a neat trick. It reframes every rejection by the scientific community as evidence of colonial gatekeeping rather than evidence that fungi aren’t jellyfish. The name is an unfalsifiability engine. Every “no” becomes proof.

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Now here’s where it gets interesting. This isn’t just one person with a microscope and a Squarespace account. The same structural vulnerability — the gap between appearing credible and actually being credible — operates at every scale.

I wrote about this in my Temnik Case piece for the Washington Outsider Centre for Information Warfare. The Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) spent decades building genuine credibility. Real technical expertise. Real litigation. Congressional Research Service cited them. The Government Accountability Office consulted them. They helped stop a multi-billion-dollar nuclear facility through meticulous NEPA challenges. That credibility was earned honestly.

Then, around 2014, something shifted. LASG started framing NATO expansion as the root cause of conflict. Started describing the Ukraine crisis using language that mirrored Russian state media. Started hosting Scott Ritter — a convicted sex offender who became a regular contributor to RT and Sputnik, compared Ukraine to a “rabid dog,” and addressed thousands of Kadyrov’s fighters in Grozny. The event was reported by Executive Intelligence Review, which is the LaRouche publication. The same LaRouche network I wrote about in my first Small Clues piece.

LASG weren’t agents. Nobody gave them instructions. They internalised the narrative through what Russian doctrine calls reflexive control — shaping someone’s decision-making by controlling the information environment around them. The credibility they’d built over decades became the delivery mechanism. Their name still sounded like a nuclear watchdog. Their DOE citations still existed. But the content had changed. And the reputation carried the new content into spaces it could never have reached on its own.

Same structural exploit. Different resources. Earned credibility repurposed as a distribution channel for aligned narratives.

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Now scale it up one more time.

Putin’s daughter Maria Vorontsova leads a programme called the “Genome of Russians.” Rosneft is investing up to a billion dollars. The programme aims to collect genetic material from 100,000 Russians to identify “genetic defects” typical of the Russian ethnic group. It operates through Moscow State University. It has institutional affiliation, state funding, and all the apparatus of legitimate science.

It is, to be blunt, eugenics with a lab coat on.

But it doesn’t need to create a fake journal on Zenodo. It doesn’t need DOIs or self-published PDFs. It has captured institutions. The pseudoscience gets published through universities and research centres that still carry the full appearance of peer review, even though the conclusions were decided before the research began. The institutional shell provides cover. The name does the work.

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Three points on a single line.

At one end: a lone actor publishing quantum jellyfish papers in a journal she created, reviewed, and edited herself. No earned credibility. Pure exploitation of open infrastructure.

In the middle: a captured organisation — LASG — that built real credibility over decades and then became a vehicle for narratives aligned with Russian strategic interests. Earned credibility repurposed.

At the far end: a state-funded programme with billions of dollars, institutional capture, and the full machinery of a national university system. No need to exploit open infrastructure when you own the institutions.

The structural vulnerability is the same at every point. Peer review is a costly signal. It exists to impose a filter between “someone wrote this” and “someone checked this.” Remove the cost — or capture the institution that imposes it — and the filter disappears. Everything downstream, from Google Scholar to policy debates, inherits the gap.

The door was built to be open. It can’t tell the difference between a marginalised researcher and a quantum jellyfish.

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If you’re interested in how credible organisations get captured by aligned narratives, read the full Temnik Case and the rest of the Small Clues series at the Washington Outsider Centre for Information Warfare.

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