Homeopath has a diluted understanding of a simple story

So I went to see Contagion last weekend. The first thing I did afterwards was lash out at and threaten our followers on Twitter for no good reason. The second thing I did was check out what the alternative medicine crowd thought of it. I thought it’d be fun to see how angry they were over certain aspects, but what I found was even more disturbing than what I expected. [EDIT: Spoilers ahead!]

In the movie Jude Law plays a homeopathy salesman / blogger named Alan Krumwiede who is exposed for the fraud he is in the end. He helps create panic over the epidemic, profits off of it, and then accuses “big pharma” and the government of doing exactly that while portraying himself as a tireless crusader against corruption. When he’s arrested after a hedge fund manager wears a wire to bust him for fraud, manslaughter, and other charges, his devout followers pool their money to bail him out like any cult would for its leader. In other words it’s just like real life.

So I was pretty surprised to come across this blog post from a website called “Homeopathy World,” run by someone named Mary Aspinwall. It’s basically a toned-down version of the Krumwiede character’s blog, “Truth Serum Now.” Mary is mostly happy with how homeopathy is portrayed in the movie because she’s apparently so devoted to the alternative medicine mythology that cognitive dissonance prevented her from understanding the Krumwiede storyline.

To be fair, Contagion doesn’t revolve around Krumwiede. It’s a Steven Soderbergh film, and it’s very similar in its decentralized structure to Syriana and Traffic. There really isn’t a main character and the parallel narratives give more of a ‘big picture’ perspective than most movies. So you’ve got the widower of America’s patient zero (Matt Damon) dealing with the loss of his wife and son, doctors at the CDC (Kate Winslet and Laurence Fishburne) trying to do the best they can with the bureaucracy they have, a WHO epidemiologist (Marion Cotillard) investigating the origins of the disease, and so on. So it’s understandable that someone wouldn’t get parts of the story, but not so much if it’s the one aspect of it in which you’re supposed to be especially interested.

The way in which Aspinwall misunderstands the story is a great microcosm of how alternative medicine conspiracy theorists misunderstand the way science works. Plot points which reinforce her beliefs are blown up way out of proportion and the rest are ignored. Here’s what she thinks happened:

Alan is highly suspicious of the motives of pharmaceutical companies and government agencies. When he himself falls sick he chooses an alternative route, dosing himself with a (fictitious) natural remedy called “Forsythia”on his vlog (video log). After making a rapid online recovery he begins to attract millions of hits, as people desperately try to get information and protect themselves from the virus, which is killing one in four people who contract it within days.

Law’s character doesn’t fall sick. It’s revealed that he was faking the symptoms at the end. When the authorities confront him with his test results which prove this, Alan replies by saying something like, “Well, of course your tests would say that” in a cold tone which implied that that would be his official defense against their allegations. Even if he were just honestly mistaken about his treatment’s efficacy, he should still be surprised that any tests would show he never was sick – unless, of course, he were faking his symptoms all along.

Another sign that Alan is knowingly lying comes earlier in the film when he meets up with an unidentified woman he seems to care greatly for. She asks him for his magic potion and he tells her that he has none left because his house was robbed. The way he struggled with telling her this hinted that he was probably lying. At first I thought this was a lie born out of greed, but that’s too simple. Too much of a cheap shot.

If you were totally dishonest and making a living out of selling fake medicine to gullible people, would you recommend your own product to people you really cared about? Probably not. You probably wouldn’t bring it up at all. And if things got really desperate, like they do in Contagion, you’d probably find some way to nudge them towards going with an effective treatment without simply telling them that you’re a snake oil salesman. That’s exactly what Alan does with his lady friend.

If the alt-med worldview is the one Soderbergh adopts here, which is what Aspinwall believes, then these two scenes make no sense at all. But alternative medicine and things that don’t make sense kind of go together. If I made a Venn Diagram of the two, it would just be one circle inside another.

If you’re still not convinced Alan was a con man, look at this. It’s actually a screenshot from Aspinwall’s blog with a still from the movie:

Alan’s shown wearing this kind of get-up throughout much of the movie, and almost exclusively after he’s already “cured himself.” But why does the inventor and supplier of the cure need to protect himself so much more thoroughly than pretty much anyone else in the movie? If he comes down with symptoms again, he could just drink some of his magical tap water and be cured. Soderbergh’s practically bashing the audience over the head with the idea that Alan’s a liar, but Aspinwall’s blinding herself to all of this and concluding that Alan “does come across as genuine in his beliefs.”

Here’s another funny part of her review:

At one dramatic high point he even catches a high-ranking government spokesman in an out right [sic] lie on live TV.

This is technically true. Laurence Fishburne’s character warned a family member on Facebook to leave her city before news of the massive outbreak and ensuing panic. It’s pretty unethical, but also understandable under the circumstances. It also has absolutely nothing to do with who is right in regards to the science. The entire government could be building an underground city for high-ranking officials with a 10:1 female-to-male ratio a la Dr. Strangelove and it still wouldn’t make Alan’s customer testimonies more reliable than actual epidemiological research.

Oblivious to irony, Aspinwall then pitches her homeopathy kit at the end of her review. When your own way of making a living is so similar to a movie villain, you can either acknowledge that you’re an awful person and try to change or you can do your own revision of the movie and turn the villain into a hero. And it’s pretty clear which option homeopaths prefer.

The harm in “traditional healing”

A few weeks ago when I wrote about a new age exposition here in Western New York, a few commenters on Facebook were whining about how I could dare to criticize the idiots who attended and the frauds who sold overpriced garbage to them. Here’s what one of them said:

Let whackos be wackos. Nothing wrong with them at all- they’re just wackos. Live and let live….. Whether the vendors are con-artists or not… Wackos need to buy their wacky stuff. It’s good for the economy.

Usually I just direct people who make this kind of argument to whatstheharm.net for lots of examples with what’s wrong with “wackos” selling quack “treatments” to the gullible. But since I don’t have a Facebook account, I’ll have to just write about a recent example in the news here.

Tanzania has outlawed witch doctors and traditional “healers” recently due to a mass killing of albinos for their body parts to use in magic potions. But that doesn’t mean their government will do anything about one of them selling the same crap to desperate sick people when the “miracle pastor” selling it happens to be making a lot of money off of it.

There is a line 16 miles long stretching to Rev Ambilikile “Babu” Mwasapile’s house in a remote area of Tanzania. They’re all waiting to pay the equivalent of 30 cents to get a mixture of water and herbs which, according to the BBC, is “safe to drink.” The problem is that it’s not really safe to buy. The people waiting in line for this have no real shelter besides their automobiles (if they happen to have driven there), and no access to clean water. So far 52 have died just waiting in line to buy this stuff.

Maybe some of them would have died of whatever they were trying to cure anyway. After all, they wouldn’t be going to such extreme measures if they didn’t have some serious medical ailment already.

Fortunately even the guy profiting off of all this insanity is calling for fewer customers, since it’ll probably turn out that he’s caused more suffering in his business venture than he’s alleviated. When this story came out, he was asking for no new arrivals until April 1. Also the tests to see if his concoction had any medical benefit were still ongoing. But even if it turns out it has some measurable positive effect, he should still be subject to the law for selling it without doing any real tests or seeking any approval for it at all.

5 Effects that cause people to believe in nonsense

Originally posted at the BEAST

All of us humans are the result of an unconscious biological process called evolution. Based on the conditions at the time, lots of different pressures selected for certain traits. And after those conditions changed – for example most of us don’t need to prioritize escaping from predators on the savannah anymore – all of the selected-for traits remained. We can’t just say, “Hey! Now that we have houses and locked doors and stuff, I don’t need to wake up in the middle of the night whenever there’s a loud noise because chances are very good that it isn’t a fucking tiger here to eat me and dismember my children!”

Nowadays, lots of these psychological traits have become a target for charlatans and frauds out to scheme you out of your time and money. Here are a few of them to bear in mind the next time one of them approaches you.

The Forer Effect

Carnies like this one depend on at least 60 suckers born per
hour in order to raise a family of four.

***
What it is:

Also known as the Barnum effect, the Forer effect describes our tendency to think that descriptions of a large group are directed at ourselves personally. Bertram Forer performed an experiment on his students where he gave a personality type description to his students, leading them to believe that each were custom designed for each individual when in fact they were all reading the same description. Here’s a snippet:

While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.

People love flattery, and when it’s restrained within some bounds of reason they’ll just eat it right up. This is why you never see astrology newspaper columns which describe what a colossal douchebag Pisces can be, even though we know that there are people of that “sign” who fit that description perfectly.

What it can lead to:

Astrology, Tarot, and most personality tests.

Worst case scenario:

A friendly stranger on the street approaches you and offers you tickets for a “free movie.” Afterwards, she asks you some innocuous-sounding questions while you hold on to a metal bar attached to something which looks like a lie detector, but isn’t. You go on what you believe to be another “date” at her office, where a man in a sailor suit does a high-pressure sales pitch for some excessively overpriced literature. Before you know it, you’re paying a cultish authoritarian institution for the privilege relaying all of your most deviant sexual fantasies to an official record which is then stored away for blackmail purposes in the event that you try to escape. Yes, you have just joined the Church of Scientology.

***

The Placebo Effect

“By harnessing my body’s ‘natural energy field,’ this worthless bracelet can help me–ow, my back!”

***

What it is:

We usually think of the Placebo Effect as when we feel better after seeing a doctor, solely from their “bedside manner,” or when subjective and/or psychosomatic symptoms are relieved by something the patient believes is effective medicine, but actually is just a sugar pill. That’s definitely a part of it, but the Placebo Effect also plays a part in the perception of the medical practitioner, not just the patient.

So not only can the Placebo Effect cause patients / customers to be deceived into thinking that an ineffective treatment works, it can do the same to the people who are trying to use science to solve that same problem. So the people doing the studies on, say, homeopathy, can also be Placebo’d by perceiving an improvement in a condition when there isn’t one. This goes a long way towards explaining why certain implausible methods occasionally get written up in respected, peer reviewed publications with vaguely promising results.

What it can lead to:

“Alternative medicine” like homeopathy, acupuncture, most chiropractic, naturopathy, Reiki, psychic surgery, and whatever other form of bogus “treatment” the quack industry invents.

Worst case scenario:

Your dog is scratched by a rabid raccoon, so you head off to your local alt-med store for some homeopathic rabies cure for dogs (hey, homeopathy cured that cold you had for 11 days, so this will work too, right?). After administering it a few times, your pet’s condition seems to be improving…until it bites off your hands. It dies the next day. Also: You can no longer masturbate.

***

The Ideomotor Effect

So there’s this guy.

***

What it is:

It’s very difficult to keep completely still. We’re pretty much always making these involuntary movements. And when you hold, say, a pen, it’s going to move a little even if you were to try very hard to keep it motionless. It’s so subtle that some don’t even believe that they themselves are causing the movements in the object in question.

So if someone can convince themselves that a stick will twitch when they’re standing near a bomb, and if they can then convince a Middle Eastern government to buy $85 million worth of these magical sticks, then the lives of everyone using one of these fake bomb detectors is put at risk.

What it can lead to:

Dowsing, facilitated communication, automatic writing.

Worst case scenario:

Your kids are having trouble saying goodbye to Grandma, so you pick them up a Ouija board. The next night, they “receive” a message from Grandma telling them to take your car to the cemetery. They’re arrested for driving underage. You’re charged with negligence. Your wife leaves you and takes the children. And your house. You end up dying cold and alone.

***

The Clever Hans Effect

Wilbur’s tragic mental illness was exploited to create a classic ’60s sitcom

***

What it is:

Clever Hans was a horse in Germany who lived about 100 years ago. His owner, a guy named Wilhelm von Osten, claimed that Hans was able to do simple math by stamping his foot, which would be a pretty amazing breakthrough in the cognitive abilities of non-human animals if it were true. However, as a study by psychologist Oskar Pfungs demonstrated, what was actually happening was that the crowd watching would unconsciously cue the horse as to when to stop stomping his foot. So instead of adding, say, 7 and 9, the horse would stop stomping his foot after 16 times which is when the crowd’s demeanor would change. The audience was what poker players would call an easy mark.

This kind of observer bias also carries over into psychological studies where surveys are used. People and horses alike are eager to give those performing a study what they believe they want to see instead of a real, honest reaction.

What it can lead to:

Believing that animals are communicating with you.

Worst case scenario:

David Berkowitz and his neighbor’s demon-possessed dog.

***

The Availability Heuristic (Availability Bias)

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“As the ethnic and religious majority, we are under constant threat of oppression.”

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What it is:

In general, people don’t deal very well with statistics. Especially when those statistics show that an overhyped phenomenon is much less common than we’d believe solely from news media coverage. We tend to conjure up examples of things which come easily to mind and think about them as if they were common occurrences even when they’re not.

So for example, we here in the US spend a huge amount of money doing something which our political leaders call “fighting terrorism,” while those same political leaders simultaneously tell us that we cannot have a single-payer health care system like the rest of the industrialized world because it is “too expensive.” Someone unfamiliar with any of the statistics of harm caused by terrorism and by a lack of health care coverage might be forgiven for mistakenly thinking that terrorism kills more Americans than not having health insurance. But that’s clearly not the case. It’s just that we prioritize “fighting terrorism” to such an insanely out of proportion degree because it’s easier for us to be rattled emotionally by dramatic, violent events like 9/11. We just aren’t wired to be so moved by more mundane causes of death, even when they’re much more common.

It’s only been very recently in human history that we’ve been able to compile statistics on a large scale. For most of our time here, what comes easiest to mind was really all we had to go on. But that’s not necessarily the most accurate portrayal of reality.

What it can lead to:

Pretty much anything that can be summarized in a cheap, stupid soundbite or a random anecdote.

Worst case scenario:

You hear about The Secret from Oprah, and then waste your money on the book. You learn that you can have whatever you want just by visualizing it. You are arrested, for stealing other people’s property, and raped in prison.

The 5 Worst Quacks Around Today

[Re-posted at The BEAST]

I’m going to have to limit this list to people who are currently practicing some form of quackery, because if I tried to make a historical list I’d feel compelled to handicap for that person’s period in history. So Isaac Newton, who was literally one of the smartest people ever, believed in alchemy. The great 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler believed in astrology. Lots of the ancient Greek philosophers believed in demons. Demons that controlled their thoughts. Seriously. But you’ve really got to cut them some slack because of how primitive human understanding was in their times. If you’re living in a technologically advanced society today, as the five below are, you really have no excuse for that kind of ignorance. So to make it a level playing field, here are what I think are the worst purveyors of antiscientific pseudomedicine around today.

Jenny McCarthy

There’s a significance to this picture. The website advertised across her boobs is one McCarthy used to run, and it no longer exists. You wouldn’t know it from reading her antivaccine rants on the HuffPo nowadays, but Jenny McCarthy used to believe that her son was a something called an “indigo child.” Indigo children are supposed to represent the next stage of human evolution, according to some New Age whackaloon named Nancy Ann Tappe. It’s apparently pretty important that they have blond hair and blue eyes. They are supposed to have paranormal powers, and exploring those powers early in life seems to have the effect of making them appear to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. But they’re NOT AUTISTIC. They’re just… you know, special. Like little, supernatural, card-counting, Aryan snowflakes.

But the problem with Indigo Children is that eventually they grow up to be Indigo Adults and are expected to take on Indigo Responsibilities and an Indigo Spouse and an Indigo Mortgage, maybe even get an Indigo Job which allows them to make an Indigo profit off of their Indigo paranormal powers. And the problem with this (SPOILER ALERT) is that the whole idea of the Indigo kids is a ridiculous lie. So they never manage to demonstrate their paranormal abilities in any meaningful test comparable to any test a normal employer would use on a job applicant.

So if her child’s still going to be a precious and unique snowflake, Jenny McCarthy would need to find a new narrative which doesn’t involve him reading minds or astral projection or that kind of crap. This is where the disgraced Dr. Andrew Wakefield enters the story with his stories about how the MMR vaccine causes autism, even though it doesn’t. And this meeting of Wakefield’s data manipulation and lying with McCarthy’s (and her then-boyfriend Jim Carrey’s) abuse of celebrity status is the origin of the modern antivaccination movement.

The gist of it is that antivaccers think that “toxins” in vaccines cause injuries to children. One of those injuries we refer to as autism. And what’s funny is that the “toxins” still allegedly cause those injuries years after they’ve been removed from the shots. You might consider that and think that it proves them wrong, but you’re stupid for thinking that. It really proves just how super-powerful these “toxins” get when they cause autism without even actually being there.

I’m sure lots of former and current models are intelligent and thoughtful people, but McCarthy really does fit the stereotype of the ditzy blonde, combined with a jaw-dropping arrogance and cold-heartedness. For example:

Response to a question about her interacting with actual medical doctors: I did a lot of digging on my own, the “University of Google” (source)

My greatest lesson is always to trust the mommy instinct. Always trust yourself. Always trust the gut instinct. It will never let you down. (source)

Response to how scientists disagree with her: My science is Evan. He’s at home. That’s my science. (source)

Autism, as I see it, steals the soul from a child; then, if allowed, relentlessly sucks life’s marrow out of the family members, one by one…(source)

I do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it’s their fucking fault that the diseases are coming back. They’re making a product that’s shit. If you give us a safe vaccine, we’ll use it. It shouldn’t be polio versus autism.(source)

You might be thinking that spreading this kind of weird, eugenics-y conspiracy theories would only affect those who buy into it. If a parent wants to have their kid die from an easily preventable disease, that’s their right, right? But even if you accept that those children are just the property of their parents, refusing to vaccinate still affects others by threatening herd immunity. More on that later.

But there is a lighter, unintentionally funny side of McCarthy. Here she is on CNN:

Mercury is the second worst neurotoxin on the planet, and that’s a fact. Get it out of our shots!

OK, got that? Jenny McCarthy does not want anyone injecting the second worst neurotoxin on the planet. But what about the first worst neurotoxin on the planet?

I love Botox, I absolutely love it. I get it minimally, so I can still move my face. But I really do think it’s a savior.

So when you’re injecting something with trace amounts of neurotoxins to immunize against preventable diseases, that’s an outrage that must be stopped. But when you’re injecting something with trace amounts of neurotoxins to get rid of a few wrinkles, that’s the act of a “savior.”

Leonard Horowitz

Horowitz is on a mission to tell the world about how AIDS was created by the government. If you’ve ever wondered where Jeremiah Wright got that idea, this is the guy.

Horowitz runs a publishing company in Idaho called Tetrahedron which sells his books and DVDs about how you can use the Bible to cure diseases and walk on water and how the government 9/11′d the WTC themselves and how the Apocalypse is imminent and much, much more. He also sells lots of “alternative medicine” (i.e. not medicine) through the “Healthy World Store.” Let’s take a look at some of the products.

Breath of the Earth Hawaiian Holy Water
HYPERCHARGE NATURAL HEALING using Hawaiian Holy Water researched by Dr. Len Horowitz and Dr. Masaru Emoto. This water holds the spiritual blessing of the Big Island of Hawaii, revered by Kahuna’s as the sacred rebirthing place spiraling down from the center the universe. This supercharged blessed water is recommended for its “purgative and restorative” properties. It ousts negativity and general pathology, and lays the foundation for the creation of paradise.
Price: $24.20

Yeah, that’s right: $24 for a bottle of water. And the justification for that in its description is basically a bottled water commercial on acid. That’s the least expensive product, tied with a colon cleansing product. Here’s another product Horowitz is trying to sell to the gullible:

Holy Harmony Perfect Circle of Sound Tuning Forks (Complete Set)
Used for healing, chakra balancing, or instrument tuning, the 9 Holy Harmony Tuning Forks contain the 6 frequencies (“the original Solfeggio”) found in “Healing Code” by Dr. Leonard Horowitz and Dr. Joseph Puleo; plus 3 newly discovered frequencies completing this numeric series and creating “God’s Perfect Circle of Sound.”
Price: $188.00

Yeah, that or you could just buy a set of tuning forks from Amazon for under $20. That’s somewhere close to a 1,000% mark-up, just for the pleasure of having Horowitz’s name and delusional ravings about magical frequencies attached to it.

One of his old products was deleted from the internets, but Horowitz claimed that it could treat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome back in 2003 when that was a thing. The “treatment” was a naturopathic / homeopathic nasal spray. The FDA did their job and explained to Horowitz that they weren’t having any of it, which explains why you need to use the Wayback Machine to find the original and hilarious press release.

OK, now here’s the most despicable one of all:

C-Cure Membership
Few products can honestly claim to cure cancer, but C-CURE challenges the risky old slash, burn and poison approach of chemo and radiation therapies and even expensive and risky removal of many skin cancers. C-CURE stands for Concentrated – Cancer Undermining and Restorative Emulsion. THIS PRODUCT IS FREE FOR EXPERIMENTAL USE ONLY AS PER FDA’s EXTORTIONISTIC COERCIVE REGULATIONS SOLELY SERVING THE CANCER INDUSTRY.
Price: $386.00

How much cognitive dissonance can the human mind stand? Well, it’s apparently enough to be able to rant about the “CANCER INDUSTRY” within a short description of a sham product you’re selling for almost four hundred bucks. Notice how it mentions curing cancer, but doesn’t actually say that it is a cure for cancer. It “challenges” normal cancer treatments. That’s a trick these hucksters use to get around the OPPRESSIVE AND TYRANNICAL REGULATIONS OF THE FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION. As a quick side note, if you listen to the first link in this section, which is a debate between Horowitz and a grad student on HIV/AIDS, you’ll notice that he really does speak in caps-lock mode very often.

Speaking of that debate, I’m going to finish this section with how his opponent broke down what is wrong with this kind of approach to an attempt at medicine and how it reveals what she perceives as Horowitz’s deceit regarding the supposed efficacy of these products:

Lets pretend [Horowitz] really, REALLY thinks that [his crap] can ‘help people’. Why doesnt he do what is necessary to get this information mainstream (and I dont mean publishing straight to consumer books)? Why doesnt he get in a lab and do research? If I screwed up in the lab and accidentally *cured* HIV with a mixture of Flonase, coffee, and calcium, I would beg my boss for a few supplies to run some preliminary experiments! If they turned out well, I’d call the people who make Flonase and beg them to give it a try. If they ignored me, ‘Id take it to their competition. If they ignored me, I’d write a grant and try to do it myself. I would not stock up on Flonase, coffee, and calcium and make little bottles of it in my bathtub and sell it to AIDS patients for $189.99. Nothing about his behavior makes me think he thinks the crap he’s selling actually works, especially considering the gravity of the diseases he proclaims he can cure.

Jim McCormick

Admittedly this guy doesn’t have the track record of his colleagues on this list. He’s really only known for one thing, and it doesn’t involve Satanic vaccines or Nazi doctors who hate mothers or anything like that.

McCormick is the inventor of a product called the ADE 651. It made the news a while back in the NY Times and Esquire and the BBC and NPR and… well, you get the point.

The James Randi Educational Foundation is credited with bringing attention to the ADE 651 so-called “bomb detector” and the British company (ATSC) who manufactures and profits off of it. The JREF issued a simple challenge for anyone to test it under controlled conditions with positive results. If anyone could do that, they would win a million dollars from the JREF. So far the challenge has remained unmet.

The ADE 651 initially didn’t even contain any electronic components. It’s basically just a stick in a box. Here is what it looks like:

Oh yeah, I didn’t mention that this thing was being used by our troops in Iraq up until recently. And some Iraqi police are still using it. Here is what one of the device’s defenders had to say about it:

Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is detecting bombs. I don’t care what they say. I know more about bombs than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world.
-Major-General Jehad al-Jabiri of the Interior Ministry’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives

Even though the aforementioned JREF challenge had been in place since October of 2008, the media outrage over McCormick’s fraud really took off during a series of IED bombings while the ADE 651 was being widely used in Iraq. The British government was similarly outraged, arrested the executive of ATCS, Ltd. – after the government had already paid that company at least $85 million for these devices – and banned the export of ADE 651s.

But it all started with one “entrepreneur” named Jim McCormick who decided to put some plastic together and sell the Ideomotor Effect for profit at the expense of innocent lives. What a class act.

Kevin Trudeau

If you’ve ever found yourself in a drug-induced haze in front of a television at 3:45 AM during the middle of the last decade (and let’s face it – if you’re reading this then that applies to you), then you know Kevin Trudeau. He’s the infomercial guy who wants to tell you about all the natural cures “they” don’t want you to know about. He also wants to tell you about the free money “they” don’t want you to know about. But have you heard about Kevin Trudeau’s larceny, credit card fraud, SEC lawsuit for running an illegal pyramid scheme, Federal Trade Commission fines, contempt of court charges, and subsequent prison sentence – all of which “they” don’t want you to know about?

Kevin Trudeau started off his career as a fraud by running credit card scams. He went off to Prison University for that, where he teamed up with a fellow inmate “they” don’t want you to know about. On the outside they started up a multilevel marketing scam “they” don’t want you to know about. So he was originally selling Horowitz-esque products, like a necklace with a magical piece of metal to stop cell phones and radio waves from microwaving your brain. It’s not quite a tin-foil hat, but it’s pretty close. He’s also very into colloidal silver, which gives your skin a nice, permanent silvery hue which “they” most certainly don’t want you to know about.

By 2004, the Federal Trade Commission was so fed up with Trudeau (and rightfully so), that they banned him from selling anything on infomercials other than “informational publicans,” which are protected by the First Amendment.

Now you’ve really got to kind of begrudgingly admire Trudeau for how he took hold of the crisis of being banned and Jujitsu-flipped it into an opportunity to rake in even more cash. From there, he kept on making those infomercials most people know him from, but this time he just sold his books. Since the products he was selling on television were just his books, he was only obligated to tell the truth about the contents of his books – which of course themselves were simply advertisements for his products in book form. His book could say that purple rabbits will invade the Czech Republic tomorrow; but as long as he remembered to insert a phrase like “in my book” in the middle of his late night squawkings, he could talk about the purple rabbits and still legally be considered “informative.”

So instead of buying airtime to hock his useless products directly to his marks, Trudeau was buying airtime to sell his advertisements to an audience which would then pay him again for those same products. So the FTC decision to ban Trudeau from infomercials with a loophole unfortunately had the opposite of the deterrent effect it was intended to have. So much for that shadowy government conspiracy always keeping the non-working naturopath man down.

His books encouraged a lot of thoughtless behavior, like avoiding chemotherapy when you have cancer, sunscreen, deodorant, vaccinations and really any form of medicine. Eventually Trudeau couldn’t help but violate the terms of his infomercial loophole by lying about the contents of his own book about weight loss secrets, which he had allegedly written. In the press release “they” don’t want you to know about, the FTC fined Trudeau $5 million and banned him from infomercials altogether.

And the real bitch of it is that even after all that, the guy still has a net worth of $10 million.

Oh, and by the way, here is a shot of a page in one of his books where he endorses Dianetics:

Meryl Dorey

Meryl Dorey is antivaccine activist in Australia, but she was born in America. She heads the Australian Vaccination Network. They lobby against vaccination, speak out against it – along with all other medicine – and in favor of homeopathy. Even though their mission statement claims that they are “dedicated to the idea that health can be achieved and maintained without the use of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines,” until recently they claimed that they weren’t anti-vaccine. They claimed they were just spreading information so that people could make their own choices. As if frightening parents and lying to them and then mumbling, “But do what you want,” afterwards doesn’t count as advocacy.

Dorey also wrote in her book Voodoo Children that nobody dies from diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and other vaccine-preventable illnesses. This is just not true, and that fact was brought home to her when a four week old child named Dana McCaffrey died from pertussis. The McCaffreys lived in an area of New South Wales, Australia, which had a very low rate of vaccine compliance. This stopped herd immunity in the region, which is supposed to protect infants and people who for legitimate medical reasons can not take vaccinations.

The AVN immediately began harassing the bereaved parents, claiming that they and the government were lying about their baby’s illness. When those conspiracy theories were debunked, Dorety started claiming that the pertussis vaccine wasn’t effective even though it is.

If you wanted to invent a fictional character that started off with a dangerous and misanthropic belief who denied all the contrary evidence and twisted around facts so that they were more complicit with her conclusion, then that character would be indistinguishable from the real-life Dorey.

Now the bright side to all this is that Dorey’s organization is in financial and legal trouble. The New South Wales Office of Liquor, Gaming, & Racing has been investigating their legal authority to raise funds, and just two weeks ago they ruled that they had “detected a number of breaches of charity fundraising laws.” Dorey hasn’t commented yet, but hopefully they’ll find some nice little island for her somewhere near Antarctica. No vaccines there, you see.

The 5 Best Cases of Religious Schadenfreude

[reposted at The BEAST]

Schadenfreude isn’t even the best word to describe what you feel when you hear about cases like these. It’s a very specific kind of schadenfreude: one where you know that the subject’s irrational beliefs somehow shaped their own downfall, so that their own life becomes a case study against the very worldview they had adopted. We’re all happy that Hitler killed himself in the end, but how much sweeter would it have been if rumors of him being part Jewish had sent him to his own gas chambers? Clearly, that would have been awesome. So let’s look at some cases like that.

Paul Ingram

What he believed:

Paul Ingram was a chief civil deputy of the Olympia, Washington’s sheriff’s office and the Chairman of the local Republican Party. He was also a fundamentalist Christian, and one day one of his daughters returned from a church “retreat” with “recovered memories” of Satanic ritual abuse by, among others, her father.

This was in the late 1980s, during the height of the “Satanic panic,” when stories like Ingram’s were about as common as stories of Mexicans invading Texas ranches are today. When the accused denied any such abuse, the accusers would claim that the abuser was repressing their own memories just as the victim had. That would mean that it’s time for a “therapy” session so that the accused could recover their memories and confess. On the other hand, if the accused confessed immediately, they were also seen as guilty. Much like the old witch hunts from centuries ago, all accused were presumed guilty and there was no way for them to prove their innocence.

Since Ingram was generally supportive of this idea that there were rings of Satanic cults raping and torturing their own children, he was open to the idea that he himself had been involved but had suppressed his memories. His pastor and a court-appointed “therapist” supported this hypothesis and kept him in the dark when skeptical investigators challenged the accusations.

The Schadenfreude:

Ingram acquired a Christian attorney with limited experience in criminal law, who let Ingram plead guilty. Pretty much immediately after being sentenced, the reality of his situation started to dawn on him and he tried to withdraw his guilty plea with the aid of a legitimate law firm. The motion was denied, and Ingram went to prison. He remained there for the next 15 years and was released in 2003. Further details of the case are available here.

Kent Hovind

What he believes:

Kent “Dr. Dino” Hovind is primarily known as a Young Earth Creationist (YEC), but he believes just about any crazy ideas he hears about. Even as YECs go, Hovind’s the worst of the worst. Exhibit A: Answers in Genesis has a list of arguments they wish other YECs would stop using because they’re so easy to refute that even my old friend Ken Ham is embarrassed by them. Most of them were and still are old favorites of “Dr. Dino,” so he responded to what he saw as AIG’s unreasonable attempt at quality control (an “overreaction”) with a long, psychotic rant (deleted from his site but archived here), buffered with his customers’ testimonials of his “integrity.”

Here he is with Sasha Baren Cohen on his Ali G Show, doing his standard creationist shtick.

And if you’re on a road trip, or have a few hours to kill, you really have to listen to this hilarious debate on the Infidel Guy show between Hovind and Dr. Massimo Pigliucci.

But you miss out on the whole picture here unless you take into account some of Hovind’s other lesser-known beliefs. Hovind’s also a rabid conspiracy theorist. And when you think about it, this is pretty much necessary for creationists as well as any other science deniers. There would have to be a vast conspiracy afoot for evolution to be both false and widely accepted by the vast majority of scientists in relevant fields. And when you give credibility to the idea that most scientists are lying about their work in order to promote what Hovind sees as their religion, it’s not too much of a stretch to apply that same paranoid approach to politics.

So for example, Hovind believes that flu vaccines are a plot to make people dependent on the government. And it’s not just any government, but a “one world government” (as opposed to a multiple worlds government, I guess). And this “one world government” is going to be run by Freemasons and Catholics and Muslims and Jews. Also the trails that airplanes leave are really made of poisonous chemicals to kill most of the global population, but somehow magically spare the lives of the “one world government” conspirators.

I could go on in this vein for a while, but I’ll spare the reader and cut straight to the most relevant of Hovind’s conspiracy theories – you don’t have to pay taxes! See, the Bible doesn’t say anything about a federal income tax. It just says that you have to render unto Caesar that which is Caeser’s. But Caesar has been dead for thousands of years, so that is just ancient history. How could Kent Hovind pay Caesar? He couldn’t, that’s how.

The Schadenfreude:

In January of 2007, Hovind began serving a ten year sentence after being convicted on 58 counts of federal crimes. He remains in prison today, where he writes e-mail to God and whines about what he perceives as his own martyrdom. Unlike Paul Ingram, Hovind remains committed to the same worldview which has caused him so much harm.

He cried like a little baby at his sentencing, begging that he be allowed to “just go home” and to have his friends pay his back taxes so he could continue preaching. The courts were having none of it, and they rejected all of his appeals – probably because they were the ravings of a deranged lunatic. Later his property at the Dinosaur Adventure Land – Hovind’s lame attempt at a creationist Disneyworld in Pensacola – was confiscated by federal authorities. Hovind is scheduled to be released in 2015.

Joseph Smith

What he believed:

So this is the Mormon guy. You probably already know the story of the magical stones and the golden tablets and how he met an angel while meditating on a mountaintop and all that Lord of the Rings crap. What you might not know is that starting a weird cult like the LDS Church took a few trial runs before it all really took hold in Utah.

Joseph Smith never even made it to Utah. It was his successor, Brigham Young, who had established Utah as home of the Mormons. While Smith was in charge, the LDS Church was a roving band of wanderers who tried settling every now and then until they were driven out by the local communities. Smith took his snake oil show on the road from Palmyra, NY to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois, each time declaring that the new Mormon home was some kind of holy land. And each time they had to leave it was because their beliefs were just too fucking crazy for words.

The Schadenfreude:

By the time Smith made it to Illinois, his ego was getting to be a liability. He became the mayor of a small town and took charge of a militia, which he then used to try to suppress a local newspaper which printed things the LDS Church did not like. Since he had to worry about that pesky First Amendment, the governor of Illionois at the time came after Smith and put him in jail.

While awaiting trial, Smith’s followers attempted a jailbreak. They sneaked a gun into prison and Smith tried to shoot his way out. This turned out to be a bad idea, even for the mid 19th century. He was shot and killed during the escape attempt.

Hulda Regehr Clark

What she believed:

Hulda Clark was a notorious quack who believed that she could cure all diseases. Her primary focus was on cancer – that is ALL cancers. One of her books was called The Cure of All Cancers. Another was called The Cure For HIV/AIDS. Another was called The Cure For All Diseases.

Clark called herself a naturopath, which is a bullshit term alternative medicine practitioners use. She had a problem with conventional Western medicine (a.k.a. medicine) because medical practitioners, especially ones critical of Clark, are “arrogant.” Someone who wrote a book called The Cure For All Diseases is calling someone else arrogant. Let that settle in your mind for a minute.

The Schadenfreude:

Clark had her problems with the Federal Trade Commission and the Food & Drug Administration, as well as local authorities for practicing medicine without a license; but as you can probably tell from the use of past tense in this section, the real hilarity was when she died. Of cancer – which, if you remember from the above is something she claimed she could cure.

Yanadi Kondaiah

What he believed:

This one is easily my favorite, and the simplest. Kondaiah was a “holy man” in India who claimed to have a magical leg. He claimed it had “healing power.” He also made claims to be able to predict the future, but the article’s not exactly clear on whether or not that power came from his leg.

The Schadenfreude:

Some enterprising folks asked themselves why they should pay to make wishes on a holy man’s leg when they can amputate it for free. And so that’s what they did. First they got him drunk. Then he passed out. Then the two men hacked off his leg with a hunting knife and hauled it off. Hilarity ensued.

Sharron Angle’s prison rehab plan: Drink water, as long as it isn’t fluoridated

Sharron Angle is one of the funnier Republican challenger candidates. The other week she won her party’s primary for US Senate from Nevada, and now she’s set to run against Harry Reid in November. Lots of crazy shit she’s said and advocated has been reported on, and everyone is having a fun time with her kookiness. Many of these positions can be found on her own website, and I’ll cite additional sources too.

1. She wants to eliminate the Department of Education, basically because she thinks local school board members (i.e. local businesspersons with children) probably know more about education than people with actual expertise in it.
2. She is against gay marriage and works on legislation preventing it, because, in the words of her own website, she “recognizes the traditional family as the foundation of America’s society.” Translated, this means she is almost definitely a closeted, self-hating lesbian Seriously, does she really expect anyone to actually believe that she’s the one and only heterosexual on the planet who is VERY ANGRY about the gays getting married?
3. She wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare. The latter one is odd, seeing that the teabaggers who supported her were very upset about alleged cuts to Medicare in the recent health care reform bill.
4. She’s either a member of, or a strong supporter of the Oath Keepers, which is a group of conspiracy theorists/militia members who are vowing to stop the INTERNATIONAL NEW WORLD ORDER OF TOTAL GOVERNMENT OPPRESSION and who seem to be regularly charged with possessing illegal weapons, like napalm bombs. Now she’s getting into serious Alex Jones/Tim McVeigh territory.
5. Remember how General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove started the chain of events which eventually led to the destruction of all plant and animal life on Earth because he was paranoid about fluoride in the drinking water being a Communist conspiracy to weaken “our precious bodily fluids”" Well, in the real world, and 40something years later, an actual politician shares that same paranoia.
6. In the past she publicly advocated outlawing alcohol, which again is pretty strange for someone pretending to be “a ‘less government’ person.”
7. She has some ties to my friends at the Church of Scientology in the form of an appearance in a video for L. Ron Hubbard’s prison drug rehabilitation program.

So now the wingnut website Human Events ran a campaign ad puff piece on her where they breathlessly reported unquestioningly that “attacks against [Angle] are unfounded.” Strangely enough, the way that they explain that the attacks are unfounded is just by admitting that Angle in fact holds the positions on which she is being attacked – positions which are obviously nuts, by the way.

Only one of the claims are kind of countered, and that’s the final one. In the article, she’s quoted as redirecting the focus of the methodology behind the supposed prison drug rehab program she advocates. From the completely normal and sane folks at Human Events, quoting Angle:

“This is a very intense potassium, calcium, vitamin, mineral regimen, with a hot rock sauna that sweats the toxins out. Those two protocols were developed by [the late Church of Scientology founder] L. Ron Hubbard, and they had to give him credit. But it is not Scientology, but rather natural homeopathic medicine.”

No, see – you guys just don’t understand! This isn’t some weird crackpot’s obvious pyramid scheme like Scientology! It’s homeopathy, which is totally legit and not at all a cultish belief or anything like that at all. Seriously.

Douchebag preacher mocks medicine

Here is the black preacher version of Sarah Palin:

So I guess my defense mechanism to teh stupids of this magnitude is to treat it a little more seriously than it deserves. It’s basically “folksy wisdom,” and like most of that crap it’s just feel-good fluff which contradicts itself if it’s lucky enough to even make any sense in the first place.

In the beginning he’s talking about how God decides when we die and we just have to let God do his God-thing. “Let go and let God” is a popular and nauseating way of expressing this idea.

But later he seems to switch over to a secular argument, which is that staying away from doctors who try to find “knots” is actually better for your health. But I thought worrying about what’s better for your health is a betrayal of your faith… So which is it? Should we try to live longer lives, or should we just give up and let God decide when we’re supposed to die? This preacher is in such a thick fog of theological bullshit that he probably doesn’t even realize he’s preaching for contradictory positions.

Simon Singh wins appeal

After almost two years of legal action, Simon Singh won the libel case against him by the British Chiropractic Association on appeal (full text of ruling). The case was over an article called “Beware the Spinal Trap” which appeared in the Guardian in 2008, specifically over where Singh wrote that the BCA “happily promoted bogus treatments,” because they do.

Originally, the courts ruled that happily promoting bogus treatments implied that the BCA would have to be promoting treatments which they knew didn’t work. This is exact opposite of how we have libel in America, where the prosecution has to prove that the defendant knowingly misinformed the public. In British law, such as it is, being right isn’t good enough of a defense against libel.

The president of the BCA said he is considering appealing the appeal (YO DAWG I HERD U LIKE APPEALS). Singh says that so far the lawsuit has cost him £200,000.

Hopefully this can be used as a precedent to reform the UK’s primitive libel laws. From the BBC:

Coalition for Libel Reform spokeswoman Tracey Brown said: “This case has brought out of the woodwork the fact that so many other discussions are being killed, from discussions of cardiology to human rights to medicines.
“We’re now pushing ahead for bigger changes to the law so that we have the kind of public interest defence that means it wouldn’t have taken two years and £200,000 to find out whether Simon can defend himself.”

You can learn more about British libel reform here.

You can also read more info on the case from the Index on Censorship, Steven Novella, Rebecca Watson, and Jack of Kent.

Mark Twain takes on the snake oil salesmen of his time

Mark Twain was awesome. A lot of people date the beginnings of the modern skeptical movement at around the 1970s, when Paul Kurtz was starting CSICOP, Carl Sagan started making counterarguments to the claims of Ufologists, and James Randi started offering money to people who could objectively prove paranormal claims.

But it all goes back further than that and Mark Twain is a great example. He battled the emerging Christian Science school of faith-healing in a largely unknown book, was critical of religion in general in most of his works, and was even critical of belief in free will.

So back in 1905 a patent medicine salesman sent out a leaflet (p1, p2, p3, p4)advertising his “Elixir of Life” which proposed to be able to cure meningitis and diphtheria, among other diseases of “Human, Animal, and Fowl.” I guess today they call this stuff natural supplements which detoxify your body and stimulate the immune system. But they went even further in those days by calling it the “GIVER OF LIFE EVERLASTING.”

The huckster’s problem came when he didn’t notice a prominent name on his list of recipients to his advertisement – Mark Twain’s. Or maybe he was listed under Clemens then. Anyway, Twain decided to have his secretary take dictation on a letter in response. This secretary was apparently not chosen for the job due to her stellar handwriting, so there will be a transcript after the image of the actual letter:

Dear Sir,

Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand. The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link. It puzzles me to make out how the same hand could have constructed your letter and your advertisements. Puzzles fret me, puzzles annoy me, puzzles exasperate me; and always, for a moment, they arouse in me an unkind state of mind toward the person who has puzzled me. A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed and I shall probably even be praying for you; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.

Adieu, adieu, adieu!

Mark Twain

“An idiot of the 33rd degree” is one of those phrases that need to live on, so I think I’ll be borrowing that one from time to time. Anyway, Twain was probably a little agitated beyond normal by this particular ad since his daughter and son had both been killed by diseases which this product claimed the ability to cure.

Idiotic quote of the day

Usually I post quotes I admire by people I admire. This is the exact opposite. But first I have to give a little context.

This guy called Mike Adams runs this pro-quackery website called Natural News. Mike was in some kind of Twitter contest, which is serious business. PZ Myers noticed that some quacks like Mike were in the lead in the health category and encouraged his horde of followers to pharyngulate the polls in favor of Dr. Rachael Dunlop from Australia.

Well, it turns out that the people running the Twitter contest found that Mike’s votes were from new accounts on Twitter, implying at the least that his voters had signed up for Twitter exclusively in order to vote for Mike, which is against the rules. A less generous interpretation would be that they’re just sock puppet accounts.

So Mike Adams lost his shit over this internet contest and made some really funny/pathetic attempts at analyzing the methods and perspectives of skeptics. He claimed to have researched, but doesn’t cite any sources. Orac had a good way to describe it – he is a “pyromaniac in a field of straw men.” PZ also responded, as did Steven Novella. Everyone’s having fun with this Adams character’s apparent mental breakdown. Good times for all.

Now Mike has a new response to the responses, which is even more hysterical (in more ways than one). And here’s where we get to the idiotic quote of the day:

“One such skeptic accused me of being a quack because he said that I believe “water is magical.” Was that supposed to be an insult? I do think water is magical!

I think pregnancy is magical. Human consciousness is magical. Plant life is magical. And water is at the very top of the list of magical substances with amazing, miraculous properties, many of which have yet to be discovered.”

The thing is that we have a pretty good idea of how pregnancy, human consciousness, plant life, and water work, and none of those things require any magic to be explained. And on the latter “point,” (and I’m using that term in the loosest possible sense) I wonder how Mike here knows that water has these “amazing miraculous properties” if, by his own admission and in his own words, those same properties are “yet to be discovered.”

The problem with hypothetical properties which have yet to be discovered is that they appear in exactly the same way as properties which don’t actually exist, regardless of how magical and miraculous they might or might not be. What a sad and miserable existence this Mike person must have to need to believe in magic to have any meaning in his life at all – which is obvious from reading the rest of his gibberish.

Homeopathy overdose scheduled for January 30

In 10 days, participants in the 10:23 Project will simultaneously overdose on homeopathic “medicine.” This is something James Randi used to do all the time. At the beginning of a lecture, he would take a huge amount of what is marketed as homeopathic sleeping pills and then go on with his talk. If they really were sleeping pills, he wouldn’t be able to finish his talk without falling asleep at least, or even needing medical attention. Needless to say, he never had any problem finishing his talks when this was done.

Homeopathy advocates can always respond to this by claiming that a true overdose of homeopathic “medicine” would mean either drowning or death by sugar high since such “medicine” necessarily needs to be diluted with either sugar or water until there’s probably nothing left. But the main point here is that if it worked as something other than what it clearly is (water), then there should be dramatic results from this mass overdose.

MOST OBVIOUS UPDATE EVER: No one died.

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Have you ever stared at the back of a dollar bill… on South African vulture brains?

Vultures in South Africa are in danger of going extinct because gamblers are smoking their brains. They believe doing this will give them visions of the future – like lottery numbers and the outcomes of sporting events.

This is one of those crackpot ideas that should have a short shelf life. If people were rational, they’d see that the people they know who smoke vulture brains then (probably) don’t win the lottery – and then stop smoking vulture brains. But it seems to have become an obsession on its own, kind of like how gambling itself can to some people. Just… a few… more… vulture brains….

From the Guardian article:

Andre Botha, manager of the birds of prey working group at the Endangered Wildlife Trust in South Africa, said: “People believe it’s foresight and this finds fertile ground in people’s imagination. If it worked for the lottery, everyone would use it and we’d have a lot of millionaires walking around today.
“There is a lot of betting in South Africa. So we may see an increase connected to gambling around the 2010 World Cup.”

For some reason the Guardian is calling people who do this “traditional healers” instead of more appropriate terms, like quack. It’s not objective to refer to this as “traditional,” it’s just enabling.

There are parallels to this around the world. The vulture brain story is just the one to become a news story recently. Another problematic area in “traditional healing” is the use of ground-up Rhinoceroses’ horns in China as an antidote to poisons, devil posessions, to keep away evil spirits, to cure typhoid, headaches, fever, dysentery, smallpox, and pretty much everything else. Similar use waste of tiger bones in China has led to their demise in that part of the world.

So people who are interested in preserving a diversity of animal species on Earth are left with what some might approach as a dilemma. They want to protect endangered species, but many of those same people have a misguided but well-intentioned desire to preserve marginalized human cultures – and never mind what those human cultures happen to be doing, even if it’s in direct conflict with the goal of protecting endangered species.

So the obvious solution, at least it’s obvious to me, is to not worry so much about how “OMG IT’S THEIR CULTURE” when that involves doing unnecessary harm. Otherwise you’ll have no reason to use that same principle to defend witch hunts and human sacrifices in the interests of communities which do that sort of thing.

Anyway, the important thing to remember about all of this is that smoking vulture brains will let you see the future.

Antivaxers get litigious

So if anyone’s reading this on the actual website and not through a reader, you might have noticed that I have a few of these ‘widget’ things on the right side here. The first one is for a campaign by Sense About Science in support of science writer Simon Singh in his ongoing legal battles with the British Chiropractic Association. Here is what it looks like:

You can click on it to read more about Singh’s case, but the gist of it is that he said that the BCA happily promotes bogus treatments, because they do, and the BCA sued him. This all happened in the UK, where libel law is completely ass-backwards and the burden of proof is on the defendant(s) to prove that they’re innocent, instead of on the prosecution to prove guilt.

Anyway, now Rachael Dunlop of the Australian Skeptics is reporting that something similar is happening to Amy Wallace and her publisher at Wired for an article published a few months ago about the anti-vaccine movement. The pdf of the case is here.

Barbara Loe Fisher has a problem with Wallace citing someone who called her a liar, even though she is one. But that doesn’t seem to be in dispute here. Fisher seems to be much more upset that she wasn’t given an opportunity to say to Wallace pre-publication, “Nuh uh, I’m not a liar!” Seriously, just look at the pdf linked to above.

The antivaxers are actually starting to get pretty funny at this point. They skip over the whole point of suing for libel (i.e. proving intentional disinformation, material damages, etc.) and go right into their whiny political rants:

“The article does not present science concerning the risks or the informed consent rights issues that arise from mandatory vaccination but adheres to a bias in favor of the general safety of vaccines and a presumed medical necessity blah blah blah.”

So they don’t appear to have much interest in pursuing their case for the goal of actually winning it; and it’s being done in the US, where libel law is more reasonable than most other places. These two facts together add up to this being nothing but another SLAPP-suit by the alt med industry, just another attempt to frighten and silence critics. And the pattern recently with those kinds of things is that they reveal much more ugliness about the plaintiffs than they do about the defendants. Hopefully this case will fit in that pattern.

UPDATE: Case dismissed.

Prince Charles urges EU medical deregulation

England’s most famous welfare queen – besides the actual queen – is meeting with the UK’s health secretary to get him to cancel proposed EU medical regulations which would “crack down” (words of the Telegraph) on people who practice medicine without being registered to do so.

Imagine that! It’s like the EU wants to enter the 20th century already in this regard.

Prince Charles has been outspoken in his advocacy of certain antiscientific positions. For example, he’s opposed to so-called genetically modified crops because to do otherwise would be to take us into “realms that belong to God and God alone.” Apparently he doesn’t understand that crops have been genetically modified by humans ever since there were such things as crops, during the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago.

Likewise, he doesn’t seem to understand the importance of regulating medicine, which is funny for what’s supposed to be the “nanny state” of the UK where regulation is taken a bit too far. He sees the deregulation of medical practices as protecting the “alternative medicine” industry, of which he has long been a strong supporter from promoting coffee “cures” for cancer to homeopathy and herbal remedies which has angered actual doctors who understand medicine. Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst even dedicate a chunk of their book to countering Charlie’s claims about such “medicine.”

It’s often said that there’s this word for “alternative medicine” that’s been proven to work: It’s “medicine.” So alternative medicine by definition either has yet to have been shown to work, or has been shown not to work. If you want your remedies and magic potions to be considered medicine, why not test them and have them join the rest of medicine? After all, it’s not like this is a foreign concept. Lots of medicine was once in the same category as herbal remedies, but then it was tested and shown to work. If it can’t pass those tests, then there are good reasons to regulate them and point out clearly that the results of such testing are consistent with them not working at all.

That’s what Charles would be doing if he actually cared about showing that his quackery works. But he doesn’t. He just wants more money poured into the multi-billion dollar industries he favors for his own personal, ideological reasons.

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Charlene Werner and Homeopathy

I try not to write about stuff that’s been dealt with by PZ Myers on his blog Pharyngula, simply because it’s the most popular blog dealing with science and atheism since, like, ever. But the subject of this post probably should be duplicated as much as possible for reasons which should become obvious soon.

About a week ago, this video started being circulated around skeptical circles. It’s a person called Charlene Werner trying to explain homeopathy.

“Do you know what H2O is? Do you know who Einstein was? Do you know who Stephen Hawkings [sic] is?”

Yeah. Wow. Depending on my mood, it’s either hilarious or painful to me.

So it looks like this Charlene Werner person decided to contact the original poster of this video with a sort of threatening letter, claiming that it is copyrighted material. But this isn’t about her trying to make money off of this footage, this is about her being embarrassed about being called names (and rightfully so) on the internet. It seems like Charlene Werner and the king of Thailand both need to learn about the Streisand effect. And they’ve apparently decided to take that lesson the hard way.