4 Ways the Alt-Med Industry is Fucking With Animals

Animal testing is a tough subject. For the most part I’m for it, although there are probably a lot of unnecessary ways it goes down which should probably be stopped. But when it comes to developing new drugs to treat diseases, there’s a certain amount of acceptable harm to non-human animals which in my opinion can be justified in the interests of a greater good to humanity.

Probably some BEAST readers disagree with me there, and we can have a discussion about the moral ambiguities and grey areas, and maybe learning more about it might cause some of us to change our minds. But when you get into how animals are used in the alternative medicine industry, all these potential nuances are wiped away since by definition alternative medicine doesn’t even work. If any of the practices I’m about to get into had shown efficacy through real scientific evidence, then they wouldn’t be alternative medicine anymore; they’d just be medicine. So what we’re talking about here isn’t about whether we should sacrifice X number of Y species to save Z number of humans; it’s just about how much we should let the quack industry harm animals for the sole purpose of profit.

Killing Tigers For Boner Pills

This one will grow up so that he may give us hope for a solution to our erectile dysfunction.

Hey guys! Having trouble getting your dick up without fantasizing about presumably wild tiger-sex? Does the idea of poaching endangered species to grind up into vitalism-inspired magic dust give you a boner? If so then alternative medicine has just the thing for you.

Vitalism is this quasi-religious way of looking at the world which emphasizes some kind of vital essence of things. We might be made of mere atoms, but there’s also some kind of mysterious living force or “spark” of life within us which always manages to escapes detection by empirical means.

In some versions of this belief, the vital essence idea doesn’t apply only to life and living organisms themselves, but also to each part of the body. So for example, my feet aren’t just organs made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements as encoded by my DNA and controlled by electrical signals connecting them to my brain. For some reason that’s not quite cool enough to interest people who get into vitalism. For them, my feet also have to have a “keeping Josh standing” essence to them. Presumably if you cut them off, they’d still ‘want’ to help me walk just because that’s what they really like doing, apparently.

So how does this apply to killing tigers for boner pills? You need to start with the assumption that tigers have AWESOME sex lives. I don’t know why exactly people would assume that, but if they do, the secret to their unparalleled ability to just bone for hours on end (at least according to vitalism) is literally in their junk. Chop it up, smash it into powder, pour the powder into those little empty pill capsules you can buy at the health store, and you’ve got an aphrodisiac. Or at least a product you can sell as one, thanks to the FDA’s lax regulations.

Homeopathy For Cows

Louise and Melvin, seen here  drinking their €2 million barrel of water.

We’ve dealt with how absurd homeopathy is a few times before, so I’ll spare you the details on that this time around. It’s a similar way of thinking to what leads people to crush up tiger junk for boner pills, but adds another layer of quackery by insisting that the supposedly active ingredient be diluted. Like, diluted a lot. This makes the remedy more powerful. Seriously, that’s what homeopathy proponents say they believe.

Using homeopathy on cows isn’t so much evil as it is stupid and wasteful. But that’s not stopping the European Agriculture Committee from allocating millions of taxpayer Euros on it during one of the worst recessions in decades. You know, just to be really extra sure it doesn’t work. Again.

This time the quacks are saying homeopathy will cure mastitis, a bacterial breast infection, in cows. The nauseating Dana Ullman tried to portray a recent study as supporting his brand of bullshit, but as Le Canard Noir points out on Quakometer, Ullman badly misrepresented the actual text of the study. A group of cows being treated for mastitis using homeopathy showed statistically significant results, but — and this is the part Ullman leaves out — there was only one observation showing the homeopath group of cows having a significant difference compared to a placebo-controlled group. Also there was only one trial, so the chances of a false positive increases.

Let’s say you have the world’s worst basketball player. Someone who only makes, say, 1 in 20 shots. You give him a basketball and tell him to take 3 shots. He makes one of them. The basketball equivalent of Dana Ullman would say that this player makes 1 in every 3 shots. A more scientific person interested in knowing just how bad this hypothetical basketball player is would tell him to shoot the ball as many times as possible, and then take a percentage. And if this basketball player is analogous to homeopathy, what that person would find is that the only times he manages to sink a ball are basically flukes.

The Europeans are being swindled by cranks and frauds to support magical thinking. If they want to spend more money on how they treat cows, that’s great. But at least spend it testing some treatment which is plausible. We don’t need to waste time and money on showing there’s no tooth fairy, and we don’t need any more studies on whether or not water has memory. It’s ridiculous.

Torturing Bears For Their Bile

Let’s say you’re a black bear, in southern China, born and raised. In the forest is where you spent most of your days. Chillin’ out, relaxin, maxin, all cool and all, eating some fruit, honey, and small birds outside of the nearest village.

A black bear, seen here roaming the forest like a boss.

When a couple of dudes who were up to no good started making trouble in your neighborhood. You get in one little fight and the poachers got scared. They said, “We’re going to lock you up in a cage for the rest of your life so we can extract bile from your gall bladder to sell as traditional Chinese medicine.”

PWNED!1

Yeah, so that’s an image of a black bear in captivity. What they do is puncture a hole through its abdomen into its liver. They keep this wound from closing up, creating a brand new orifice which the quacks then use to extract bile. Imagine being kept in a cage only slightly bigger than you so someone can stab you in the guts without you tearing both of their arms off. Then whenever the hole in your belly starts to heal, they tear it back open again. It sounds like something out of an Eli Roth torture porn flick where medical staff are kept around to keep the victim from dying prematurely, thereby prolonging its suffering for as long as possible. But this is alternative medicine, so you know they do all of this with love and in harmony with nature and stuff. Or something.

Smoking Vulture Brains to See the Future

For some reason, some people in South Africa got the following idea into their heads: That you can see the future — especially lottery numbers and the results of sporting events — by getting yourself a vulture, killing it, crushing its skull, extracting its sweet juicy brains, rolling it up into a giant spliff, and smoking it.

You would probably think this is the kind of superstition with a short shelf life, since it’s so easily testable. Actually, maybe “easily” isn’t exactly the right word. But if you find it easy to kill a bird and smoke its brains or you know someone who does, and if that really does allow you to perceive future events, this should be one way to win the lottery or a long-shot sports bets by being like this kid:

But no. As far as I know, there’s no huge surge in South African millionaires. All that’s happening is that the vultures in that part of the world on the verge of going extinct because people can be greedy and stupid. Or maybe it’s just that they secretly like the taste of vulture brain smoke but rightfully feel embarrassed about it so they make up this lie about seeing the future to cover for their weird and cruel habit. Some vulture brain junkie is probably explaining to his wife right now that they’re going to win the lottery any day now if only he could just have a few more vulture brains.

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.

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)

***

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

***

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.

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.

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.

Similar:

• Charlene Werner & Homeopathy

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.

Similar:

• Prince Charles is being a douchebag again

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.