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“Union Jackboot” (North American Union)

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In the late 1990s, Michael Moore previewed an upcoming episode of The Awful Truth by announcing he would be helping aliens illegally enter the United States. This teaser included a video of him ushering people across the border under cover of darkness. During the episode, the full truth was revealed, as viewers came to learn Moore was assisting with an invasion of Canadians.  

Moore was pointing out the hypocrisy of persons having far less of a problem with that than with helping aliens cross the southern border. However, there is a difference between racial bigotry and xenophobia. While they often go together, and many persons exhibit both, there are subtleties that distinguish them.

I saw an interview with a racist who admitted he would have no trouble with immigrants, legal or otherwise, coming from Sweden. It was the Latinos he had an issue with, and he freely admitted it was the amount of melanin in their skin that he took issue with.

By contrast, let’s consider the Birthers. Certainly, it is no coincidence that the movement arose once a man with dark skin ascended to the presidency. When someone sees their world being upended in ways they find discomforting, they look to reassert control and seek revenge on those responsible. But even in the wacky Birther world, there was a difference between the hard-core adherents and the less strident. For the latter, the theory was primarily a way of coping with election results they were unable to handle. Rather than asking, “Where did we go wrong, why did we fail,” it was more reassuring to insist, “The other side cheated.”

But the hardcore Birthers, while just as wrong and also spurred in part by racial bigotry, were driven more by xenophobia. These types also objected to John McCain’s presidential bid because he was born in the Canal Zone. Eight years later, they created memes in which Ted Cruz was a puppet of either Canada or Cuba. Even birth in the United States was insufficient, as venom was also flung at Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, and even the lilywhite Rick Santorum, all for daring to have foreign parents.

For these folks, a Caucasian Christian Conservative candidate would be opposed if he moved the United States from London when he was three days old. Again, I’m not denying racial animus on the part of these people. They would likely not be OK with their daughter showing up with a black man (or a woman of any color, for that matter). Still, their overriding bigotry is xenophobia, and they are the types who endorse the idea that U.S. sovereignty is about to be sacrificed to a North American Union.

Jerome Corsi, who championed the idea before giving his considerable conspiracy energies to the Birther movement, described the NAU as a globalist attempt by  to surreptitiously dismantle the borders between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. The three federal governments will then be dissolved and in their place will be communist policies, barbed wire, and Kafkaesque courts.

Some say this takeover is already underway, while others think it’s in the planning stages. Either way, the goal is for unspecified elites to oversee a new government that allows allows them almost unlimited power and profit. This will all be buoyed by 500,000,000 involuntary laborers toiling in a totalitarian dystopia.

There is no evidence this is taking place, but believers point to disparate catastrophes as being part of the plot. The Sept. 11 attacks, for instance, were perpetuated to give the government a chance to increase control of the populace and smooth the way to stand up the Union. While the Patriot Act includes many chilling provisions that potentially makes the U.S. more authoritarian, this actually runs counter to the NAU theory, which presupposes the U.S. will sacrifice its sovereignty.

Believers also assert that Hurricane Katrina was created and controlled by HAARP weapons. The reason was to provide a guise under which the usual suspects could be rounded up and ushered into FEMA camps.

For being central to the theory, these camps are conspicuously missing, as is an extra wide highway that will run the run the length of the three countries. This construction project would be exceedingly difficult to pull off clandestinely, yet NAU believers continually insist it is being built or planned.

The most frequently-cited evidence for the coming NAU is the supposed existence of the amero, a currency that will replace the U.S. and Canadian dollars and the peso. There are examples of such bills and coins, but they were created as novelties by individuals and private companies, not government mints.

The coins were the brainchild of Daniel Carr, who designed the New York and Rhode Island statehood quarters. Unauthorized postings of images taken from his website were touted in conspiracy circles as proof the NAU is imminent.  

Before being sentenced to prison for encouraging the assassination of federal judges, white nationalist Hal Turner was the primary promoter of the coin/collective roundup connection. After Carr explained the truth on his website, Turner played the classic conspiracy theory card of claiming evidence that disproved the theory was instead part of it. Turner claimed Carr’s coin website had been created overnight for the express purpose of discrediting him. In truth, the website had been up for years.

From there, Turner moved onto highlighting paper money. His blog ran photos of amero bills in different denominations. He deflected inquiries as to where they came from, citing only “my sources.” Sources other than his own revealed the images had been pilfered from a Flickr user who had created them for purposes of artistic and political commentary.

In what passes for one of their arguments, supporters of the theory point out that many European countries adopted the euro. Besides being irrelevant, this glosses over significant differences between European and North American countries and economies. Also, the euro was publicly announced and planned, whereas the amero is supposedly shrouded in sinister secrecy.

Plus, the euro was created to solve problems specific to Europe, which featured dozens of small countries doing business among each another. This became an issue because each nation had separately fluctuating currencies, exchange was inefficient and costly, interest rates spiked and dipped wildly, and there were varied, continually changing inflation rates. All this turned almost every transaction between European nations into guesswork.  

The euro cleared up these problems, so much so that U.S. soldiers who had received four Deutschemarks for every dollar were, 10 years later, getting just 75 Euro cents for that buck.

North American countries, meanwhile, do not experience the myriad economic issues that plagued Europe before it adopted a common currency. There are only three economies and exchange rates in play, and NAFTA has solved many of the economic issues the North American countries had faced.

Likewise, there’s little comparison between the EU and the nefarious NAU. EU members retain sovereignty, hold elections, issue passports, raise armed forces, collect customs, and have the option of maintaining a border presence. More tellingly, the EU is not imprisoning citizens without trial or shipping them to slave labor camps.

Two groups are cited by theorists as evidence for the planned Union: the Independent Task Force on North America, and the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. The former is a group of business owners and academics, while the latter consisted primarily of government officials, whose stated goals were information sharing, improved productivity, reducing trade costs, environmental protection, disease reduction, and ensuring access to clean food and water.

It mattered little to the theorists that neither of these groups entered into any treaties or agreements. Lou Dobbs, probably the most conspiratorial-minded mainstream media personality, called the SPP as an agreement which would establish the North American Union without Congressional consent. In fact, it was not an agreement, it formed no Union, and attempted no end run around Congress, and indeed had nothing to try and sneak past it.  

Pointedly, neither Dobbs nor any other theory subscriber considered the 2009 dissolution of the SPP to be evidence the NAU proposal had been abandoned.

Another supposed piece of evidence is a Council on Foreign Relations report that calls for more economic cooperation and intelligence-sharing among the three countries. However, the CFR is a non-governmental organization that has no relevance to policy making in any of the countries.

Besides, the paper calls for little more than streamlined customs procedures that would eliminate tariffs between the countries and employ a common tariff for goods imported from outside the three nations. The paper also calls for greater border security, which would be antithetical to the NAU’s supposed goal, and which would stifle Moore’s Canadian interlopers.

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“What fur?” (Aquatic Ape Hypothesis)

SEAMONKEKYS

Humans and apes share a common ancestor, yet Homo sapiens have several traits that distinguish them from orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and the rest. We are exclusively bipedal, lack fur, and have more fat.

One attempt to explain these differences is the aquatic ape hypothesis, an idea first proposed by physician Max Westenhöfer and marine biologist Alister Hardy in the 1920s and 1930s. They argued that a branch of apes was forced from the trees and began hunting for food on the shores. The notion is not that man came directly from the sea a la Creature from the Black Lagoon. Rather, following the split with chimpanzees, the Homo genus went through a stage of being aquatic or at least amphibian, and this branch became us. In the hypothesis, wading, swimming, and diving for food had a large evolutionary impact on how we turned out.

While humans and apes have very similar appearance, the most obvious difference is our lack of fur, save for a couple of guys I’ve seen in the locker room. There are only a few other mammals without fur, and this includes dolphins, manatees, and whales, all of whom have smooth, oily skin that allows for more efficient swimming. However, this is the result of being adapted for swimming over tens of millions of years. Also, other savanna mammals such as elephants, hippos, and rhinos are without fur, while seals, otters, and beavers maintained theirs. Therefore, it does not necessarily follow that an aquatic ape would have lost its coat.  

Which leads us to the second point of the aquatic ape hypothesis. Instead of fur, humans have subcutaneous body fat, which apes have little of, and dolphins and whales have plenty of. This fat would seem to be disadvantageous for a hunter-gatherer but beneficial for a creature needing buoyancy and insulation from cold water.

However, apes have the same type of subcutaneous fat as people, they just have less of it. Moreover, human fat is distinct from the blubber of furless sea mammals, and would not help an aquatic creature stay afloat or keep warm.  

A third claim centers on our bipedalism. In water, this makes it possible to wade to a greater depth, and when swimming, enables a coordinated motion of arm strokes and leg kicks. Supporters of the hypothesis point out that while biologists feel bipedalism emerged for life on the savannah, no other animals from there developed the trait.

However, bipedalism has developed only in land animals and is not an adaptation for an aquatic life. Also, animals who spend all or part of their time in the water are either four-legged creatures like the hippopotamus or specialized swimmers without legs, like dolphins.

Another point made to support the aquatic ape hypothesis is that humans can control their breathing consciously, a trait they share with mammals who have the ability to dive. However, most primates can hold their breath, as can dogs. Humans have much better breath control than other animals, but they also use their breath for speech and other skills not possessed by other creatures. Therefore, an aquatic ape would not need humans’ specialized breath control.

The hypothesis runs counter to the archeological and anthropological evidence that hominids developed on Rift Valley savannas. This evidence further suggests a major divergence between the great apes and hominids about six million years ago. Also, fossils from around 4.4 million years ago reveal terrestrial bipedal hominids with small brains and fur, which would be inconsistent with the hypothesis.

Animal Planet ran a faux documentary on mermaids in 2012, then aired an equally silly sequel the following year. The subject matter was presented in advertisements as genuine and the only hint to the contrary came during the closing credits, when a disclaimer in minuscule print flashed on the screen so briefly it could have been mistaken for a subliminal message.

While the shows were staged, they introduced the notion that mermaids could be explained through the aquatic ape hypothesis. This idea has since received positive mention on the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. While the notion is presented as possibly shedding new light on human evolution, the fact that formerly erudite networks are promoting mermaids seems more an example of us having devolved.

 

 

 

 

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“Corrective memory” (Mandela Effect)

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In my early 20s, I had memorized every batting champion and pennant winner in baseball history, so I decided to tackle home run leaders next. I went to the shelf to retrieve the book that contained this information and it was nowhere to be found. I only thought I had put it there. The brain that had soaked up a thousand pieces of baseball information in the previous week failed me when I tried to recall where I had put the book earlier that day.

Probably all of us have had these false memories, but when the same delusion happens on a mass scale, it is dubbed the Mandela Effect. This refers specifically to the aftermath of Nelson Mandela’s death in 2013, when many persons were certain they had seen his funeral procession years earlier.

Another well-known example of the Effect is many persons thinking they recall a film that never existed, Shazaam, starring Sinbad. Also, the Berenstain Bears are frequently mis-remembered as “Berenstein.”

It’s unclear why these phenomenon happen. With the anthropomorphic grizzlies, it has been speculated that since “stein” is a much more common ending for last names than is “stain,” those who grew up with the Bears were exposed to many more examples of the former. This may have helped created a false memory, which would be easy enough since the stain/stein distinction was less important than the Bears’ personalities, appearance, and adventures.

As to the fictitious flick, persons likely confused it with Kazaam, Shaquille O’Neal’s tragicomic attempt at thespian arts. Shaquille and Sinbad sound somewhat similar, and the latter has Middle Eastern fantasy overtones, so the blanks were filled in with false memories.

As to the example that gives the Effect its name, when Mandela was released from prison in 1990, there was a march that may have resembled a beloved figure’s funeral procession in terms of length, attendance, tributes, and displayed emotions. His release and its immediate aftermath may be what persons are mistakenly remembering as a funeral.

Offering a more paranormal rationale is ghost hunter and psychic Fiona Broome, who wrote that this might be evidence of an alternate universe. As she describes it, we may move in and out of these universes, sometimes taking memories with us. But if this were true, we would also be sliding out to a reality where Mandela still lives and another where he overthrew the South African government in the 1960s, and no one is claiming to have recalled these circumstances.

Broome is not offering a testable hypothesis so there’s nothing substantive we do with her idea. Instead, let’s consider more reasonable alternatives.

Brains confabulate invented recollections to fill in memory gaps. We might, for example, misattribute later memories to earlier events, or think our childhood trip to the creek was with our best friend when it was really with his brother. These fabricated recollections are sometimes provided by someone else. While a few persons may have mistakenly remembered Hannibal Lecter telling the FBI trainee,  “Hello, Clarice,” many more people think they recall this line because they heard someone else saying it. Indeed, being exposed to a false memory can cause it to become implanted.

And if the false memory centers on something important to the listener, confirmation bias makes it even more likely to take hold. One of the Birther claims was that Obama’s step-grandmother was captured on tape talking about his Kenyan birth. No such tape exists, but Birthers continued to parrot it because the idea was attractive to them. Conversely, the 1990 New York Times article describing Obama as Hawaiian-born is not something they would be likely to remember.

So then, common cognitive errors are all that is needed to explain the Mandela Effect. At least that’s the case in our parallel dimension.

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“You ooze, you lose” (Ectoplasm)

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Séances were once performed in hushed, darkened rooms, but those locales have been supplanted by wowed audiences and stage lighting. A field once reliant on intimacy now favors auditoriums. The stereotypical foreboding Gypsy has given way to congenial men in tailored suits and women with impeachable manicures, ideal for television.

Most of this is done to make mediumship more appealing, but one change made out of necessity was the exorcising of ectoplasm. This was any substance said to have spewed from a medium during a séance, and it was usually touted as having been draped over the sprit’s body before being imparted to the medium. It was supposed to be the deceased letting us know it was there.

Ectoplasm was offered as an explanation for the levitation, table-turning, and floor-tapping that was observed during séances. But this was Tooth Fairy science, where the reasons for a phenomenon are examined before the phenomenon has been shown to exist. It was described as vulnerable to light, so séances were conducted in the dark, providing convenient cover for those sneaking the materials in or removing them from their hidden location, such as the medium’s clothing, a body orifice, or under a trapdoor.

Manifestations were common during the séance heyday from the late 19th Century until the Great Depression. But after investigators exposed the ruse, ectoplasm fell out of favor with séance practitioners, and it had practically gone extinct by the middle of the 20th Century. I am aware of no medium today that claims to be producing this netherworld substance.

Normally, an ad hoc rationalization is fabricated when psychic fraud is exposed. Uri Geller instantly lost his power when Johnny Carson offered Geller spoons and other items to demonstrate his ability during a Tonight Show appearance. Since Geller had been unable to manipulate the objects beforehand, he was unable to ‘bend’ them and was left meekly attributing his failure to “not feeling strong tonight.”

Another time, James Randi was conversing with three Russian alternative medicine practitioners who claimed to be in possession of some type of psychically-charged water. They claimed they could identify this magic water through a dowsing tool. Randi challenged them to go into separate rooms while he placed the magic water in a container, then filled two identical containers with tap water. The three would then enter individually and try to identify the magic water. At this point, the experiment abruptly ended, as one of the Russians said the magic properties would seep out and infiltrate the regular water, making them all indistinguishable. In these cases, Geller and the Russians had to come up with a hasty rationalization, lest their entire ruse be upended.

Similarly, I checked out a Flat Earth page and one of its claims was that a north-south circumnavigation has never been accomplished. This was in error, as Ranulph Fiennes and Charles Burton did it from Dec. 17, 1980 to April 11, 1982. I posted this, but the Flat Earther who maintains the page will not have an epiphany and become a globalist, so to speak. Despite the Fiennes-Burton journey being verified by the likes of the Guinness Book, the Flat Earther will dismiss the circumnavigation as fraudulent. And I may be outed as one of the tens of thousands of world government agents the page insists monitors the Internet 24/7 to spread the spherical Earth myth.

East-west navigation, of course, also proves a round Earth, but the Flat Earthers  have somehow convinced themselves this is untrue. From flateaerthsociety.org: “Circumnavigation is achieved because on a compass East and West are always at right angles to North. Thus traveling Eastwards continuously takes you in a circle around the North Pole.”

Actually, traveling east takes a mariner east, not north. But Flat Earthers have their rationale and they’re sticking with it. However, a north-south navigation would punch holes in their own theory, so it has to be dismissed out of hand.

Ectoplasm, then, is sort of the east-west circumnavigation of séances. Mediums can be OK with it going away since the central point of communicating with the dead remains. In fact, it makes it less messy.

Around the time that skeptics and researchers were exposing the ectoplasm ruse, other physical manifestations of séances were also coming undone. Hereward Carrington, a James Randi forerunner, revealed how slate writing, table turning, sealed-letter reading, and spirit photography were accomplished. Exposés like this largely eliminated physical props in in mediumship, but again, this was not a fatal blow to the field because the props were superfluous to yakking with the dead.

The research showed ectoplasm to come from a variety of sources, none of them supernatural. This included cheesecloth, chewed paper, cotton, cloth, gauze, egg whites, soap, muslin, starch, handkerchiefs, animal livers, and newspaper and magazine photos.

Despite a general idea of what ectoplasm was supposed to be, its appearance, consistency, color, elasticity, strength, and constitution varied by whichever medium was producing it. It could be dry or wet, viscous or gelatinous, opaque or transparent. None of this would not have been the case had ectoplasm been genuine. That would be like blood changing in type, texture, appearance, and color depending on which nurse was drawing it.

In 1924, Mina Crandon, one of the country’s most celebrated mediums, was tested by Scientific American and Harry Houdini, and was unable to replicate her ectoplasm powers under controlled conditions.

Another well-known psychic of the era, the mononymous Carrière, flunked a similar challenge. She had claimed, through ectoplasm, to have produced an image of a man. But this was revealed to have come from a magazine. She said, yes, she knew that. She had read the magazine and that’s how the image of the man came to be imprinted in her brain and later excreted as ectoplasm.

With all due respect to Geller, Russian quacks, and Flat Earthers, that gets my vote for the all-time greatest ad hoc reasoning.

 

 

 

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“We’re note worthy” (Solfeggio Frequencies)

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One aspect of anti-science forces that perplexes me is how often they consider excellence to be inadequate. Ken Ham believes in unicorns and dragons, yet nearly as intriguing are verified creatures like members of the Phylliidae family. These insects have evolved a camouflage that causes them to almost precisely resemble a leaf, right down to swaying in the breeze.

Planet X believers contemplate about what this rouge body or its inhabitants are plotting to do to us. They spend time on this pursuit rather than studying fascinating astronomical phenomenon like neutron stars, which are so dense a dipperful would have more mass than the moon.

Meanwhile, music has given us treats as diverse as Bach, Chuck Berry, and the Andrews Sisters, yet this is not enough for proponents of Solfeggio Frequencies, who insist certain musical notes have healing powers. They go beyond asserting that music may have a soothing effect or the ability to lift one’s mood. They say it can vanquish fear, awaken intuition, repair DNA, overcome guilt, fix relationships, “return spiritual order,” “connect with light,” and “raise the vibration of our chakra system.”

At least they’re not claiming the ability to cure cancer, reverse aging, or heal cirrhosis. In fact, proponents seem to be giving themselves cover by employing vague language. Whether Solfeggio Frequencies can offer “transformation and miracles” is not something subject to scientific testing.

Proponents of Solfeggio Frequencies are unusual in that they appeal to both antiquity and novelty. Most alt-med and New Age types will pick one or the other.

In appealing to antiquity, proponents claim that some notes found in ancient music have distinctive, benevolent uses. Like most alt-med topics, there is disagreement among practitioners on even the most basic points. In this case, the dispute is over which Hertz performs which functions. This would be like orthopedists arguing over whether a certain tissue is a muscle or a ligament.

Another appeal to antiquity is the claim that certain ancient sites, such as Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Giza, are tuned to a certain Hertz, and if that’s insufficiently ancient, another claim is that specific Hertz is in tune with the sun. Also, John the Baptist and Benedictine Monks are sometimes identified as having had spiritual awakenings when they listened to music at these frequencies.

For the appeal to novelty, we have claims such as this one from solfeggiotones.com: “Energy and vibration go all the way to the molecular level. We have 70 different receptors on the molecules and when vibration and frequency reaches that far they begin to vibrate.”

One isolated accuracy in the Solfeggio Frequencies narrative is that the Concert A became 440 Hz in the 1940s. The fact that this happened with the Nazis in power may have given rise to the notion that this was the Third Reich’s responsibility. However, it was not a conspiracy, Fascist or otherwise, to do away with a magic frequency. Rather, it was an attempt at uniformity. Various symphonies of the era were using various Hz for “A” and this simplified that. 

The idea that the sun or stone constructions have a resonant frequency has no backing and adherents never explain what this means, how it works, or how they know it. Even if the Pyramids or Stonehenge did send off a frequency, it would have no impact on our health. Notes can produce deep emotional effects on us, but serious medical conditions are the purview of medics, not musicians.

As some point, these magic frequencies were lost. Many Solfeggio adherents think they were hidden away by the Catholic Church while others think Nazis were the culprits. In either case, the frequencies are said to have been resurrected by modern prophets and are available for not just for our esthetic enjoyment, but for our health.

In the book Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse, Leonard Horowitz insists that “the solution to all humanity’s problem lies within the music.” Once we are all literally on the same sheet of music, Horowitz says, “nothing will be broken, there will be no disease, no dissonance, but only harmony with this communion divine.”

His co-author, Joseph Puleo, writes he received an epiphany while noticing certain numbers, which he took to be codes, while reading Genesis, chapter 7. Puleo explained, “When deciphered using the ancient Pythagorean method of reducing the verse numbers to their single digit integers, the codes revealed a series of six electromagnetic sound frequencies which correspond to the six missing tones of the ancient Solfeggio scale.”

It would take a mighty sweet musical accompaniment to make all that sound anything but discordant.

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“Sprouting nonsense” (Wheatgrass juice)

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My journey to skepticism wasn’t necessarily slow, but it was a leisurely stroll. Psychics and astrologers always seemed ridiculous to me, but when I was 12, I would have gladly gobbled up the idea that Nostradamus had predicted that the Abominable Snowman would fire from the Grassy Knoll.

I had left those ideas behind by my late 20s, but would still have believed a few things I blog against now. The government had been caught lying about Roswell so often that I could put no trust in anything it said about the incident and, combined with the idea of intelligent alien life being possible, I figured the story was true.

Also, I could have been won over by claims of “natural” foods and cures. At the time, I lived in charming Vermont village of 12,000 that featured scenic views, live theatre, and festivals most weekends. There were burned-out hippies, most of the populace had helped elect an avowed socialist to Congress, and lesbians walked hand-in-hand, something most small towns in 1996 had yet to see. So it was very left wing, though other aspects were out in left field with a hockey stick.

Such as the seminar on how to communicate with fairies in your garden. Or the hypnotherapist who would use scented candles and psychic energy to interpret your dreams. Then there was the smoothie bar that, even by the inflated prices of the region, sold wheatgrass at an eye-popping $8 an ounce.

In the world of supposed superfoods, wheatgrass juice usually tops the list, certainly in terms of cost and sometimes in terms of uncorroborated health benefits. The bulk of those benefits center on the fact that the shamrock-colored drink contains chlorophyll, which is crucial to photosynthesis. Plants use chlorophyll to synthesize proteins and sugars, which is wonderful for the wheatgrass but of negligible value to the person drinking it since s/he already receives ample proteins and sugars from their diet. And if drinking wheatgrass juice for this purpose, it won’t work because we have arms, not leaves.

Wheatgrass advertisements feature the usual litany of exaggerated, unproven claims one finds with any “superfood.” But there are also ones that might be true, but mean little. An example of this would be the one which proclaimed, “Wheat grass is high in oxygen…and the brain functions at an optimal level in a high-oxygen environment.” Well, I wouldn’t like my brain’s chances in an oxygen-free environment, but if needing more oxygen, I’ll take deep breaths.

Then there are the undefined, medically worthless claims about restoring balance, detoxing, nourishing organs, restoring vitality, building blood, and neutralizing environmental pollutants. Because none of these attributes are about a disease being prevented or cured, they have legal cover. However, some more daring promoters assert that wheatgrass juice can crush cancer, beat bronchitis, and eradicate eczema. Proponent Ann Widmore even claimed it could be used in place of insulin, then upped the hyperbolic ante by insisting it could also cure AIDS.

Another source credited it with being able to lower the levels of toxic metals in one’s cells. If those need to be lowered, you need the ER, not a drink that makes Starbucks seem cheap.

Yet another claim is that this lugubrious libation takes care of one’s daily vitamin and mineral allowance in one gulp. Yet the typical two-ounce shot contains just 15 percent of Vitamin C, 20 percent of iron, and 0 percent of everything else. Brian Dunning at Skeptoid described wheatgrass juice as offering “far less nutrition than a Flintstones vitamin at 100 times the price.”

Meanwhile, the Hippocrates Institute stresses the importance of consuming wheatgrass within 15 minutes of it being blended: “When it is consumed fresh it is a living food and has bio-electricity.”

Living food is when an eagle scoops down and spears itself a salmon. Wheatgrass is living when it grows, but not when it’s being gulped. As to bioelectricity, the website crosses completely over into New Age Lala Land with this description: “This high vibration energy is the life force within the living juice. This resource of life-force energy can unleash powerful renewing vibrations and greater connectivity to one’s inner being.” After reading that, I need a shot, and not of green juice.

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“I Fought the Law of Thermodynamics” (Stanley Meyer)

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If setting out to find a microcosm for all things pseudoscience, one might well end up at Stanley Meyer. He hit most of the major hallmarks: Remarkable, untestable claims; working in isolation; never producing a working model to be examined; showing his device to reporters, not researchers; claiming to defy the laws of physics without offering evidence this was being done or demonstrating the method by which this was achieved.

Even in death, the pseudoscience hallmarks continued to spring forth, as his believers insisted he was murdered in order to keep his invention hidden.    

Meyer claimed to have modified a dune buggy engine so that the vehicle could run on a water-fuel cell that operated via an unexplained, advanced form of electrolysis. He said an oxygen-hydrogen generator enabled this Magic Bus to go 100 miles on a gallon of water.

When Meyer died, he left behind no known blueprints, working models, correspondence with scientists, or anything that would substantiate his sizable claims. He never submitted anything for peer review or offered an explanation for how he had managed to violate the First Law of Thermodynamics.

This Law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. Meyer’s device purportedly split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then caused the hydrogen to burn and generate energy, and finally reconstituted the water molecules and started the process over. The first two steps describe what happens in a fuel cell and is well-understood science. The third step describes a perpetual motion machine and is pseudoscientific folly. His fuel cell purportedly split water with less energy than what was released by the recombination of the elements.

A glaring red flag was that Meyer made his pitch not to scientific journal editors but to investors. Or litigants as they were later known. Meyer was successfully sued by those he had duped into purchasing dealerships that never received anything to deal. His water-fuel cell was examined by three expert witnesses in his fraud case and they testified that it employed only conventional electrolysis. Unlike the fraud laws he was found to have violated, the laws of thermodynamics could not be ignored just because Meyer found them inconvenient.

Meyer died on March 20, 1998, after a restaurant meal. According to his brother, he had been meeting with two investors, when he suddenly exited the restaurant, declaring, “They poisoned me.” It’s unclear who ‘they’ were. It could have meant the chefs, the investors, or those he had previously tricked out of their money. But conspiracy theorists have filled in the blanks to mean it was those whose livelihood and fortunes would be threatened if Meyer’s device worked.  

Despite the poisoning claim, the county coroner found the cause of death to be a cerebral aneurism. This, of course, is meaningless to a conspiracy theorist, for whom any contradictory information is more evidence of a cover-up. In this case, that means that the coroner was in on the plot or was threatened with a similar fate unless he falsified his report.  

Beyond the total lack of evidence for the poisoning claim, murdering him would do little good because if his methods were real, researchers into alternative fuel sources would also discover them.

Besides, most successful businesses adapt and embrace change. Restaurants alter the menu when faced with demands for healthier options or vegetarian fare. Newspapers have established an online presence with subscription fees for full access. When baseball integrated, bigoted owners and scouts began signing former Negro League players and started gauging the talent on Hispaniola and in Cuba. If a water-powered car prototype were a reality, automobile manufacturers and petroleum companies would want to find a way to profit from it, not eliminate the man who would make this possible.

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“Predator and pay” (Fraudulent peer- reviewed journals)

LOREMIPSUM

One aspect of this blog I am most proud of is that readers will find me sometimes writing about weaknesses of things I believe in. Try finding some pro-vax points on Natural News or a post about the shortcomings of biblical literalism at Answers in Genesis.

I strongly believe in peer review, but the process is not without its flaws. Those involved are human and therefore subject to bias and error. Besides these deficiencies, there is also fraud. For example, some authors have been busted creating fictitious persons to praise their work and including these testimonials with their peer review packet.

There is also a significant problem of journals that exist not to further science and research, but to sustain themselves by collecting payment from authors. Rather than seeking to ensure transparency and playing a crucial role in doing sound science, these journals exist only for ill-gained profit, and they do damage to the scientific process. That’s because Answers in Genesis and Natural News can accurately point out that some publications calling themselves “peer-reviewed” in actuality print unedited submissions, including some that are strings of computer-generated gibberish. These organizations can then use this to assert that peer review is an unnecessary step in getting to the truth.

Bogus journals adopt names that sound scholarly and they sometimes imitate legitimate publications by using a similar name to an existing journal. It is akin diploma mills calling themselves Columbia State or Monticello and adopting the .edu suffix in their URL.

Rebecca Schuman at Slate reports that “an entire cottage industry” has arisen, consisting of “peer-review fraud syndicates, journals that nobody proofreads, academic book mills, and pay-to-play conferences where everyone is accepted and whose proceedings are then stapled together in a glorified pamphlet” that is counted as a publication.

The journal Nature launched a sting in which it submitted a counterfeit application to 360 journals for an editor position. For the operation, Nature created a fictitious scientist named Anna O. Szust. By design, her experience and education were horribly inadequate for an editor’s role. Despite this, she received 48 job offers, many of them coming in less than a day. Moreover, these were often contingent on a payment, such as one that wanted Szust to pay the journal’s annual subscription fee of $750.

Similarly, some journals granted Szust conditional acceptance if she submitted her papers for a price. In some cases, these paid submissions could be submitted by Szust’s associates, with her and the journal dividing the submission fee. Most of these journals were more interested in Szust functioning as a recruiter for paid submissions than they were in having her assess a manuscript’s quality.  

Nature reported that there have been more than half a million papers published in predatory journals, so how can we know if a publication is legitimate? While it would be nice to think that there is a list of such journals, Brian Dunning at Skeptoid cautioned that this can never be.

“There is no such thing as an authoritative list of reputable scientific journals. There can’t be,” he wrote. “And the reason is that word ‘authoritative.’ Who is qualified to be the authority? No one is. No one must be. The moment that any one group is anointed with the ability to declare a source to be legitimate or not, is the moment that we lose objectivity and impartiality.”

While there is no neat, tidy list of journals that engage in robust publishing of scientific papers, there are some clues that can help determine if a journal is the type that would offer Szust an editorship. Psychologist Eve Carlson, who has published in legitimate journals and been targeted by predatory ones, put together a list of warning signs.

One tipoff is that no one specific person is identified as the editor. This may be an indication that several persons have been “hired” as editors, much in the same way that Szust scored 48 job offers.

Second, the journal should include a legitimate address and telephone number. If a Google Map search of their address brings you to Mail Boxes Etc., or a split-level ranch home, that’s a sizable clue that the journal is phony. As to the phone number, if calling it produces the following results, the journal is likely counterfeit: 1. No answer, nor even a recorded message. 2. The opening salutation is ‘hello,’ as opposed to the professional, “This is blah, you have reached such-and-such a publication.  How may I direct you call?” 3. The call is forwarded to the 1-800 phone bank for the publisher. When Carlson had this experience, the person who answered at the phone bank was unable to tell her the name of the journal editor.

Another warning sign is if a search engine that caters to journals in a specific field fails to produce hits when a journal’s name is entered. As part of her investigation, Carlson entered the name of a supposed bio-medical journal into PubMed and came up empty.

One of the hallmarks of pseudoscience is hostility to criticism, so it follows that a pseudoscience journal would not welcome questions about how it operates. Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado-Denver compiled a list of journals that engage in these shady practices. For his effort, he received a notice from a publisher’s attorney that he was on a “very perilous journey” with “serious legal implications.” Someone doing real research will let it stand on its own or offer new evidence, not threaten to get contrarian views silenced.  

Finally, some journals post alleged interviews with its editorial board members that are in fact  electronic questionnaires that produce this type of response:

Q. What has been your experience with this journal?

A. The spam e-mails I’m sent, wanting me to purchase space in it.

Volleys like the one above have been fired in the counterrevolution against predator publishers. Professors have submitted strings of gibberish to phony publications and counterfeit conferences, and these “works” were accepted and labeled as “peer-reviewed.” The professors then blew the whistle on the offending journals. There are so many such journals out there that this would be an ineffective method of rooting out all of them, but it’s still a success when fraudsters are exposed.

In one such takedown, computer science professors David Mazieres and Eddie Kohler made it into one of these journals by submitting a treatise that consisted of “Get me off your Fucking Mailing List” repeated hundreds of times.

Splendid. And if they change it to, “Get me off your Fucking vaccination schedule,” they can make it onto Natural News as well.

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“Lookalike context” (Doppelgängers)

LOOKALIKE

A motorist once saw my nephew enter a residence, then was perplexed four blocks later to again encounter my nephew, who was driving past him in the opposite direction. This was possible because the motorist has spied a pair of identical twins.

Had the motorist shared this story is some online forums, however, a solution more sinister than a split embryo would have been blamed. Doppelgänger is a German loanword that in today’s usage normally means lookalike, but more traditionally referred to an apparition that portends doom for the person it resembles.  

Per the legend, if a friend, stranger, or family member sees another person’s doppelgänger, it is an omen that harm will befall the authentic individual, while seeing one’s own doppelgänger means death. Doppelgängers might attempt to provide advice to the person they shadow, but this advice is meant to confuse, mislead, or cause ruin.

In English, doppelgängers are sometimes referred to by a much less excellent term, the umlaut-free “fetch.” By whatever name, there are legends that Abraham Lincoln and Percy Shelly saw their own. These stories are only told because these men met an early demise. There’s not much narrative in, “Dwight Eisenhower saw his, but the doppelgänger was thwarted and Ike lived to a ripe old age.”

Another tale centers on a 19th Century French schoolmarm, Emilie Sagée. Students swore they saw her doppelgänger many times, after which Sagée would always be exhausted. There is no way to confirm or refute these claims, though they most likely are a case of students messing with their teacher. 

Similar stories were passed down by Scots, Norse, and ancient Egyptians. The Scottish story was most prominent on the Orkney Islands, where inhabitants feared evil fairies would give birth to sickly infants, then replace them with identical-in-appearance human babies. Similar themes were the focus of the American films Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Changeling.

Doppelgängers also appear in works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe, and Charles Dickens. They are often described as casting no shadow and having no reflection, though it’s possible the root of doppelgänger mythology may be another myth, Narcissus.   

To the best of my knowledge, no one believes that Narnia, Chewbacca, or Bilbo Baggins are real. People obsessed with these notions might be geeks or aficionados, but they are not delusional. By contrast, persons fond of Bigfoot, angels, and ghosts are convinced they are real even though their existence has not been verified.

Doppelgängers straddle this line. While they appear in works of fiction, they are also at the center of tales told by persons who pass the stories off as true. Most persons enchanted by the idea of doppelgängers consider them imaginary and in the same category as campfire stories, Poe works, and Lon Chaney Jr. movies. But there are a few believers, just like Ken Ham believes in dragons and unicorns and some Earth-based spiritualists believe in sprites and leprechauns. These positions are unorthodox even in the credulous creationist and cryptozoological camps, but people who hold them feel their case is bolstered since the creatures existed in tales from different cultures and over many centuries, but this is an ad populum. Neither the number of adherents nor the fervency of their beliefs has any bearing on whether something is true. 

There have been some documented cases of persons genuinely thinking their loved one has been replaced by an impostor. These are the results of brain injury, brain malfunction, or hallucination. This is more likely if the injury or malfunction impacted spatial reasoning. Similar occurrences that took place before science understood this might be how some doppelgänger legends were born.

If that’s boring and stodgy, another speculation holds that doppelgängers are visitors from another dimension or another corner of the multiverse. This always seems to be a one way road. We Earthlings are never able to access these portals, vortexes, or wormholes. I can live with that, we’ve got Renée Zellweger and guacamole on this side.

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“Shredding wheat” (Gluten hysteria)

GH

In the mid-1940s, Dutch pediatrician Willem-Karl Dicke examined children who were suffering from diarrhea, anemia, poor appetite, abdominal pain, bloating, and stunted growth. That, plus having to deal with occupying Nazis. Rough childhood.

A couple of years later, the Netherlands experienced a shortage of bread and other foods. Consequently, most people in the country were in declining health, but the sick children Dicke had observed began to thrive. He eventually became the first person to diagnose celiac, a disease that causes an intense autoimmune reaction in the intestine, and which is traced to gluten.

So the children who had celiac, which was unknown to exist until Dicke discovered it, became pain-free and started doing better when gluten by happenstance was removed from their diet. But the idea that everyone needs to do the same is an extreme overreach. Alas, the alternative medicine and pseudoscience communities seldom fail to take advantage of extreme overreach opportunities.

The most prominent promoter of this hysteria is cardiologist William Davis, who wrote Wheat Belly. In it, Davis described wheat as a modern poison and a “Franken-grain.” However, wheat today is nearly identical to what it was when the last sabre-toothed cat was roaming about doing frightening feline stuff.

Davis commits garden variety correlation-causation errors, such as writing that 200 million Americans eat wheat daily, then noting that 100 million of them experience some type of adverse health effect. Another correlation-causation error is at the center of his thinking. Celiac sufferers are unable to tolerate gluten, but Davis flips this to assert that gluten causes celiac. If this were true, there would be far more celiac sufferers than the 3 million now in the U.S.

He also regularly embraces pseudoscience in the form of exaggerated claims such as this doozy: “Wheat has killed more people than all wars combined.” These folks must be suffering a long, painful death because in the last century, the average lifespan has more than doubled. Another exaggerated claim is that a non-celiac person can experience 24 hours of diarrhea if they eat a piece of cake. It would take your best birthday present ever to make up for that.

While Davis conducted no research, his book contains pages of endnotes that reference studies and seem to give Wheat Belly a scientific backing. However, a closer inspection reveals the medical mirage. He misuses the studies, even including ones that contradict each other in the same paragraph if it supports his agenda. Blogger and celiac sufferer Peter Bronski details examples of this.

Davis also cherry picks, such as when he fishes for studies that will support his conclusion that wheat is addictive. He asserts that if someone has a pretzel, their brain and body will demand more and more, then revolt if their need for knotted dough goes unmet. But the study he cites to support this was done on the brains of dead rats. There are no human studies suggesting the existence of wheat addiction.

Davis said his health improved after he forsook gluten and his book is full of such anecdotes. He writes of a patient who said he felt better after giving up grain and reports that is one of 2,000 such cases. But this many anecdotes does not equal one piece of data.

Maybe patients did report getting better, but they may have undertaken other lifestyle changes as well. Perhaps some had a pain that was at its greatest when gluten was exorcised, then the hurt coincidentally went away as happens with fluctuating conditions. Perhaps an equal number of patients reported no change or a worsening, but bias caused Davis to dismiss or forget these. This is why when it comes to determining evidence, we rely on double blind studies, clinical trials, and peer review, rather than anecdotes, sweeping generalizations, and trying to boost book sales.

Davis blames celiac for autism, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, heart disease, obesity, schizophrenia, epilepsy, and fibromyalgia. Many of these are common and even includes the number one killer, heart disease. Everyone is going to know someone who died from these conditions and by tying it to gluten, Davis can convince more people to commence with a French toast and linguini hiatus. But the only persons who need to give up gluten are those with celiac and possibly a few other conditions. For instance, going gluten-free may help with irritable bowel syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, type one diabetes, and psoriasis.

In grand pseudoscientific tradition, Davis offers a flattering self-portrayal of a man fighting against a malevolent trio of Dr. Frankensteins, Big Ag, and complicit government agents. “I’m waging a war against misinformation in health,” he boasts.

Those who follow his advice and go anti-gluten may experience harm beyond the loss of fiber, B vitamins, and minerals. Persons who have a condition they wrongly suspect is caused by gluten will think giving up crackers and Cheerios will fix it while the real problem goes unchecked.

Those with authentic adverse reactions to gluten have mixed feelings about the hysteria. On the plus side, there are many more food options than before. Imagine trying to find a gluten-free cake mix in 1987. On the other hand, they also experience an increasing number of rolled eyes and condescending remarks from those who think they are following a misguided fad when they, for years, have been doing it out of necessity.

It’s possible that gluten may be causing conditions we don’t yet know about. And it’s possible some persons may be having a negative reaction to another wheat component. Certainly, there are some who say these situations describes their situation, though there’s no evidence for it now. There are no gluten sensitivity tests and these claims are limited to anecdotes and self-reporting. But even if this is eventually proven, that’s no reason for all of us to cut out gluten any more than we should eliminate dairy on the chance there might be undiscovered negative reaction to milk not caused by lactose. And persons certainly shouldn’t self-diagnose these conditions unless they are a gastroenterologist.