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“Astro-illogical” (Astrology)

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Astrology is the belief that spinning spheres of rock, liquid, and gas determine the fates of creatures millions of miles away, dictating how much they make, who they love, how annoying they are, and whether they have that second slice of cornbread.

Astrologers offer no explanation for how this works. Curiously, the one celestial body that might impact a person’s life, Earth, is a nonfactor in astrology.

One form of astrology holds that natural disasters are predicted by celestial events. With countless astronomical occurrences to choose from, it’s easy to concoct a relationship between these events and natural disasters. One could also find a correlation between natural disasters and spicy mustard sales or use of the word plenipotentiary, but this would not prove causality.

The overarching idea of astrology is that celestial bodies impact us. But if this were so, why would birth date be the only human factor? The moon impacts the ocean, but ascertaining when tomorrow’s low tide will be does not require knowing where the satellite was when the Atlantic was formed.

The force of celestial bodies might impact future space travelers, but not us present, atmosphere-bound types. Other than the sun and moon, celestial bodies are too distant from Earth to impact us. The key forces in nature are nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational. The nuclear forces have almost no impact outside the nucleus. The electromagnetic force is only a little stronger. With regard to gravity, its pull decreases substantially as distance increases. Something that moves from one location to twice as far away exerts a quarter of the gravitational pull. That same object three times farther away exerts a ninth of the gravitational pull. By the time you get to the 40 million miles from Mars to Earth, the Red Planet has lost all influence on your ability to become more focused.

A few supposed validations of astrology with regard to athletic ability have been claimed. For instance, since 1950, someone born in August has had a 60 percent better chance of playing Major League Baseball than someone born in July. This is not based on whether Saturn was descending, but is because July 31 is the cutoff date used by youth baseball leagues. The older players were stronger, faster, and usually better. Buoyed by initial success, they trained harder and the momentum continued all the way to the Big Leagues. In countries with different cut off dates for athletic teams, the trend shifts accordingly.

Astrology has never been validated by any study. The most serious scientific undertaking was overseen by physicist Scientist Shawn Carlson, who conducted a double blind controlled experiment for Nature magazine. Twenty-eight astrologers were given the task of matching birth charts to psychological profiles, and none performed better than chance.

Not that this meant doom for the field. Some people like thinking astrology provides order to their lives, and most predictions and personality identifiers are general enough to allow for easy shoehorning. Another tactic is using contradictory ideas, such as “You are sometimes shy, but will open up around the right person or situation.” Astrology relies on the Forer Effect, subjective validation, confirmation bias, and selective and elastic thinking.

Vague ideas also help. I found one prediction that read, “With Neptune in Pisces until 2024, we will see political issues coming up involving water.” So rest assured, the last 20,000 years of geopolitics will continue.

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“Close encounters of the blurred kind” (Alien visitors)

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When it comes to a UFO, the flying and object parts are straightforward. But how unidentified the object is relies on the location and knowledge of the viewer, along with the conditions.

It could be an aircraft, atmospheric phenomenon, ball lightning, bird, flare, meteor, reflected artificial light, rocket, satellite, weather balloon, or something else. However, the term usually refers to a belief that it is an alien aircraft.

Almost no UFO reports are logged by professional astronomers who watch the sky and space for anomalies. They see lots of images, but recognize them as natural or manmade objects.

While there is no evidence for alien life, it certainly may exist. With trillions of stars and their orbiting planets, the odds would seem good that life has developed elsewhere. However, the vast numbers also make alien visitation supremely unlikely. It would take 100,000 light years to cross the Milky Way and in the observable universe, our galaxy is an imperceptible speck.

Closer to home, Alpha Centauri is four light years away, or about 25 trillion miles. Let’s make the extremely gracious allowance that one of the star’s planets is home to beings that have mastered inter-solar system travel. Even then, the numbers don’t support them stopping by for coffee. To reach Earth, the aliens would need either extremely fast spacecraft or astronomical life spans and an inexhaustible fuel supply. At one million miles an hour, it would take 2,500 years to get here. Reaching us in 25 years would necessitate an average speed of 100 million miles per hour, done safely and with provisions for repairs managed in deep space.

Coming from even farther away, space travelers would need to keep a population alive for millions of years. There are alternate theories, such as wormholes or other dimensions. But it requires the most desperate desire to believe to take an unproven notion, tie it to flashes in Earth’s sky, and deduct that aliens are overhead.

Descriptions and accounts of UFOs are a relatively modern phenomenon. It wasn’t until the airplane began being seriously contemplated in the 1890s that sightings began. And these described not saucers or flashing lights, but long cylinders and objects resembling advanced hot air balloons.

In 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine brightly glowing meteors speed past his plane. Since they were pieces of an exploding fireball breaking up, they seemed to be flying in formation. He assumed their brightness was reflected sunlight. Arnold told reporters they flew “like a saucer skipping over water.” Arnold’s description of the meteors’ actions (skipping like saucers) was mistranslated into that being their shape, and the flying saucer fixation began that day and continues unabated.

The best evidence for alien visitation would be an alien landing and showing us the aircraft. This could be bolstered with photos from its planet and journey, its DNA, extraterrestrial objects, and demonstrations of science or technology we have yet to manage. Instead, for evidence we have blurry photos, shaky videos, and anecdotes.

The most intense stories involve alien abductions. Fairy, elf, and goblin abduction tales go back for millennium in Europe. These tiny humanoids were fused with supernatural powers and scurried about the countryside nocturnally, snatching victims. Other Medieval delusions centered on demons raping nuns, or on gods incarnating as swans to seduce women. These have vanished today because we have our own fairy tales. These ideas seem silly to us, just as spaceships and alien abductions would have been scoffed at in Elizabethan England. Our culture heavily influences the belief in UFOs and aliens. Author and investigator Robert Scheaffer has said, “We find all the major elements of contemporary UFO abductions in the 1930s comic, ‘Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.’”

Most alien abductions are explicable through sleep paralysis, which is the opposite of sleepwalking. Instead of being unconscious and mobile, a person is awake and paralyzed. Abductees report being unable to move or speak and they sense a presence. This mirrors the experience of sleep paralysis. Most tales involve a probe and implant of some kind. Yet when NOVA asked to abductees to submit implants for scientific scrutiny, no one took the offer.

If mankind ever manages intergalactic travel, I hope the impression we leave on exoplanet inhabitants is better than crop circles, painful injections, and repeated nighttime desert visits.

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“Monster smash” (Cryptozoology)

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Most preschoolers believe in monsters under their bed or in their closet. Those who never outgrow it become cryptozoologists. This field focuses on the search for make believe animals.

There are, of course, many creatures yet to be found by science. But few cryptozoolgists are searching for undiscovered types of beetles. Only a tiny fraction would be excited by the unearthing of a new grub worm. While usually claiming to be interested in promoting science, cryptozoologists show little to no interest in deeply learning biology and then applying this knowledge in pursuit of creatures reasonably assumed to exist.

There are some locations off limits to all but the indigenous, primitive population, such as the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, where undiscovered species could exist. It is a virtual certainty that the Amazon is home to mammals and reptiles yet to be found, along with thousands of bugs. The oceans are likely teeming with hordes of undiscovered species. But most cryptozoologists are only after exciting creatures that resemble dinosaurs, have fangs, or terrorize local populations. Cryptozoologists seldom examine animals, but rather are concerned with trying to establish a creature’s existence. These creatures are usually malevolent, indicating the monsters may be a manifestation of mankind’s fear of the unknown.

The Big Three of cryptozoology are Sasquatch, Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster.

There have been thousands of Bigfoot sightings, with just about as many descriptions. But a conglomerate report would describe a bipedal hominid eight feet tall, covered in fairly dark fur, and stealthily avoiding all capture, vehicles, and steady cameras, while never leaving behind any fur, excrement, bone, or skin. There have been many footprints, but there is no consistency to them.

His Asian cousin is the Abominable Snowman. Yeti measures slightly lower on the ridiculous scale, owing to his remote place of alleged residence. However, treks to the top of Mount Everest have become relatively common and there is still no capture, footage, or fur. Many sightings are likely the result of blizzard conditions and oxygen deprivation. A likely answer for many of the sightings is that the spotter was eyeing the Tibetan blue bear. When the hide of such an animal was brought down from Everest, Nepalese identified it as belonging to a Yeti. Other alleged Yeti samples have proven to be a goat or yak.

The mythical creature most embraced by locals is the Loch Ness Monster. Unlike most of the other cryptids, Nessie’s habitat is confined, enabling area merchants to promote the Monster and cash in. Blurry photos and videos exist, but the physical evidence is zero.

There are a few reasons why the Monster is highly unlikely. Loch Ness is inadequate in size to support a sustainable population of animals as large as Nessie is purported to be. An ad hoc hypothesis has developed that the animals come and go from a secret tunnel that leads from the loch to the ocean. There exists no evidence for this tunnel, nor is there an explanation of how the animals keep finding their way back, or how Loch Ness animals survive the introduction of seawater.

Another huge obstacle is that these animals would need to regularly surface for air. Yet none has ever been captured on film doing this, despite the thousands of camera-toting tourists on hand for just such an occurrence. Even the era of cell phone camera ubiquity has failed to produce this evidence.

There are some scientific theories that may explain many of the sightings. Loch Ness is long and straight, subjecting its surface to unusual ripples. When the water reverts to its natural level, tree branches and logs can rise to the surface, resembling the Monster. Wind can also give the loch a choppy appearance, with intermittent calm patches looking like humps.

Many other regions have monsters, such as Florida’s Skunk Ape, Champy in Vermont, the Jersey Devil, the Australian Outback’s bunyip, Central America’s Chupacabra, and the mokele-mbembe in Congo.

There are common threads to these creepy critters. First, they are usually fear-inducing. The Chupacabra, for instance, is said to kill livestock. Occasionally, supposed Chupacabras are captured, but they are always proven to be a dog or member of the Canidae family, usually with mange.

The Chupacabra is a relatively small cryptid, as most others are described as huge to gargantuan. The largest is the mokele-mbembe, an alleged sauropod. Despite 200 years of reports, there has never been a carcass, bone, or fossil of this animal as large as an Apatosaurus.

The other common characteristic is the inconsistency with which the monsters are described. This indicates that one factor in the sightings is pareidolia, which is seeing something significant in vague and random images or sounds.

Almost completely vanished today are belief in fairies, pixies, gnomes, and elves. These are usually benevolent, diminutive, and humanlike, so they lack the appeal of their larger, hairier counterparts. However, belief is not completely extinguished. In otherwise enlightened Iceland, road work was delayed in 2013 to ensure elven habitat remained undisturbed.

Also moribund is belief in unicorns and dragons. The only proponents I’m aware of are Ken Ham and his ilk. The evidence they put forward for unicorns is that the King James Bible references them and that rhinos have one horn. Ham is partial to dragons because he feels it bolsters his contention that dinosaurs and humans lived together. He points out ancient cultures had dragon tales, a logic that should have him worshipping Odin.

Unlike those is legitimate science, cryptozoologists have no samples of what they say they are studying. Cryptids are a self-perpetuating phenomenon built on shaky sightings, fuzzy photos, and confirmation bias.

Every day that passes without these creatures emerging further strengthens the unlikelihood of their existence. Nevertheless, they will endure. If they are real, they will be found. If they aren’t, the appeal of myth and mystery will sustain them.

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“Doctor’s disorders” (Deepak Chopra)

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Ayurvedic is a form of alternative medicine whose tenets were first written on palm leaves in Sanskrit in 3000 BCE. If India’s 112th place rating in overall health is any indication, the field has grown little in the last 5,000 years.

Its most prominent champion is Deepak Chopra, who claims modern physics has validated ancient Hindu teachings. This is an unrequited love. No scientists are claiming that ancient Hindu teachings validate modern physics.

Chopra asserts a connection between quantum physics and consciousness. He asserts no connection between this claim and any science or testing. Chopra insists that patients are classified by three body types and that he can tell these types by taking their pulse. No double blind or comparison testing is done. In fact, Ayurvedic proponents consider scientific tests superfluous since they can tell the medicinal quality of any substance by looking at it.

The three body types are determined by the doshas, areas which Chopra says regulate mind-body harmony. He considers illness and disease to be the consequence of a dosha imbalance. The vata governs movement in the mind and body and must also be kept in good balance. Depending on the malady, an Ayurvedic practitioner determines if a patient has too little or too much vata, then prescribes a diet. The treatment will leave the patient saturated in New Age benefits, such as restored harmony, balance achievement, and mind-body synergy.

The field focuses primarily on diet and herbal treatments. These are unproven at best and dangerous at worst. High amounts of lead have been found in Ayurvedic treatments and a study of shops in Boston found dangerous amounts of arsenic, lead, and mercury in the medicines.

Chopra claims that perfect health is a matter of choice and that quantum healing will even overcome aging. A counterargument is the death rate of Ayurvedic patients holding steady at 100 percent.

Chopra believes that the mind heals by harmonizing the quantum mechanical body. He never defines his terms, nor provides evidence of their existence. Other claims, again backed by no studies, include that poor digestion is the cause of allergies and that aging can be halted by “directing the way our bodies metabolize time.”

Ayurvedic treatments promise a number of wonders, such as lubricating joints, moisturizing skin, improving memory, curing cancer, and making one less envious. If you cured someone’s cancer, they’d no longer envy the healthy, so you’d knock out two right there.

Ayurvedic has a number of bizarre and unsavory prescriptions. This includes treating cataracts by brushing your teeth and scraping your tongue, spitting into a cup of water, then washing your eyes with this concoction.

There is also the panchakarma treatment, which consists of essential oil ingestion, vomiting, purging, an enema, herbal inhalation, and bloodletting. After that routine, anything would be better, so in a way this does serve to make the patient feel healthier.

Then we have rasa shastra, which is consuming arsenic, lead, and mercury baked in bovine excrement. There are no double blind studies on this one, as they had trouble finding volunteers.

One enterprising person built a computer program and fed in Chopra Tweets, then generated random sentences from these Tweets. He put three of those next to an untouched one to see how many persons could guess the Chopra original. Here’s the list:

“Perception is inherent in cosmic possibilities.”
“Interdependence inspires quantum life.”
“Hidden meaning is serving your own evolution.”
“Freedom heals self-righteous knowledge”.

I’m unsure which one is real, but I’m pretty sure they all say the same thing.

James Randi offers a million dollars to anyone who can prove paranormal abilities under agreed-upon conditions. Chopra has countered with his own challenge, daring skeptics to prove how thoughts are formed. This makes no sense as a counter challenge. Randi doesn’t believe in the paranormal, so Chopra’s challenge would only be consistent if Chopra didn’t believe that thoughts were formed.

But as to the answer, Deepak: Thoughts are formed when a dosha localizes its awareness in order to harmonize with its vata and restore balance with its quantum mechanical body and toothpaste cataract water.

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“Possession is nine-tenths of the flaw” (Demons)

DEMONAn exorcism is a religious rite aimed at driving a demon out of a person, place, pancake, or wherever else he takes up diabolical residence.

With there being no scientific evidence for demons, there are no studies on the effectiveness of Holy Water or repeated exhortations to get rid of them. While it’s unclear if any demons have been cast out, we do know persons have died in these attempts, from asphyxiation, poisoning, and blunt force trauma.

Though primarily associated with the Catholic Church, exorcisms are also endorsed by Orthodox and protestant denominations. It is also a feature of some sects of Hinduism and Islam. But it’s almost invariably Catholic priests and bishops who are featured in movies or paintings since they sport cool tunics, staffs, and giant cross necklaces when sending dark lords scurrying.

Most documented cases involve only the testimony of the possessed, the exorcist, and maybe a couple of family members. Sometimes even those names are kept secret. This makes the cases impossible to investigate, but the descriptions seem best explained by the likes of epilepsy, schizophrenia, or trickery. The subject can be willing, reluctant, or forced. Some genuinely believe it. If this belief is owed to subjective validation and communal reinforcement, these same phenomenons can convince the person they are cleansed once the exorcism is complete. If the underlying reason is physical or mental, the symptoms continue, with demons continuing to take the blame.

Those said to be afflicted by demons act like how possessed persons are depicted in film and literature: Flailing, harming one’s self and others, and communicating in a deep, tortured voice. The demons always speak whatever language the possessed does, as opposed to the more logical Hebrew.

In Matthew, Jesus cast out demons into herd of swine, which promptly made a beeline off a cliff. Why the afflicted person hadn’t hurled himself over the cliff first is unclear. Nor does the Bible explain why Jesus didn’t just cast the demons directly into Hell instead of giving them a pig layover. Some think since Jesus cast out demons, they can, too, even though they don’t think they can also walk on water or heal the blind. Then again, with demon casting, there’s no way you can be disproven.

In the Middle Ages, possession was used to explain almost any illness or abnormality. It was even said to be responsible for alcoholism, prostitution, and sloth. Reports of possessions in these times usually included convulsions, immense strength, numbness to pain, temporary blindness or deafness, and clairvoyance. These may have been manifestations of epilepsy, migraines, schizophrenia, Tourette’s Syndrome, or other disorders. As science began to understand mental illness and physiology, demons as an explanation become less necessary. Today, medicine and psychology consider a “diagnosis” of demon possession to be a mislabeling of other conditions. I found one online list of demon possession signs that merely mirrored indicators of being suicidal.

As much as it ever would, the Catholic Church admits all this is its official stance on exorcism, which reads, “Before an exorcism is performed, it is important to ascertain that one is dealing with the presence of the Evil One, and not an illness.” Even if no illness is detected, it is a non sequitur to think chasing demons will do any good.

Christianity still holds onto it, however, as a way of maintaining relevance. If you need an exorcism, only the church can provide one. Some have entered the modern age. Bob Larson conducts exorcisms by phone and some televangelists encourage afflicted persons to lay their hands on the TV and let the sanctifying force come bursting through. There may even be exorcism via Facebook texts these days, I don’t know.

Sometimes, the only thing the victim is possessed with is a sense of humor. Trickery was behind two of the 19th Century’s most storied possession tales, those of the Fox sisters and Davenport brothers. Both revealed the ruse in old age. Other times, skeptics have been the ones to uncover the deception. When cases have been properly investigated by illusionists and detectives using hidden cameras and tracer powders, the possessions are shown to be pranks.

The descriptions of what happens during an exorcism are wide-ranging, tangential, and noncommittal. Here’s one example: “Anything or nothing can happen. There is no set standard. In some cases, all hell seems to break loose. In others, not a peep is heard. It can take some time before you are sure an exorcism has worked. Sometimes the ritual forces the demons into a state of dormancy. However, the problem may arise again.”

There is no consensus on why a demon would enter a person or what they gain by it. There are several lists of discouraged behaviors that could leave one’s self open to possession. Some of these contain virtually every action known to mankind. Here is a more specific list I found, and I’ll peruse it for how at-risk I am:

1. Going to churches whose members bathe in the river. My Unitarian church is within a mile of the Mississippi River, which is a really lousy place to try and get clean. Besides, I only shower.

2. Eating food sanctified to idols. I’ve been a vegetarian for 21 years and never heard of anyone sacrificing an eggplant.

3. Reading occult books and literature. Think I’m in moderate danger here. My home library includes Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and Pride & Prejudice. I know that last one doesn’t quite fit, but Elizabeth Bennet sometimes alludes to feelings of sensuality, and arousal is another no-no.

4. Adultery, or having premarital sex with a possessed person. The latter presumably cancels itself if both partners are possessed. As to the former, if I did this, a demon would be the least of my concerns.

5. Consulting witch doctors or mediums. My health care plan doesn’t cover these, so I’m good to go.

6. Reading or watching porn. I may have left myself vulnerable here. The other day, I viewed asexually reproducing amoebas on Animal Planet.

7. Watching horror movies. Oh dear, watch out. A frothy mix of blood and vomit is about to come spewing through your monitor.

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“Falsehoods, fallacies, and falafels” (Critical thinking)

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Time again to give fortune tellers and magic spritzer water a break and focus a post on critical thinking. We will use some real life examples to illustrate different logical fallacies.

In the mid-1980s, a serial rapist terrorized elderly women in a Pittsburgh suburb. After investigations, interviews, and leads failed to turn up anything, police chief Chris Kelly consulted a psychic. “What did we have to lose,” he asked, “We’d tried everything else.”

What they had to lose were time and resources. But it’s his second line I want to focus on. The failure of traditional police methods was irrelevant to whether consulting a psychic was a valid option. Instead of having the psychic come up with a suspect, why not just grab a random man on the street? To justify the random man, psychic, or any other new method, one needs evidence that it would work. The police chief in this case employed a non sequitur form of reasoning.

This is a common occurrence with alternative medicine patients. Lack of success from traditional methods is insufficient reason to treat one’s backache with tachyon water and jasmine crystals.

Non sequitur sightings are also frequent in the Intelligent Design world, where an organism’s complexity is presented as proof that God did it. But just because a scientific explanation hasn’t been found doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist. That would be like saying persons in the 18th Century who considered flight impossible were correct since it wasn’t being done at the time. Besides, if an eye or a mollusk’s protection is so complex as to necessitate a designer, whatever created it would have to be more complex than what it created, so the creator would have to a have a creator, as would that creator, ad infinitum.

We’ll now move on to the false dichotomy, but stick with the God stuff. Skeptic Andre Kole related the story of meeting a Christian magician who showed him a tract he had written entitled “Jesus: Magician or God?” Kole explained this was a false dichotomy. Jesus could have been neither a magician nor a god. Perhaps he was a great leader with excellent organizing skills, distinctions requiring no supernatural explanation. Or maybe he was embellished, fraudulent, loony, manufactured, or misquoted.

Kole read the tract and credited the author with making a good case that Jesus was not a magician. But it certainly didn’t follow that Jesus was therefore a deity. The frustrated author then asked why so many biblical prophecies had come true, thus employing a pair of logical fallacies: Moving the Goalposts and Appealing to Ignorance.

We move now to the regressive fallacy, which is the failure to take into account natural fluctuations. Stock market prices, golf scores, and chronic back pain inevitably go up and down. A person seeking relief from a throbbing elbow through chiropractics, magnetic belts, or chi-infused falafels is likely to do so when the pain is at its worst. If the pain lessens, the method will be credited, but it may be due to the natural fluctuations. This demonstrates the value of controlled double blind tests under strictly defined conditions. The plural of anecdote is not data. We need scientific tests, not testimonials, to gauge a medicine’s effectiveness.

We’ve beat up on alternative medicine and creationists enough, let’s address a logical fallacy common among conspiracy theorists. Proportionality bias is the belief that extreme events must have extreme, probably sinister, causes. It is a telling feature that there are seldom conspiracy theories surrounding something that failed. After substantial digging, I could only find a couple of sites that argued for a conspiracy surrounding the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt. And these gained no traction and were of little interest among the conspiracy minded. Even one of the more extreme sites, beforeitsnews.com, though sympathetic to the idea, noted that “there is no smoking gun.” (I guess John Hinckley’s didn’t count). But if Hinckley had succeeded, imagine the zeal with which conspiracy theorists would pounce on the idea that an obsessive, greatly disturbed lone gunman did the deed.

Then we have recency bias, which is placing more emphasis on what has happened lately and thinking it will continue. Many an amateur investor has fallen prey to this one, your blogger included. It’s easier to think current momentum will continue rather than bothering to analyze trends. Yet one year before advent of the Internet, personal computer, or cell phone, few persons would have foreseen these devices.

Our brains have evolved to react more strongly and quickly to threats and fear than to flattery and soothing. This makes us vulnerable to negativity bias. Condoleezza Rice took advantage of this when she glossed over the total lack of evidence for weapons of mass destruction and pronounced this ominous vision: “The smoking gun of evidence for WMDs in Iraq could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

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“Losing Patients” (Consegrity)

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Consegrity is a faith healing practice that is 100 percent faith and zero percent healing. It was started by someone who should have known better: Georgetown School of Medicine alum Mary Lynch. Her co-founder, Debra Harrison, died from a combination of untreated diabetes and stupidity while receiving consegrity treatments from Lynch. According to Harrison’s family members, Lynch blamed the death not on diabetes but on the family members’ “negative energy.” Despite their pleas, Harrison never sought medical care.

The first consegrity victim was Harrison’s mother, who died a few months before her daughter. The elder Harrison used consegrity to treat extreme body aches and jaundice. The daughter attributed the ailments to unspecified cellular toxins that would disappear once detoxification was complete.

By the time the mother went to the hospital, she had developed an inoperable, grapefruit-sized tumor. In perhaps the all-time ad hoc rationalization, her daughter claimed the diagnosis didn’t reveal the cancer, but caused it. The negative thoughts, she surmised, caused consegrity’s efficiency to collapse, giving birth to the tumor. Lynch died in 2012, presumably from a consegrity overdose.

The field’s literature finds the usual batch of undefined, unprovable, unfalsifiable New Age buzzwords: Awareness, balance, disruption, dynamics, interactive energy fields, paradigm, quantum something or other, and state shifting. Some originality is shown by addressing a “cell’s spiritual trauma,” and we have an Einstein reference for good measure.

The crucial difference between this treatment and the likes of Reiki and crystal healing is that consegrity, used as instructed, will kill you. Many other New Age healing methods promise only to restore one’s harmony or balance an energy field. Consegrity practitioners, however, assure patients they will be cured of ADHD, allergies, asthma, back pain, cancer, chronic fatigue, depression, eating disorders, fibromyalgia, headaches, heart disease, HIV, and learning disabilities. They also note it can improve athletic performance and work on animals. The co-founder also claimed it cured diabetes, though she was disinclined to prove this on herself. It is a dead giveaway of pseudomedicine to make claims this wide-ranging. It can cure everything except gullibility.

Lynch’s defunct website read, “We can bring order to chaos, unity to our mind, body, and spirit, and awaken to a planet reborn through remembering who we really are.” In this case, what you are is dead for taking this as your medical advice.

As to how it works, the description is so drenched in undefined gobbledygook, it’s hard to figure out. But it seems to center on cleaning up negative energy around one’s cells. Or rather, paying someone who has plunked down $2,000 for consegrity training to do it for you. The healer detects negative energy inside the patient’s cells, removes it and transmits it to positive energy, then reenters it into the patient. No explanation is given for how this works, nor has any study been done on its efficacy.

Another pseudomedicine sign is the proponents’ insistence that this is a settled science. One merely needs to clean up an energy field and everything is fixed for good.

For consegrity, the death of both co-founders and one of their mothers proved a huge blow, but not a fatal one. A few practitioners are out there. One site wrote of the technique: “There is no difference in results between a distance session and a local session. The client’s inherent wisdom is guiding the practitioner throughout the session.” So you don’t need to show up and the attendant needn’t do anything. That’ll be $500, please.

Deeper into the site, we learn, “Consegrity can enhance positive emotions and can dissipate negative emotions. Emotional healing through consegrity will improve every facet or your health.” Yep, it’s as simple as mind over matter and melanoma.

Still later, we see that, “The patient may need more sessions to address the source.” Rather odd for someone who has received a panacea. Going on, it reads, “Patience is important to allow for full healing, as you’re addressing cause. It’s a long-term solution.” How long term depends on how much time goes by before you die from an untreated disease.

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“Power plants” (Plant Kingdom sentience)

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Grover Cleveland Backster Jr. sported a most excellent moniker and had an even more distinctive claim: That plants experience emotions and read minds.

He was an interrogation specialist with the CIA and, perhaps bored with hooking up prospective agents and communist sympathizers, decided to attach a polygraph to a plant. He did this in his science laboratory, also known as his living room.

First, Backster watered the plant to see if the polygraph indicated the plant was happy. To his surprise, it instead suggested (to him) that the plant’s response was similar to a person when asked an unpleasant question. He never considered that a fern isn’t a nervous suspect. He just jumped to the conclusion that the plant was trying to communicate to him. Plants react to physical and chemical stimuli, but since they lack nerves or sensory organs, they would seem incapable of sentience.

To understate the case, Backster failed to use proper controls in his study. The purported fluxes he recorded were probably due to a change in humidity since the readings were down right after a watering. Other possible causes were static electricity or movement in the room.

Still, pumped by his seeming discovery, Backster spent 14 minutes trying to get more reaction from the plant by torturing it in various ways. Instead of saying “This is stupid” and giving up, our intrepid plant doctor took this stagnation as a sign of it being bored. He may be onto something. Could you imagine spending all day as a scented geranium?

After getting no reaction, he went to the extreme with his CIA enhanced plant interrogation technique. He decided to burn one of its leaves. I came up with some crazy ideas myself while burning a leaf in my 20s, but never went this far. When he chose this course of action, Backster reported that this caused the polygraph needle to sway mightily. He took this as proof the plant was reading his mind. No other cause was considered, which would become a hallmark of Backster’s method. On the spot, he invented the field of plant psychology.

Backster’s experiments contained several scientifically fatal errors. He failed to explain precisely what he was testing and how he would do so. He used a polygraph, which measures a person’s blood pressure and heartbeat, not a plant’s purported emotions. He committed the logical fallacy of Begging the Question in assuming plants have the ability to feel and think.

To conduct the test properly, he should have had another party think or do something around the plant, then have a third person record the data. This should have been done at least 10 times, with independent parties examining the results and drawing their conclusions.

Despite the shoddy research and lack of independent verification, some persons embrace the notion. His ideas are championed by dowsers, energy healers, remote viewers, telepathic communicators, and a few Wiccans. They feel plants telepathically experience love and fear, store energy like batteries, and do something the proponents call “transducing bioenergetic fields.” These wide ranging, poorly defined claims reek of pseudoscience.

One of Backster’s fans asked him if he could influence chemical and metals as well. So he went to Times Square and tried it for a couple of weeks, apparently without success. This approach to experiment speaks to scientific ignorance. A reputable scientist would never respond to this speculation or employ such a research method.

Controlled experiments repeatedly failed replicate Backster’s findings, and he was criticized for failing to use the Scientific Method. His most public repudiation came during the 141st annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science, where a panel of biologists found his claims unsupportable.

Botanist Arthur Galston told journalists, “We know plants don’t have nervous systems. But they do have little electrical currents flowing through them and are subject to outside manipulation.” Backster Backer Jim Cranford could manage only an ad hominem response: “Backster’s not a scientist and those guys don’t like to admit that anyone else knows anything. That’s pride and arrogance at its worst.” Curiously, neither Cranford nor Backster let us know what the plants were thinking about all this.

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“Washer and liar” (Laundry balls)

LAUNDRY2When looking into a claim critically, I first ascertain if a product or method has gone through a double blind test. It’s a good measuring stick, but it would be more interesting if I could carry out such a test myself.

To my good fortune, I have the apparatus to conduct one at home: My washer and dryer. They will be the testing ground for laundry balls, which supposedly make detergent superfluous and last 2,500 washes.

The clothes will be laundered in one of three ways: With detergent, with the laundry ball, and with hot water alone. As to the double blind element, the clothes won’t know in which manner they are being tested and my wife won’t know which pile of clothes is which when I ask her which is cleanest. For that matter, she doesn’t even know she’s been drafted for this assignment.

For the first portion of the test, I dressed my four oldest children and myself in identical jeans and T-Shirts and commenced to sliding, slipping, and sluicing in the backyard. This proved a painful experiment for my 46-year-old bones and muscles, but I have always resolved to donate my body to science.

We trudged back in, exhausted, sweating, and most importantly, filthy. While doing laundry, we kept with the science theme and I familiarized my 7-year-old with the Periodic Table. He was handicapped by being 7 and having me as his chemistry professor. But he memorized the symbols and numbers for hydrogen and helium, so at this rate we’re eight weeks away from success. We also got a lesson in acoustics when our conscripted scientist walked in. We discerned how far yelps of outrage will bounce back when hitting drywall. We were also tutored on optics, learning a glare can be laser-like without burning a hole through you.

A couple of hours later, we took our experiment results to the tester for product evaluation, or as she called it, wasting her time. Normally, I’d want at least one other person as a control, but it’s best to not question her conclusions. She picked the ones washed with detergent as best by far. She was mostly inconclusive on the other two. Some clothes washed in hot water alone seemed a little better than the ones washed with the laundry ball, and vice versa.

It turns out I got little for my activated water, manipulated electric field, and quantum mechanics. Maybe the instructions meant the same load needed to be laundered 2,500 times. I looked on the box to more closely examine some of the other claims. One noted that the laundry balls “emit far infrared waves.” This is true, since all materials emit far infrared waves. By this logic, the clothes should have laundered themselves. There was also a claim that the balls contain agents that neutralize chlorine. Chlorine is an antibacterial agent, so neutralizing it in washing water would seem counterproductive. Maybe that explains the dark green and brown splotches left behind. Another boast noted that the balls manipulate electric fields to form crystals, and these crystals retain their form in boiling liquids. It never explicates why this form matters or why this would make socks and pants cleaner.

I looked into the claims made by other laundry ball makers for comparison. Besides making these balls, the companies also seem to manufacture their abilities. Even though the products are similar and have the same goal, there exists little agreement on how they work. This is a strong indication they don’t work at all. There are many antacids and, while they have varying benefits and efficiency, there would be general consensus on why they were effective.

Some laundry ball users report a seeming increase in efficiency on certain types of stains, but this is the result of hot water washing as opposed to cold. Moreover, the mechanical action of the laundry balls could help clean a few types of stains, but you’d get the same result if you tossed in a golf ball, plus you’d increase the golf ball’s aerodynamics.

I learned in my research that silver has antibacterial properties. For a follow up, I could test the results of laundering with items from our jewelry box. But I’m in enough trouble with the evaluator as it is.

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“Purportual Motion” (Perpetual motion machines)

PERPETUL MOTIONI was fishing for a new topic and, at first, herbal medicine came to mind. But after looking over the evidence, it was clear that garlic, ginseng, and St. John’s-wort have proven benefits. There are other herbal remedies whose proponents claim abilities in excess of what has been shown, and there is a danger of overdosing. But the idea itself is not inherently pseudomedical. So I moved onto cryonics, but found this an honest field. Proponents acknowledge huge obstacles and admit the cryonics rests on a foundation of the barely theoretical and highly implausible. It’s pretty much a mesh of a Pascal’s Wager variant and H.P. Lovecraft. Cryonic businesses promise customers a frozen cadaver and they deliver.

I prefer to aim at full blown hogwash, so I kept searching until my scope landed on perpetual motion machines. In the skeptic movement, one’s ears are tuned to detect nonsense. Alarm bells go off when hearing terms like harmonic convergence and toxin cleanser. In the perpetual motion field, however, the device itself is the deceptive term.

Such a machine would be capable of running forever with no outside intervention or energy input. This clashes with the first two laws of thermodynamics. The first law states the amount of energy is constant and can be neither created nor destroyed. The second law states the amount of energy put into a system will always be more than the amount of energy that system puts out. So any machine will have inefficiency, even if it’s just friction or the load of the machine. A machine could never manage 100 percent efficiency, much less the 101+ percent that the more brazen proponents claim.

Historially, the most common types of perpetual motion machines are overbalanced wheels. This wheel is continually reinvented and continually failing. These wheels operate on angular momentum and a well-designed one will run for quite a while. But friction will eventually stop it. At some point, there will be insufficient force from the falling of one ball to raise the wheel to a point where the next ball overbalances.

If one is a good enough amateur engineer and magician, a perpetual motion machine charade can last long enough to keep an audience focused. But if it really worked, the only audience you’d be demonstrating for is the one watching you accept your Nobel Prize.

Purported machines are based on either deception or a misunderstanding of physics. In the former, demonstrators use a hidden source for additional energy, and bandy about terms like magnetic polarization, gravitational work, and zero-point energy to impress and confuse the scientifically illiterate.

Many perpetual motion machines create the illusion of motion by exploiting coefficients of friction. If pulling a tablecloth slowly, objects on the table go with it. But if a person yanks the cloth quickly and skillfully, the objects remain on the table since the friction coefficient drops. This principle has industrial applications, such as when a conveyor vibrates asymmetrically, going quickly one way and more slowly the opposite direction. People invent machines similar to this and think they’ve demonstrated perpetual motion. Failed claimants of the past 15 years include Yuri Potapov, Genesis World Energy, and Steorn Ltd. Steorn cancelled a demonstration when the device met with “technical difficulties,” a seeming impossibility for a perpetual motion machine.

Moving from the deceived to the fraudulent, Dennis Lee is one of the field’s more enduring names. However, the only thing he has in perpetual motion are the props in his shell game. Lee has been making claims about his ability to deliver free energy for the past quarter of a century without ever demonstrating this.

Eric Krieg of the Center for Scientific Inquiry attended Lee’s seminar to examine his tactics. Rather than science, Lee hit on the political, claiming victimhood from an international, decades-long conspiracy to keep his machines from the public. He had promised a demonstration, but rescinded that because he said government agents had infiltrated the audience to arrest him if he proceeded. He kept another promise, the one affording attendees the chance to pay $25,000 to become dealers of this unseen wonder machine. Lee has multiple fraud convictions, which he cites as proof of the conspiracy.

Then we have Tom Bearden, who holds that unlimited free energy can be extracted from the vacuum of space-time. He demonstrates a trio of pseudoscience hallmarks by calling himself a conspiracy victim, a scorned genius, and by being forever on the verge of discovery without making one. He also claims an associate was killed by a poison ice dart and warns of a ruse whereby government agents take out inconvenient inventors by rear-ending their vehicle, transporting them in an adjacent ambulance, and injecting them with a pernicious fluid. This must be working since all perpetual motion machines have been repressed.