Wi-Fi Outcry

A group of Ontario parents is demanding their local school district shut off all its wireless networks and go back to running cables to every classroom, citing a mountain of anecdotal evidence that the invisible signals are making their kids sick. It’s a cut and dry case, really. When these kids are at school, they suffer from headaches, dizziness, racing hearts, nausea, memory loss, concentration problems, rashes, restlessness, night sweats, and insomnia. On the weekends, all these issues go away. “I’m not saying it’s because of the Wi-Fi, because we don’t know yet,” said one concerned parent. “But I’ve pretty much eliminated every other possible source.” In other words, he’s saying it’s the Wi-Fi. Which makes perfect sense, because there’s no other opportunity for these children to be exposed to the kind of dangerous radio waves emitted by wireless network transmitters. Other than carrying cell phones, of course. Or walking around outside. Or going inside. Anyway, the point is this: there’s no other reason why children would feel worse in school than at home playing their video games and their Twitters. More details here.

Clearing the Air

A gentleman living in Santa Fe, New Mexico thought he'd found refuge from his electromagnetic radiation allergy when he moved into an isolated house at the end of a narrow street. But there were a few problems with his plan; the biggest of which is probably the fact that electromagnetism allergies don't exist. Also, you can't escape EM signals at the end of a deserted road, because they're literally flying through all of our heads at all times in the form of radio waves. Plus, a friend of his rented a house adjacent to his property, and she had the unmitigated gall to use a wireless router. Now, he's suing his friend for $530,000 in damages and an injunction to force her to shut off her Wi-Fi network. He says her internet use has caused him to experience nausea, vertigo, body aches, dizziness, and even a heart arrhythmia. And he has a doctor who backs up his allergy claims. Of course, this doctor specializes in "environmental medicine," which is like regular medicine in almost every way other than being based on reality. But I think this man's biggest mistake is in publicly discussing his special weakness. Now all of his nemeses know that they can render him helpless simply by pointing at him with an iPhone. More details here.

Ray Pulls an O.J. (Update)

UPDATE

Hey, this asshole's now been charged with manslaughter! Neat! More details here.

ORIGINAL STORY

You may have heard that two people recently died in a sweat lodge operated by new age bullshitter James Arthur Ray, author of the bestselling "Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want". Ray's book and teachings have been featured on the "Oprah Winfrey Show", "Larry King Live", and in "The Secret". Like "The Secret", Ray claims in "Harmonic Wealth" that you can receive fame and fortune just by wishing hard enough. It's really that simple. Which seems especially odd considering Ray's fame and fortune has come from writing and selling books and charging up to $10,000 a pop for spiritual retreats. It was at one of these retreats outside of Sedona, Arizona where Ray crowded over fifty people who had just come off a long fast into a plastic-covered lodge, jacked up the heat, and killed two people. Nineteen others were sent to the hospital for burns, dehydration, breathing problems, and kidney failure. The police are looking into whether Ray and his company can be prosecuted for criminal negligence, but Ray says he's not sure he's to blame. He's so not sure, in fact, that he's hired his own independent investigators to look into the deaths. No word on whether these are the same investigators hired by O.J. Simpson to find his wife's real killers. And, curiously, no word yet from Oprah, who used her massive media presence (not a fat joke) to push Ray's nonsense on America. She's probably too busy wishing this never happened. James Arthur Ray, that miserable piece of shit, is probably doing the same. I'll let you know if it works. More details here.

DiePhone

New Mexico's Arthur Firstenberg is a very sensitive man. He believes many people, including himself, are susceptible to all sorts of medical problems due to radio waves floating through the air. He claims to be allergic to wi-fi, digital TV signals, and now, iPhones. In particular, his neighbor's iPhone, which he says has forced him from his home with its deadly emissions. Not content to just lock himself in a Faraday cage and live out the rest of his life in a slowly rising pool of his own filth, he's suing his neighbor to the tune of $530,000. Firstenberg's self-proclaimed radio hypersensitivity symptoms include nausea, vertigo, mud butt, tinnitus, headaches, cramps, joint pain, insomnia, partial blindness, muscle spasms. But most importantly, he's got the blues. Probably because there's nowhere he can hide from the radio signals flying through his head at any given moment. There's nowhere any of us can hide. Which makes it all the more suspicious that the last century or so hasn't been lousy with physically handicapped hypersensitives like Firstenberg. Unless... Could he be the new phase of human evolution? If so, he has to be the shittiest X-Man ever. Well, except for Cannonball. Or possibly Dazzler. Actually, Longshot was pretty lame. Anyway, the point is, Arthur Firstenberg would make a terrible superhero. More details here. (And thanks to Brad for the link.)

Ray Pulls an O.J.

You may have heard that two people recently died in a sweat lodge operated by new age bullshitter James Arthur Ray, author of the bestselling "Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want". Ray's book and teachings have been featured on the "Oprah Winfrey Show", "Larry King Live", and in "The Secret". Like "The Secret", Ray claims in "Harmonic Wealth" that you can receive fame and fortune just by wishing hard enough. It's really that simple. Which seems especially odd considering Ray's fame and fortune has come from writing and selling books and charging up to $10,000 a pop for spiritual retreats. It was at one of these retreats outside of Sedona, Arizona where Ray crowded over fifty people who had just come off a long fast into a plastic-covered lodge, jacked up the heat, and killed two people. Nineteen others were sent to the hospital for burns, dehydration, breathing problems, and kidney failure. The police are looking into whether Ray and his company can be prosecuted for criminal negligence, but Ray says he's not sure he's to blame. He's so not sure, in fact, that he's hired his own independent investigators to look into the deaths. No word on whether these are the same investigators hired by O.J. Simpson to find his wife's real killers. And, curiously, no word yet from Oprah, who used her massive media presence (not a fat joke) to push Ray's nonsense on America. She's probably too busy wishing this never happened. James Arthur Ray, that miserable piece of shit, is probably doing the same. I'll let you know if it works. More details here.

Hypnocat

This may come as a shock, but certification doesn't always mean anything when it comes to quacks and charlatans. Just because you're a board certified chiropractor, it doesn't mean subluxations exist. And just because I'm a board certified sexologist, it doesn't mean I know how the pee-pee fits in the hoo-ha. But just to test the lax standards of your average nonsense-approval board, Chris Jackson, one of the host of the BBC's "Inside Out" sought certification as an honest-to-goodness hypnotherapist from three different approval bodies. For his cat George. And without so much as sending a UFO abductee to receive George's hypnosis treatments, the furry feline was granted hypnotherapy certification by the British Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming, the United Fellowship of Hypnotherapists, and the Professional Hypnotherapy Practitioner Association. I suppose congratulations are in order for George, though I'm pretty sure I could hypnotize him with a feather tied to a rubber string. That's called turning the tables. More details here.

Woody's Spots

Woody Harrelson says switching to a vegan diet cleared up his acne better than anything like personal hygeine or modern medicine ever could. His theory is this: ...just kidding. He doesn't have a theory. See, Woody isn't a medical doctor. He's an actor with a penchant for playing the types of characters who might join Matthew McConaughey in a shirtless steel drum solo. But you can't argue the fact that Harrelson doesn't have beautiful, flawless skin. I wonder, though, how many people out there have beautiful, flawless skin and also occasionally nosh on a burger. Anne Hathaway, for example? Oh, what a porcelain wonder. More details here.

Psychic on the Lam

A self-proclaimed psychic (is there any other kind?) going by the name Senora Monica claimed she could read your tarot cards or palms, interpret your dreams, reunite you with your lost love, cure your problems in the sack, cure your nervousness, help you find a job, and treat you for drug and alcohol addiction. All with the power of her MIND! And that's not all. She also claimed to perform spells, counter spells, and love spells. This woman's so useful, you might as well call her Slapchop. But some people who went to Senora Monica for tarot readings were also dupes into giving her their money so that she might "cleanse" it in exchange for a small fee. What they didn't realize that the small fee was actually all of their money. And she didn't so much "cleanse" it as "run off with it". Now police are on the hunt for her. If you have any information about Senora Monica's whereabouts, please call Lakewood police at 253-830-5000. And if you're ever tempted to hand over some cash so it can be psychically cleansed, please slap yourself in the mouth. More details here.

Telling Teens a Secret (Lie)

You're all familiar with The Secret, right? It's a multimedia phenomenon perpetrated by Rhonda Byrne and spread through the bullshit megaphone that is Oprah Winfrey's television empire. Through a bestselling book and impulse buy DVD, Byrne convinced millions of people with little to no critical thinking skills that they could receive whatever they wanted simply by wishing for it. This is a slight variation on the age-old nonsense of "positive thinking". Oprah herself claimed to use The Secret to achieve all of her success. After all, she wanted to be rich and famous, and that's exactly what she is. The only trouble is that every person on the planet who is rich and famous started by wanting to be rich and famous. We all want to be rich and famous! Those of us who aren't just happen to be shit out of luck. But enough good things happen to us that it's easy to fool ourselves into thinking they happened because we wanted them to. Unless you're clinically depressed, you're always thinking positively. Or at least hoping for the best. But since the The Secret gravy train seems to be rolling to a stop, Byrne and her partner in bullshit Paul Harrington have decided to bring their nonsense to a younger generation. You know, the sexters. Which is why they're releasing The Secret to Teen Power. It's sort of like Chicken Soup for the Teenager's Soul, only it's even more worthless and degrading to the intelligence of our nation's youth. A youth, by the way, that has an obscene amount of disposable income and a greedy desire to have absolutely everything. This may be the perfect audience, actually. More details here.

Cleanse Your Inner Paltrow

Not all of us can be as wonderfully fit and vivacious as professional “actor” and part-time lumber source Gwyneth Paltrow (pictured here in character as a gift-wrapped bag of twigs). Which is why she created GOOP.com, the website and newsletter wherein she tells you how to eat, play, live, and poop just like her. Seriously, she tells you about her poop. Her latest bit of wisdom? Promoting a “detox” diet developed by “detox specialist” Dr. Alejandro Junger. Why am I putting “detox” in scare quotes? Because it doesn’t really mean anything. Anything you shove down your throat (or up your ass, for that matter) to cleanse toxins from your system does nothing for your health since your body isn’t full of toxins. Like the word “energy”, people with no critical thinking skills use the word “toxin” to mean whatever they want without providing anything like evidence to show what it even is. Regardless, Paltrow just knows she’s full of toxins, so she recently tried out Dr. Junger’s suggested diet of one solid meal a day sandwiched by two liquid ones. Now she says she lost some weight and feels “pure”. I know it seems miraculous that a diet of very little actual food might lead to weight loss, but this is really just science. And what inspired Gwyneth to try this new diet out? According to her, it was guilt about the extra pounds she’d gained after a month-long “relax and enjoy life phase”. Good thing she learned to stop relaxing and enjoying life before it was too late. More details here.

Sexy Tarot

59-year-old Philadelphian Hector Ayala is currently on trial for sexually assaulting teenage girls who came to him for Tarot card readings. One of his victims testified in court that Ayala told her having sex with him would bring her good luck and help make her wishes come true. But since having sex with Ayala wasn't one of her wishes, it seems likely he was incorrect. This raises some important issues about what would otherwise seem like a harmless form of playful bullshit. The fact is that many people who seek out fortune tellers, Tarot readers, psychics, and other delusional frauds are in a very vulnerable emotional state and can be easily manipulated into doing something more harmful than giving up their cash. But putting aside the sex with minors thing, are Ayala's claims about the mystical powers of his mouth and cock really any more absurd than saying some colorful slips of card stock can tell a person's future? More details here.

It's-a Good to be a Sorcerer!

According to watchdog group Telefono Antiplagio, nearly 18% of Italians trust the advice of sorcerers. I didn't think sorcery was even a valid occupation since the end of the War of the Ring, but there you go. To be fair, the definition of "sorcerer" in this case includes your meat-and-potatoes atrologers and soothsayers in addition to people with beards and pointy hats and comprehensive knowledge of ancient elven languages. But really, that just makes this statistic even more depressing. So what are eleven million Italians paying sorcerers to help them with? Surprisingly, magic broom-related housework is nowhere on the list. 46% seek the advice of charlatans to mend their broken hearts. 25% want to know about health problems, 22% of consultations have to do with violence (not clear if this means paying to attack people with lightning spells, which would be amazing), and 7% are having trouble at work. I'd make fun, but it's not like medicine, therapy, or martial arts training can help any of these things, so who am I to judge? More details here.

The Dangers of Virginity

A Russian woman is now suffering in intensive care after complications from her sixth operation to reconstruct her hymen. For those following along at home, that's six more than the number of operations any woman should ever have to reconstruct her hymen. Why would anyone do such a thing? Well, it turns out her husband was upset to discover she wasn't a virgin before they were married. Instead of showing him just what she'd learned with a little practice in the sack and then telling the prick to fuck off for life, she decided to undergo plastic surgery to create a new hymen. Keep in mind that this doesn't make her a virgin again. It only makes her more likely to bleed the next time she has sex. But apparently that was enough for her husband, who loved the fake cherry popping so much that he demanded she reconstruct her hymen once a year for the next five years. Doctors warned her not to do it a sixth time (yes, it took them that long), but she went ahead anyway because she's a sad, sad person deserving of your pity. Here's hoping she gets well soon. And here's hoping her husband dies a prolonged and painful death drowning in a vat of his own blood. More details here.

Quack Attack

I don’t know much about Oprah’s resident doctor, Mehmet Oz, but the fact that he appears on her show can’t speak well for the efficacy of his recommendations. You’d think any doctor interested in real medicine wouldn’t associate himself with a woman hell-bent on making sure children remain unvaccinated and telling all of America about her colon cleanses. But Oprah loves Dr. Oz. She’s even giving him his own talk show. Which is why it should come as no surprise that unscrupulous (well, more unscrupulous) people are trying to piggyback on his shaky claims. Case in point: Dr. Oz’s endorsement of resveratrol, a plant-based chemical found in red wine, as an anti-aging elixir. Now, before you go drinking yourself into alcohol poisoning, you should know that it supposedly takes twenty-four bottles of wine per day to receive any noticeable effect from the resveratrol in them. You should also know that there’s far from any kind of medical consensus on whether the stuff is beneficial at all. Or, for that matter, whether it could be harmful. But that’s not stopping supplement companies from churning out resveratrol pills and marketing them as the anti-aging miracle drugs Dr. Oz seems to think they are. However, Dr. Oz isn’t personally endorsing these pills. The companies are simply appropriating his image and quotes in their advertising. And that makes Dr. Oz mad. No, not mad that his name is being used to push untested medications. Mad that he’s not seeing a dime of the profits. See, Dr. Oz loves him some profits, as evidenced by his association with RealAge.com, a website that tricks you into revealing your medical information by claiming to calculate your “real age”, then selling that information to drug companies so they can plaster you with targeted advertising. In short, Dr. Oz is a douche. But what do you expect from Oprah’s doctor? More details here.

Anti-GM Nonsense in Zimbabwe

The citizens of Zimbabwe don’t have a lot of rights under the dictatorial regime of psychopathic criminal Robert Mugabe, but at least they have a consumer protection agency in the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe. Only, the CCZ isn’t interested in protecting consumers so much as watching them starve. Like a lot of countries whose governments don’t understand simple science, Zimbabwe has banned the importation of genetically modified foods on the baseless grounds that they’re “unhealthy”. Unfortunately, Mugabe’s disastrous economic policies have forced most of the country’s home-grown food suppliers out of business, out of Zimbabwe, or out of their lives. So the government lifted its anti-GM policy in the case of GM corn imported from the U.S. Still, GM food is cheap and abundant, so many local stores have been buying it from South Africa and Brazil and stocking it on the sly. Now, the CCZ has swarmed in and closed many of these stores, leaving local citizens to starve while their health is being “protected”. According to the CCZ, many people have become sick after eating these GM foods. But there’s another important factor they seem to be overlooking. From their own spokesperson: “We have received a lot of reports of people, mainly children, getting sick after consuming the foods which in most cases will be expired.” Yes, there’s nothing in that statement that would seem to suggest these people are getting sick for any reason other than the fact that these foods were genetically modified. Nothing at all. More details here.

The Jenny McCarthy Song

So, some dude with the same name as me wrote a song all about Jenny McCarthy’s love affair with deadly, preventable viruses. And if that wasn’t enough nerve, he made a video for it and uploaded it to something called “The Official AmateurScientist.org YouTube Channel”. What a dick! Still, I have to admit the song’s pretty catchy.

Orgone Sabotage

Four people charged with attempting to sabotage a hydroelectric damn in Mozambique may not have had any ill intent after all. Instead, they're probably just idiots. One of the men, Carlos da Silva, and the wife of another say that the alleged saboteurs are all members of a movement called Orgonise Africa, and that they were attempting to imbue the water at the damn with "positive energy" by using a substance called orgonite. For those of you not up on your pseudoscience, all of this is based on the work of Dr. Wilhelm Reich, an early 20th century psychoanalyst who claimed to have discovered a previously unknown particle called orgone, which he said was the source of all positive forces in the universe. This was never proven, of course, and Reich's life ended in professional embarrassment, but that hasn't stopped gullible people from taking up his nonsense. The "orgonite" these men planned to drop in the water was actually a shard of artificial resin with aluminum filings inside. Because the local authorities just saw a few nuts trying to dump something in the water supply, the men were arrested as suspected terrorists. I can't argue that Africa couldn't use some positivity these days, but I'm not sure dropping tacky trinkets in their water is going to do the trick. More details here. And read my PinkRaygun.com article on Dr. Wilhelm Reich here.

Holocaust Deniers Want to Friend You

Anyone who's used Facebook knows it's a confusing place full of horrible human specimens constantly trying to "poke" one another and show off spring break bikini pictures. This isn't such a bad thing, really. Just annoying. What is bad, though, is the fact that many of these people have started Facebook groups and pages devoted to their common interest in denying the reality of the Holocaust. These people are dumb and not worth your or anyone else's attention. But many other Facebook users are so angry with them that they're lobbying Facebook to delete these pages. I'm all for freedom of speech, but Facebook is a private company, and they have every right to delete whatever they want from their servers. As an American, I can snap a photo of my dong and email it to a friend, but I can't insist that Facebook let me distribute it via their bandwidth. And while the Facebook brass are hemming and hawing over what kind of censorship is too much censorship, those who want the Holocaust denial groups shut down interestingly point out that the site has previously deleted groups devoted to the KKK and other "abusive" or "hateful" topics. Since Holocaust denial isn't based on anything like historical evidence, its foundation really is a wiggly pile of antisemitic bullshit. Oh, the decisions! Sure, Holocaust deniers are scum, but do they click ads? While the Facebook powers are researching this issue, I'll exploit the distraction by uploading a picture of my dong. More details here.

When Our Powers Combine…

As you’ve no doubt read somewhere else by now, Jenny McCarthy signed a production deal with Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions that, among other things, will most likely give her a TV show all her own. Yes, this means that even more people will fall under the dangerous and deadly spell of her anti-vaccination lies, paranoia, and ignorance. Those of you with a particularly morbid sensibility can keep track of McCarthy’s Sherman-esque march through the world’s public health at this invaluable website. And those of you particularly interested in futile efforts to bash some sense into Oprah’s increasingly inflated head might want to shoot a message of protest to Oprah.com. She probably won’t read your email herself, but if you believe in The Secret like she does, you might be able to wish her into hiring an intern to read it aloud. More horrible details here.

HuffPo Watch: Premonitions and Other Nonsense

It’s been a long time in coming, but the broad coalition of skeptical science blogs have finally declared war on the ridiculous bullshit littering The Huffington Post. In large part, this has to do with the website’s continual promotion of anti-vaccination propaganda by people like Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and others without critical thinking skills. And while all of that is definitely bad enough, there’s plenty of ludicrous woo-woo to go around. Case in point: the recent essay “Premonitions and Spirituality” by Dr. Larry Dossey. Unlike many other so-called “doctors” in the world of complimentary and alternative medicine (i.e. “medicine” that isn’t based on fact or evidence), Dr. Dossey really has medical training. Unfortunately, even actual M.D.s aren’t always immune to nonsense, and Dr. Dossey has seemingly turned his back on evidence-based reality in his wholesale embrace of precognition. In his essay, he gives the idea a spiritualist spin, claiming that premonitions aren’t only real, they’re also a method of tapping into the collective oneness of all living things. Like other new age quacks, Dr. Dossey tries to equate this “oneness” with the concept of God, even though to do so would be to abstract the historical concept of God to meaninglessness. (Just to use one example, the Judeo-Christian concept of God is in no way simply another word for some sort of quasi-philosophical universal force. He’s a real person who lives in another world and directly interferes with reality. Going even further back, He’s meant to be only the most powerful among a plethora of other gods. To draw a direct line between this concept and modern new age philosophy is theologically absurd.) It’s also worth noting that nowhere in the essay does Dr. Dossey ever give a shred of evidence to support the reality of precognition. Sure, there are a couple of anecdotal accounts of premonitions coming true, but there’s not a single documented case of a written or otherwise recorded prediction actually coming to pass at a later date. Dr. Dossey tells of a father who was sure that his newborn baby wouldn’t survive into adulthood and how that baby later died of SIDS. But this story doesn’t take into account the surely hundreds of thousands of parents sick to death with worry and paranoia about their children and who thankfully never experience any kind of similar tragedy. This is a pure example of confirmation bias and not proof of anything. But Dr. Dossey isn’t much interested in evidence. Judging by the post-script at the end of his essay, it seems he’s more interested in pimping his book, The Power of Premonitions. Another win for mindless credulity on The Huffington Post!