Federal Smackdowns “They” Don’t Want You to Know About

Professional douchebag Kevin Trudeau has once again been slapped by the FTC for violating the terms of a previous conviction, which barred him from making any false claims in the selling of his books. Trudeau has made a living selling useless garbage for many years now. In 1998, he was charged with making false claims in infomercials for products that promised to help people lose weight, cure their addictions, and develop a photographic memory. In 2003, he violated the terms of his previous conviction by selling a nonsense product he claimed could cure cancer. Although the FTC had banned him from selling pseudo-medicinal products and fined him millions of dollars, they couldn’t stop him from selling books under the First Amendment. Which is why for the past few years, he’s been making his living publishing useless tomes like Natural Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About and The Weight Loss Cure They Don’t Want You to Know About and Kevin Trudeau’s Convictions He Doesn’t Want You to Know About. Okay, maybe not that last one. The first book simply directed readers to a subscription-based website that allowed them to buy “natural” supplements from outside sources. But it’s the weight loss book that’s landed Trudeau in trouble again. The court found that the claims made in Trudeau’s latest infomercials simply aren’t supported in his book. So, he’s banned from producing any more infomercials for three years, and he’s been fined another $5 million. The only problem is that he’s made much more than that in profit, so this is really just a slap on the wrist. The man should be in jail, but he’s likely to pop back up again in another three years. In the meantime, you might want to print out the FTC’s press release on the new conviction and slip them into any copies of Trudeau’s books you find cluttering up your local health food store. It’s available here.

Mythbusters on YouTube

If you’re reading this site, you probably like Mythbusters. Or your Google search for “amateur MILF” brought you to the wrong place. Even still, you may like Mythbusters, so you’ll be interested to know that Adam and Jamie will be appearing on the first ever YouTube Live, a streaming variety show premiering Saturday, November 22 in San Francisco and on (you guessed it) YouTube. Walrus ‘Stache and Sugar Rush (as they’re known on the manga circuit) were asked to perform because of the tremendous popularity of their video clips on YouTube and around the Internet. Here’s hoping they use a giant paintball gun to reproduce the Sistine Chapel. The boys will be joined by “rapper” Soulja Boy (who will crank something), “singer” Katy Perry (who will kiss something), and “hologram” Will.i.am (who will punctuate something). More details here. And enjoy one of my favorite Mythbusters clips right now:

God vs. Education

The Bishop of Lancaster, Patrick O’Donoghue, was charged by the Vatican with finding out why mass attendance has been steadily declining in recent years. His conclusion? It’s all that book learnin’. According to O’Donoghue, the rise of mass education has led to hedonistic, selfish, and egocentric behavior. Not to mention flagrant skepticism about unscientific and otherwise ludicrous beliefs. Without bothering to go into detail about how this makes any sense, O’Donoghue says that while mass education has led to scientific discovery and the enrichment of daily life, it also has a dark side due, for some reason, to original sin. This is probably a reference to the fact that the first sin committed by humanity in the Biblical creation story is eating from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. But even the Bible doesn’t explain why knowledge is necessarily a bad thing. Still, there’s really no arguing the bishop’s point. After all, the Catholic Church’s heyday was in the dark ages, when people were too busy working and/or dying to bother with learning about things like evolutionary biology. But he might want to do a better job dancing around the implication that religious devotion is directly proportional to basic ignorance. More details here.

Laughs of the Titans

A newly discovered ancient Greek joke book called Philogelos: The Laugh Addict contains a premise eerily similar to Monty Python’s famous parrot sketch. But while the Pythons found humor in John Cleese returning a parrot to a pet shop because it was sold as a corpse nailed to its perch, the ancient comedy duo of Hierocles and Philagrius created a scene wherein a man returns a dead slave to the slave trader. Ah, slavery. Is there anything about it that isn’t funny? It’s sort of amazing how similar these old jokes are to the kind we tell today, only with a horrible twist of contemporary Greek society. Take the one about the dunce sent to fetch two fifteen-year-old slaves. “No problem,” he says. “If I don’t find two fifteen-year-olds, I’ll get one thirty-year-old.” Hilarious. Unfortunately, not all the jokes in The Laugh Addict are as easily relatable these days. There are several sexy zingers about lettuce, for example, which only make sense when you consider the ancient Greeks thought lettuce was an aphrodisiac. Actually, that still doesn’t make any sense. More details here.

Albino Murder

A six-year-old albino girl in Burundi has been found dead with her head and limbs cut off in the region’s sixth such murder since September. There’s a thriving black market for albino body parts in neighboring Tanzania, where local witch doctors use them to make magic potions. Yes, this is 2008. Consequently, several albinos and their families have been moving into urban centers where they might be a little safer. This little girl and her parents were one of those families, but their house was still broken into by armed guards who tied up the adults and shot the girl in the head before dismembering her. Crazy superstitions are all fun and games when you’re talking about tourist trap voodoo dolls and souvenir Vatican rosaries, but these murders should serve as a reminder of where irrational thinking can lead. Not to sound vindictive, but I hope we start hearing reports of several Tanzanians choking to death on magic potions. Actually, I meant to sound a little vindictive. More details here.

Hawaii County Council: Idiots

The Hawaii County Council has overridden the veto of Big Island mayor Harry Kim to approve a ban on genetically modified coffee and taro. While I’m sure some of the motivation for this ban comes from the standard paranoid idiocy of all anti-GM measures (misunderstanding of how genetics work, corporate conspiracy theories, gross callousness toward the world’s poor), a large part of the support for this ban is even dumber. Native Hawaiian myth says that humans sprang forth from the roots of the taro plant, so we shouldn’t mess with the plant’s genes. The biologists and rational thinkers who are against the ban pointed out that the plant has a much stronger chance of permanent survival if it’s engineered to be resistant to pests and disease, but these kinds of reasonable arguments tend to fall on deaf ears. Of course, this kind of legislation will only up the cool factor of GM crops in Hawaii. Because when you outlaw genetically modified coffee and taro, only outlaws will have genetically modified coffee and taro. More details here.

The Sad Box

People who claim to be generally unhappy watch more TV than those who claim to be generally happy. That’s according to a survey of 30,000 American adults conducted between 1975 and 2006. Of course, because this is a survey and not a scientific study, the conclusions are up in the air. For one thing, this doesn’t indicate whether people watch more TV because they’re unhappy or if watching more TV makes them unhappy. I know every time Bravo announces another Real Housewives show I die a little inside, but that doesn’t stop me from sitting on the couch for hours at a time. One hypothesis is that unhappy people can tend to have social phobias that lead to more solitary TV watching. Or that addiction to TV can push out more fulfilling activities like sex, drinking heavily, sex, and getting drunk. And there’s always the very real possibility that people lie about being happy. Just because you’re smiling, it doesn’t mean you’re not dead inside. See: John McCain’s debate performances. More details here.