Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Saturday, August 12, 2023

Magnetic nonsense

Loony people are hardly a new invention.  Any claims that "people are crazier now than they used to be" generally springs from one of two things, the first of which is a bad memory.

The other, though, is more interesting, as well as more troubling.  In the past, when Great-Aunt Ethel started babbling in public about being visited at night by a sexy alien who wanted to take her up to his spaceship and bring her back to Zeta Reticuli to be his immortal love slave, we had the option of saying, "That's wonderful, auntie, but let's go inside and get you a nice cup of tea and watch The Beverly Hillbillies, okay?  Wouldn't that be fun?"

Now, the Great-Aunt Ethels of the world have computers with internet access, where they can connect with all the other Great-Aunt Ethels.  And influence people who are already on the borderline, so as to create the next generation of Ethels.  And because a lot of social media sites now allow you to monetize your content, they're able to make tons of money off it, extending their reach even further.

We're in a world where the Ethels have just as great a capacity for being heard as the scientists do.

And this brings us to Sherri Tenpenny.

Tenpenny is an anti-vaxx activist who was identified by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as one of the "Disinformation Dozen" -- the twelve people who, put together, are responsible for 65% of the vaccine misinformation out there online.  (Other shining lights on this list are Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Christiane Northrup.)  Tenpenny, though, brings things to a whole different level, way beyond the usual "vaccines cause autism" nonsense.  Here's one example:
The stated goal is to depopulate the planet and the ones that are left, either make them chronically sick or turn them into transhumanist cyborgs that can be manipulated externally by 5G, by magnets, by all sorts of things.  I got dragged through the mud by the mainstream media when I said that in May of last year in front of the House Committee in Columbus, [Ohio].  Well, guess what?  It’s all true.

The whole issue of quantum entanglement and what the shots do in terms of the frequencies and the electronic frequencies that come inside of your body and hook you up to the "Internet of Things," the quantum entanglement that happens immediately after you’re injected.  You get hooked up to what they’re trying to develop.  It’s called the hive mind, and they want all of us there as a node and as an electronic avatar that is an exact replica of us except it’s an electronic replica, it’s not our God-given body that we were born with.  And all of that will be running through the metaverse that they’re talking about.  All of these things are real...  All of them.  And it’s happening right now.  It’s not some science fiction thing happening out in the future; it’s happening right now in real time.
Sure it is, Great-Aunt Sherri.  Here, have a nice cup of tea.

The trouble is, Tenpenny and others like her are getting rich off this stuff.  Some social media sites -- notably Facebook and YouTube -- have taken steps to stop her from spreading her insane lies, but even so, her message is still getting out there.  Business management information provider Dun & Bradstreet reported that her clinic, the Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center, has an average annual sales total of a bit over four million dollars.

And that's despite the fact that the State Medical Board of Ohio recently revoked her medical license.

What gets me is that nothing she says, however ridiculous, seems to diminish her popularity.  In June of 2021 she stated that she had "spent over ten thousand hours studying the origins and effects of COVID since the pandemic began," despite the fact that at that point only eleven thousand hours had passed since the pandemic was declared.  She also claimed that the vaccine turns you into a human magnet:
I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetized.  They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks…  There have been people who have long suspected there’s an interface, yet to be defined, an interface between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.

Well, I can state definitively that based upon an experiment I just ran with my car keys, this is incorrect. 

And this is considering that I've now had four COVID shots (the original two plus two boosters), and have been vaccinated against all the usual childhood diseases, as well as typhoid, yellow fever, shingles, hepatitis A and B, and a yearly flu shot since (if memory serves) 1995.  Despite all this, as the above highly scientific photograph shows, I am not even a tiny bit magnetic.

I have also not been turned into an electronic avatar or a transhumanist cyborg, which I honestly feel a little disappointed about, because that sounds badass.

Given the fact of the connectivity we have now for information of all sorts, we no longer have the option of hustling Sherri Tenpenny back into the house and getting her settled in the recliner in front of The Beverly Hillbillies.  The best thing we can do is to shine as bright a light as possible on her nonsense.  We can't let her go unchallenged, especially on such subjects as vaccination, where peoples' health and lives are at risk.

It'd be one thing if she was talking about sexy aliens from Zeta Reticuli.  She's not.  Her rhetoric is, literally, killing people.

We're not going to be able to stop her from shouting.  The important thing is that the sane people, the ones who actually know what they're talking about shout back -- louder.

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