The empire of chutzpah

Allow me to make it clear right at the outset that in general, I disapprove of crime.

Most crimes are designated as such because they harm innocent people, either materially or physically.  This is something that a moral person would naturally deplore, and is why just about every culture out there, from empire down to the smallest village, has rules outlawing such behaviors.

Still, every once in a while, you run into a criminal who is just so damned clever that you have to admit some grudging admiration, if not an outright, "Why didn't I think of this first?"

But before I tell you about the criminal I'm thinking of, some background.

Perhaps you've heard of the phenomenon of "micronations."  These are small tracts of land, usually owned by cranks, rogues, misfits, wags, or malcontents, which have been declared "free and sovereign nations."  These declarations are universally ignored by the parent country, but this hasn't stopped the aforementioned cranks et al. from founding a good many of them.  (See the Wikipedia list, with descriptions, here.)  The commonality across the lot is that the leaders seem to trumpet fairly loudly but then make sure to fly under the radar when it comes to potential unpleasantness.  For example, the Principality of Hutt River (formerly a part of Australia) regularly has its taxes paid to Australia by its founder, Crown Prince Leonard I (formerly Leonard Casley), with the proviso that the tax check is to be considered "a gift from one world leader to another."

I find this whole phenomenon simultaneously charming and perplexing.  Perplexing because (with the exception of the handful who have clearly set the whole thing up as a joke), these people seem to take themselves awfully seriously.  Consider the Principality of Sealand, which consists solely of one abandoned military staging platform in the North Sea.  Take a look at Sealand's webpage (of course it has a webpage).  Reading through that, and the other assorted websites for micronations, leaves me thinking, "Are you people loonies?  Or what?"

The Principality of Sealand [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ryan Lackey, Sealand aerial view, CC BY 2.0]

On the other hand, it is somewhat charming, in a twisted, Duchy of Grand Fenwick sort of way.  The majority of the self-proclaimed nobility from micronations seem to be doing no real harm.  Let them issue their own currency, stamps, and legal documents.  Hey, if it gives them a hobby, then why not?  I don't think it's really any crazier than many other hobbies, such as collecting beer bottle caps or doing Civil War battle re-enactments.

And then, the depressive existentialist side of my personality has to pipe up and ask, "Why is this so different from what all countries are doing?"  Countries only exist because a group of people with adequate weaponry have decided to band together, declare that they have the right to draw a line on the ground across which None Shall Pass, and tell everyone what they can and can't do.  The lines are mostly arbitrary, and a good many of the laws seem to be as well.  (Imagine trying to explain to an alien why on the north side of an invisible line on the ground, LGBTQ+ people can marry, and on the south side, they can't.  I think all you'd get from the alien is mild puzzlement, up until the point where he decides that there really isn't any intelligent life on Earth, and vaporizes you with his laser pistol.)

So then, what's the difference between micronations and regular nations?  There's this thing called "recognition" -- that other countries recognize the existence of a legitimate nation.  So, because the United States is pretending not to notice the Republic of Molossia (a totalitarian dictatorship, formerly part of Nevada), it doesn't exist?  It's a little like a three-year-old covering his eyes and concluding that everyone he can't see is gone.

Of course, recognition isn't everything.  There are also diplomatic ties -- who are you willing to negotiate with?  But that gets a little dicey, too, because there are countries that clearly exist by most people's definition (e.g. Cuba) but with whom we have no diplomatic relations.  So, apparently you only exist if (1) we are willing to admit you exist, and (2) we both agree to send people to meet at a five-star hotel to drink hundred-dollar-a-glass wine and discuss how much our people want to cooperate, despite our differences and our occasional desire to annihilate each other?

Sorry for being cynical.  But so much of politics seems to me to be high-stakes game playing, not so very far advanced from the Inner Circles and Exclusive Clubs that middle schoolers dream up, with the only difference being that middle schoolers aren't capable of blowing each other up with tactical nuclear weapons.  Yet.

Anyhow, all this is background.  So without further ado, allow me to introduce you to Harsh Vardhan Jain, of Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Jain took the whole micronation thing and raised it to the level of performance art.  He created four of them, all on small tracts of uninhabited land in various places around the world, naming them West Arctica, Saborga, Poulvia, and Lodonia.  He then not only produced documents, postage stamps, and currency for each one, he had his modest, two story house in Ghaziabad registered as an embassy.  He digitally altered photographs to make it look like he was hobnobbing with high-ranking dignitaries, up to and including the president of India.  He created shell companies, supposedly headquartered in the micronations -- but requiring contact through the auspices of the embassy (because of course, correspondence addressed to "Saborga" or "Poulvia" would never arrive).  He acted not only as ambassador but as a broker, luring in investors.

And amazingly, people fell for it.  Lots of people.  Me, if I was investing overseas, I think I'd at least take the time to look up the country where the company was located, and find out if it actually exists.  As astonishing as it sounds, this did not happen.  Enough people invested in Jain's micronations that when he was arrested last week, police found four vehicles with fake diplomatic plates, twelve forged diplomatic passports (representing all four micronations), fake documents bearing the seal of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, two forged PAN cards (the Indian equivalent of a Social Security card), two fake press cards, thirty-four different rubber stamps with official logos and symbols from various countries and organizations, faked documents from all of his various shell companies, and 4,470,000 rupees in cash (a little over fifty thousand dollars US).

Jain is now being held in prison in Ghaziabad pending trial.

You might know the Yiddish word chutzpah.  Chutzpah is kind of synonymous with the English "audacity" or "gall" (as in "you have a lot of gall"), but with overtones of a cheerful, in-your-face brazenness.  Chutzpah, they say, is the guy who killed his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.

Harsh Vardhan Jain has a shitload of chutzpah.

I mean, he didn't do it by half-measures, did he?  And what astounds me is that he got away with it for years.  I'm not sure how the authorities figured it out -- the source I linked is unclear on the point -- but what's certain is that he had just about everyone hoodwinked, and was living the high life as ambassador of West Arctica for way longer than you'd think possible.

And I have to admit that I can't help but doff my hat to him.

It's entirely fair that he's being charged with business fraud, forgery, and various other crimes, but at least he was creative about it.  I'd take criminals like him over the current bunch of ignorant, racist, pedophile-enabling fascists we have running this country in a heartbeat.

At least Jain has panache, you know?

Anyhow, if you want to contact me with a response to this post, or send along some much-needed foreign aid, you can reach me at the imperial castle of the Great and Glorious Empire of Perry City.  You may address your correspondence to my personal secretary, Jethro LaFlooffe, who will get right on it once he's done taking a very important nap.  Unfortunately, he's as likely to eat your letter as to pass it along to me, so be forewarned.  Assuming it eventually reaches my desk, though, I'm happy to consider any official request for diplomatic recognition between my country and yours.

You know, as one sovereign nation to another.

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Repeat performance

There are at least two differences between me and your typical woo-woo.

One is that I at least try to apply the principles of scientific induction to what I see around me.  Insofar as I'm able, given the limitations I have as a non-specialist, I base what I believe, say, and do on evidence and logic.

The second is that when I do say something egregiously wrong, I apologize and back down.

As far as the second goes, there seems to be an unwritten rule in all different disciplines of woo-woodom that goes something like "death before recision."  Even confronted by incontrovertible evidence that they're in error -- or worse, that they've cheated and lied -- they never change their stance.  The most they do -- such as the hilarious snafu "Psychic Sally Morgan" got herself into when she used her mediumistic skills to get in contact with the spirit of someone who turned out to be fictional -- is to remain silent for a while and hope everyone forgets what happened.

But before long, they're back at it, undaunted, and once again raking in accolades and money from the gullible.

No one is a better example of this than the redoubtable Uri Geller.  Geller, you probably know, is the Israeli "psychic and telekinetic" who claimed to be able not only to "see with his mind," but to manipulate objects remotely.  Geller has been called a fraud by many, most notably James Randi, whose book The Truth about Uri Geller resulted in a fifteen million dollar lawsuit against Randi and his publisher.

Geller lost.

But nothing was quite as humiliating as his 1973 appearance on The Tonight Show, where he was asked to demonstrate his most common claim, which was that he could bend spoons with his mind.  The problem is, Carson himself was a trained stage magician, so he -- literally -- knew all the tricks.  He suspected that Geller was pre-preparing his props (specifically, bending the spoons repeatedly ahead of time so they had a weak point), and refused to let Geller handle them before the show.  As a result, Geller couldn't do... well, anything.  Even if I'm completely on Carson's side, watching the sequence is profoundly cringe-inducing.

Geller, obviously humiliated by his (very) public failure, stammered out a lame "I'm not feeling very strong tonight," along with telling Carson that the host's doubt was interfering with Geller's ability to concentrate.

Which is mighty convenient.

What's most remarkable is that after this, Geller didn't do what I'd have done, which is to join a Trappist monastery and spend the rest of my life in total silence.  After a (brief) period to regain his footing, he just went right on claiming he could perform telekinesis...

... and people kept right on believing him.

What is truly extraordinary, though, is that over fifty years later, he's still at it.  An article in The Jerusalem Post two days ago describes his claim that Greta Thunberg's ship Madleen, which is on the way to Gaza to provide relief for the embattled region, had mechanical problems because he remotely damaged their equipment.

"I stopped the navigation systems of the ship," Geller said.  "I will use my psychic powers to stop [her] ship...  Remote viewing is sending your mind through space and time.  If I attach my psychokinetic energy through remote viewing, I can locate exactly where the navigational instruments are on her boat...  It's like a laser, like the IDF's new weapon, the Iron Beam.  That's how powerful the mind is for some people...  I can navigate my mind into whatever I want to."

Convenient, too, that he said all this after the Madleen was already having equipment problems.

So Geller is very far from giving up, despite a fifty-year track record of chicanery.  What's even more appalling, though, is that The Jerusalem Post is giving this guy free publicity.  They're not exactly an unbiased source -- the fact that Thunberg's flotilla is trying to get support to Gaza didn't make her any friends in Israel, and the Israeli defense minister Israel Katz came right out and called her an antisemite -- but the fact that they're even printing something like this without appending, "... but of course, keep in mind that he's a proven fraud" is reprehensible.

I did find it heartening that in the comments section, while a number of people criticized Thunberg for trying to help out Gaza, more than one of them made remarks like, "What's Geller gonna do?  Bend all their spoons so Greta can't eat her corn flakes in the morning?"

Anyhow, this is a further demonstration that Uri Geller apparently agrees with the Thermians of the Klaatu Nebula on their motto "Never give up, never surrender."  I still don't quite understand how shame-faced silence hasn't kicked in for him, but at this point it probably never will.

I guess it's kind of like a liars' version of the Sunk-Cost Fallacy.  Once you've lied long enough, may as well keep going, and just make the lies bigger and bolder.  Explains not only Uri Geller, but Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth Kegbreath, and the Bullshit Barbie Twins Karoline Leavitt and Pam Bondi, doesn't it?

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The cost of fraud

My Aunt Florence, my mother's older sister, died of Alzheimer's disease.

Her children, especially my cousin Linda, took care of her as she slowly declined during the last fifteen years of her life.  She finally died in 2008 at the age of ninety, and by that time there was little left of her but a physical shell.  She was unresponsive, the higher parts of her brain destroyed by the agonizing progression of this horrible illness.  She went from being a bright, inquisitive, vital woman, an avid reader who did crossword puzzles in ink and could beat the hell out of me in Scrabble, to being... gone.

My Aunt and Uncle in better times

During this ordeal I lived fifteen hundred miles away, so I wasn't confronted every day by the terrible reality of what Alzheimer's does, both to the people suffering it and to their families.  Even so, it was my aunt's face I kept picturing while I was reading an article in Neoscope sent to me by a friend -- all the while getting angrier and angrier.

If you've kept up at all with the research on Alzheimer's you probably are familiar with the words beta amyloid.  It's a short-chain protein, whose function is unknown, which allegedly is directly toxic to nerve cells (and can cause other proteins to misfold, suggesting an etiology similar to Creutzfeld-Jakob syndrome, better known as "mad cow disease").  A great deal of money and time has been spent investigating the role of beta amyloid in Alzheimer's, and in developing drugs that interfere with its production -- significantly, not a single one of which has been shown to slow down the progression of the disease, much less reverse it.

It turns out this is no coincidence.  There is good evidence that the often-cited papers on the topic by Sylvain Lesné -- who wrote convincingly that a specific beta amyloid species, Aß*56, was the culprit in the devastating destruction you see in Alzheimer's sufferers -- were based on faked data.

Not even well-faked, either.  The images Lesné included from "Western blot" experiments, a commonly-used separation technique used to detect specific proteins in mixtures, were cut-and-pasted, something that can be seen not only in faint cut lines in the images but in the fact that the bands in the photographs have clearly been duplicated and moved (i.e., if you look at the edges of the bands, several of them have identically-shaped edges -- something that would be next to impossible in an actual Western blot).

It's a devastating finding.  About how the hell fraud like this got past peer review, biochemist Derek Lowe writes in Science:

The Lesné stuff should have been caught at the publication stage, but you can say that about every faked paper and every jiggered Western blot.  When I review a paper, I freely admit that I am generally not thinking “What if all of this is based on lies and fakery?”  It’s not the way that we tend to approach scientific manuscripts.  Rather, you ask whether the hypothesis is a sound one and if it was tested in a useful way: were the procedures used sufficient to trust the results and were these results good enough to draw conclusions that can in turn be built upon by further research?  Are there other experiments that would make things stronger?  Other explanations that the authors didn’t consider and should address?  Are there any parts where the story doesn’t hang together?  If so, how would these best be fixed?

There is a good-faith assumption behind all these questions: you are starting by accepting the results as shown.  But if someone comes in with data that have in fact been outright faked, and what’s more, faked in such a way as to answer or forestall just those sorts of reviewing tasks, there’s a good chance that these things will go through, unfortunately.

Lesné's apparently fraudulent research doesn't invalidate the whole beta amyloid hypothesis; other, independent studies support the toxic effects of beta amyloid on nerve cells, and have shown there's beta amyloid present in damaged cells.  But Lesné's contention that Aß*56 was causative of Alzheimer's was apparently a blind alley -- and the presence of the protein in the neurons of Alzheimer's sufferers could as well be a result of the disease as a cause.

What concerns me about this kind of thing, though, is the damage it does to the scientific enterprise as a whole.  Here in the United States, in the last twenty years, we've been dealing with the effects of a surge of anti-science propaganda on a number of fronts, most notably anthropogenic climate change and the efficacy of vaccines.  When highly cited, widely publicized work like Lesné's is shown to be based on fraudulent data, it gives more ammunition to the crowd who is already shrieking about how the scientists are making it all up to get grant money and are fundamentally untrustworthy.

And as my friend who sent me the link pointed out, there is a profit motive involved in science.  The publish-or-perish model of scientific research means that the competition for grant money is intense and often cutthroat.  Producing publishable results doesn't just get you funded, it is also the key to tenure-track research positions and the stability and prestige that come with them.  Don't get me wrong, I still strongly believe that 99% of scientists are rigorously ethical, and the vast majority of research is reliable; but when you set the system up to punish negative results, it gives the unscrupulous a hell of an incentive to cheat, and the naysayers yet another opportunity to tar all scientists with one brush.

But what haunts me most in this case is the human cost.  This disease destroys lives, and does it in a slow, agonizing, dehumanizing way.  The idea that falsified data may have led researchers down a fruitless rabbit hole, wasting huge amounts of time and money while people suffered and died, is horrifying.  I keep picturing my Aunt Florence's face, as she languished for years, her brain decaying while her body lived on, and wonder how the people who perpetrate such fraud can sleep at night.

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Closing the books on homeopathy

There comes a point when there is absolutely no reason to continue investigating a claim for which there is no evidence (or significant evidence against).  Pursuing it beyond that point is a waste of money, time, and effort, and can only be explained by people's desperation not to have their pet idea proven wrong.

That point has been reached by homeopathy.  It is useless, unscientific horseshit.  Case closed.

But if by some chance you still were unconvinced, consider the paper that was withdrawn last week from the journal Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine.  The title of the journal itself makes me wince a little; to paraphrase Tim Minchin, when alternative medicine has the support of evidence, it is thereafter known as "medicine."  But setting that aside for a moment, the paper in question was written by father/son team Aradeep and Ashim Chatterjee, and claimed that the homeopathic remedy "psorinum" was effective in treating cancer.

Without even knowing what "psorinum" is, any claim that a homeopathic "remedy" can cure cancer is about as close to medical fraud as you can skate without committing an actual crime.  If you don't know how "remedies" are created, the quick explanation is that you take a substance of some kind and dilute it past the point where there is any of it left, and then use the resulting water to treat whatever condition has symptoms like the ones created by ingesting the original substance.

For example: the homeopathic sleep-aid "calms forté" is made by diluting caffeine.  I shit you not.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In the case of "psorinum," however, we have an additional level of "what the fuck?" to add; the "remedy" is made by diluting...

... wait for it...

... fluid from the blisters of someone who has scabies.

I feel obliged to say at this point that I am not making this up.  The site Homeopathy Plus, which is the source of the link above, says the following about "psorinum:"

Those who need Psorinum usually lack vitality and are prone to mental disturbances.  They catch infections easily, especially colds, and recover slowly.  Skin complaints are common and if unattended will be dirty and offensive but these days with frequent bathing and access to steroids, are less likely to be so.  The person is also likely to be anxious about health, work, poverty and the future which leads to depression, despair and sometimes, suicidal thoughts.

You read that right.  If you're depressed because you're poor, the treatment is to ingest serially-diluted scabies pus.

Anyhow, the Chatterjees wrote a paper suggesting that "psorinum" could treat cancer, and evidently that was too much even for Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine.  When it was found that (1) the "ethics board" that cleared the study the paper was based on was identical to the Board of Directors of a clinic the Chatterjees owned, and (2) both the father and the son were practicing medicine without a license, it was too much for the authorities, too, and the pair were arrested.

This, unfortunately, is not a unique occurrence.  Papers supporting homeopathy have, one and all, been shown to be cherry-picked, if not outright fraudulent.  100% of the controlled scientific studies of homeopathic claims have resulted in zero evidence in favor.

So enough people-hours and research grant money has been wasted on this.  Homeopathy was a ridiculous claim from the get-go, but it was only fair to test it.  The research community did so.  It failed.

Case closed.

Now, the next step is to get those useless sugar pills off the shelves at CVS and other pharmacies.  I know the principle of caveat emptor applies, and if you're choosing to waste your money on fake treatments, you deserve what you get.  But the companies that make this stuff are profiting off the general public's gullibility and ignorance, people are taking quack remedies for serious conditions instead of seeking out legitimate medical help, and the Food & Drug Administration needs to put a stop to it.

As far as the Chatterjees go -- to quote a friend of mine, "I hope they bring them some 'psorinum' sugar pills in jail to cure their 'anxiety about the future.'"  To which I can only add: "Would you like some highly-diluted skin lotion for that burn?"

A win for the good guys

I find it discouraging, sometimes, how often the hucksters win.  We still have homeopathic "remedies" on pharmacy shelves.  Selling supplements of dubious benefit and largely unknown side effects is still a multi-million dollar business.  Throw in all of the purveyors of woo who every year bilk thousands of people out of their hard-earned cash, and it all adds up to a pretty dismal picture.

But still, every once in a while, the good guys come out on top.

This  happened just this week with the announcement that the creators and marketers of the "Lumosity" brain-training games are being ordered to pay $2 million in reparations to customers who fell for their "unfounded claims that Lumosity games can help users perform better at work and in school, and reduce or delay cognitive impairment associated with age and other serious health conditions."

The selling points were attractive, with the aging population becoming increasingly (and justifiably) spooked by the specter of Alzheimer's and other age-related dementias.  I can understand the fear; I watched my aunt, my mother's older sister, outlive both of her siblings, finally dying at the age of 90 after spending the last ten years of her life essentially unresponsive and needing 24-hour care due to the ravages of Alzheimer's.  It's my worst nightmare, really.  The idea of having my body go on long after my mind is gone is absolutely terrifying.

So the claim that you could stave off dementia by playing some computer games was appealing.  So, too, were there other claims -- that you would improve your performance at work, at school, and on the sports field, feel more alert, perform cognitive tasks more quickly and accurately.  A direct quote from their advertisements said that playing their games three or four times a week would help users to reach "their full potential in every aspect of life."  With that kind of claim, it's understandable why people fell for their sales pitch.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem was, it had no basis in fact, and the Federal Trade Commission is requiring Lumos Labs, the company which created and marketed Lumosity, to refund money to their customers because they were participating in "misleading health advertising."

"Lumosity preyed on consumers’ fears about age-related cognitive decline, suggesting their games could stave off memory loss, dementia, and even Alzheimer’s disease," said Jessica Rich, Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.  "But Lumosity simply did not have the science to back up its ads."

In fact, it wasn't simply a lack of evidence; there is significant evidence against their claims.  A 2014 joint statement from Stanford University and the Max Planck Institute said that "The strong consensus of this group is that the scientific literature does not support claims that the use of software-based 'brain games' alters neural functioning in ways that improve general cognitive performance in everyday life, or prevent cognitive slowing and brain disease."

But flying in the face of scientific evidence wasn't the only problem.  The FTC found that "...the defendants [failed] to disclose that some consumer testimonials featured on the website had been solicited through contests that promised significant prizes, including a free iPad, a lifetime Lumosity subscription, and a round-trip to San Francisco."

So promoting falsehoods for profit + paying people to give you good reviews = a $2 million penalty.  Which is exactly as it should be.

It's high time that the FTC crack down on these spurious claims.  You have to wonder how long it'll take before they can get the supplement-and-remedies cadre to stop hiding behind "This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any human illness" as a catch-all disclaimer and general Get Out of Jail Free card.

In any case, I find the whole thing heartening.  I do believe in the principle of caveat emptor, but we sure as hell wouldn't have to invoke it quite so often if the powers-that-be would pull back the reins on the false advertisers.

Scalar scam

In my more uncharitable moments, I feel like people who get swindled and put their health at risk using quack cures deserve everything they get.  With the wealth of information available, there is no excuse for not learning a little bit of science before you decide whether to purchase some goofy pseudoscientific cure-all.

But the compassionate side of me does feel bad for people who are ill, and who spend their money on some swindler's snake oil instead of seeking help from an expert (i.e., a doctor).  All caveat emptor aside, what charlatans do just isn't nice.

I have to admit, however, that the uncharitable side won when I read about a health warning that was just issued in France over "scalar energy pendants."

What are scalar energy pendants, you may be asking?  I refer you to the site Quantum Science Pendants, wherein for as little as $12.95 you can purchase a pendant to hang around your neck which is "made from special Japanese volcanic lava containing over 70 Natural Minerals which emit energy which positively benefits the body, manufactured & processed under extreme temperature before it is coagulated to form bio-ceramics under low temperature treatment & structurally bonded together at a molecular level."  The last part is the bit that amused me the most, because it implies that other things are not bonded at a molecular level, which would mean that everyday objects are just random clusters of disconnected molecules that are as likely as not to fall apart into loose piles of quarks if you handle them too roughly.

Then, we are told, the pendants "provide the highest negative ion count in the market making it the standard to which all other Scalar Energy Pendants are held."  This would mean that the pendant is basically the negative pole of a battery, and should short out as soon as it touches a conductor (which, if the voltage was high enough, would include you).  So I'm not sure that having lots of negative ions is necessarily a good thing.

Be that as it may, you can get scalar energy pendants that are charged with "far infrared energy," not to mention ones with crystals of various descriptions.  Crystals, of course, open up yet another opportunity for woo-woo gibberish, on top of what we've already seen.

Anyhow, all this comes up because of an announcement in France, wherein we find out that CRIIRAD, the Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity, has found that scalar energy pendants are...

... radioactive.

So yes, they are "charged up with energy," but it's not the kind of energy you want anywhere near your body.  "The analysis performed by the CRIIRAD laboratories revealed that the objects have abnormally high levels of natural radioactivity related to incorporation of radioactive ore," a spokesperson for CRIIRAD said last week.  "The concentrations of radioactive products from the presence of uranium-238 and thorium-232 is on the order of 100 times to 10,000 times higher than the average soil activity."

[Note to readers: the link provided is in French, if you're interested in following up my sources and/or checking my ability to translate.]

The scalar energy pendant people should probably reconsider their sales pitch, because the case is being handed over to a government agency that investigates consumer fraud.  "Nothing [in their sales website] warns against the presence of radioactivity," said a spokesperson for the Independent Association for Fraud Control (DGCCRF) and the Commission for Consumer Safety, adding that the pendants "can all lead to exceeding the dose limit for radioactivity... and tests have showed that the interposition of a shirt or even a sweater does not properly protect the skin from exposure."

What might be funniest about all of this, to anyone who knows some physics, is that all energy is "scalar."  All scalar means is "a quantity having only magnitude, not direction," to differentiate it from quantities that are vectors (and have both magnitude and direction, such as velocity and momentum).  Saying "scalar energy" is a little like saying "wet water."  So once again, we have a goofy use of a scientific term to hoodwink people who are apparently incapable of doing a Google search or looking something up on Wikipedia.

And along the way, giving said nimrods a potentially dangerous exposure to radioactive materials.

So I guess you can tell that at the moment, I'm not feeling very charitable.

In any case, it's heartening that the folks in France at least are taking some action.  I'm still waiting for the FDA over here in the US to  follow suit and, for example, take homeopathic "remedies" off the shelf  Although to be fair, at least water and sugar pills don't have any harmful effects except on your pocketbook.

Contacting the spirits of the... living?

One of the most important, and least considered, questions about belief is, "What would it take to convince you that you were wrong?"

It is something we should always keep in the front of our brains, whenever considering a claim.  We all have biases; we all have preconceived notions.  These only become a problem when either (1) they are unexamined, or (2) we become so attached to them that nothing could persuade us to abandon them.

I'm very much afraid that for some people, belief in the power of psychics is one of those unexamined, immovable ideas.  I say this because of the response people have had to a catastrophic faceplant performed last week by Skeptophilia frequent flier "Psychic Sally" Morgan.

"Psychic Sally," you may remember, is the performance artist who has thousands of people convinced that she can communicate with the dead.  She bills herself as "Britain's favorite medium," and fills halls with people who have purchased expensive tickets to her shows.  This is despite the fact that in a previous show she was caught "communicating" with a fictional character, and was once accused by a journalist of receiving information from a helper through an earpiece.

None of this diminished her popularity.  The first incident was only revealed in a newspaper article after the fact, and in the second, the journalist was actually sued by Psychic Sally for libel -- and she won.  There was no proof, the judge ruled, that the Sally had cheated.  The journalist, and the newspaper he worked for, were forced to pay reparations.

But this time it is to be hoped that things are different, because Sally did her monumental kerflop right in public.  Here's how blogger Myles Power, who was there that night, describes it:

Sally came to Middlesbrough on Friday night and her show started off very well.  Even though she was getting the vast majority of what she was saying wrong the audience did not seem to mind and seemed to be having a good time.  The point at which the audience became disillusioned with the performance was quite specific.  One aspect of the show is that audience members can submit photographs of dead loved ones, in the hope that Sally will select theirs, and give a psychic reading from it.  Sally pulled out of a box on stage one of these pictures.  She held the picture up to the camera and it was projected on the large screen behind her.  The picture was of a middle-aged woman and by the clothes she was wearing and the quality of the image, I guessed it was taken some time in the 1990s.  Sally immediately began to get communications from beyond the grave from a man holding a baby named Annabel……or was it Becky.  Noticing that no one in the audience was responding, Sally asked the person who submitted the photo to stand up.  A rather small chunky woman at the centre of the hall stood up and Sally once again began to get messages from the afterlife.  She was informed that this man and baby were somehow linked to the lady in the picture.  However the woman in the audience (who was now also projected behind Sally) disagreed and started to look increasingly confused as, presumably, nothing Sally was saying made any sense to her.  Sally then decided to flat out ask her if the woman in the picture had any children who passed and, when informed that that she hadn’t, responded by saying “I will leave that then.” 

Sally then became in direct contact with the woman in the photo who began to tell her that there was a lot of confusion around her death and that she felt it was very very quick.  She later went on to say that the day Wednesday has a specific link to her death and that she either died on a Wednesday or was taken ill that day.  As the woman in the audience was not responding to any thing Sally was saying, she decided to ask how the woman in the photo was related to her.  It turns out the woman in the audience got the whole concept of submitting a picture of someone you wanted to talk to from the afterlife completely wrong – and for some unknown reason submitted a younger picture of herself.

So there you have it.  "Psychic Sally" has now been caught not only summoning up the spirit of a fictional character, she has gotten into psychic communication with the ghost of a person who is still alive and sitting right there in the audience.

Apparently the hall erupted in laughter when it became evident what had happened, and Psychic Sally never really did recover.  A number of people walked out.  People wouldn't answer her leading questions.  The audience, for that night at least, was a lost cause.

But here's the problem: now we have people rising to her defense, and the defense of psychics as a whole.  Just because Sally got it wrong once, they say, doesn't mean all psychics are frauds.  Here's a sampling of comments:

I know many genuine psychics who are sincere and good people, there are bad plumbers, carpenters etc just as there are good.  I was talking to a person who makes a living by speaking to the dead every week, he was a VICAR if you don’t believe fine but do not decry those who do as you will find out the truth one day as we all do.  The Sally Morgans and tub-thumping stage acts do no service to the genuine ones who just help without rooking people, she was so bad one night according to a TV comedian that they were booing her the following night when he was on.

I get really pee’d off when all people want to do is bad mouth sally make her look like she is some sort of fraudulant [sic] psychic.  Why do people only ever mention that she get names wrong n [sic] so on.  Sally has been doing this since she was 5 yrs old, and she has done show after show how bout [sic] talking about all the messages she has got spot on?  because they would out rule all the messages she may/or may not have got right.  I think personally people forget that because she mentions a name to someoone [sic] & they dont [sic] know who she is talking about that name could relate to a friend who is sitting at home & where they dont [sic] know there friends [sic] extended family it could have been for them, so it’s not that sally gets it wrong its simply because the person who the message is for is not simply sat in the audience.  Also this is not something sally can take a wild guess at, she is being given information from the other side & some people find that hard to except [sic].  Sally time & time again gives actual names of the person she has in spirit & gives names of that persons [sic] family you tell me how sally could have known this or is making it up?

THERE WAS PLANTS IN THE AUDIENCE, CAST NEGATIVE ENERGY ONTO SALLY, THAT IS WHY THE PEOPLE DO NOT SEE THE TRUTH BECAUSE THEY DRINK WATER FROM THE TOWN TAPS WITH HAS FLURECENCE [sic] IN IT TO CONTROL THE MINDS OF THE PEOPLE AND MAKE THEM THING THINGS THAT ARE NOT TRUE. 

what no-one seems to have realised that psychics do not necessarily work with or communicate with spirit – all mediums are psychic but not all psychics are mediums – there is a big difference!

Okay, that was terrifying.  Especially the part about "flurecence" in the water.

Really, people: if "Psychic Sally," one of the most sought-after mediums in the UK, fails this catastrophically, shouldn't that force you to revisit your assumptions vis-à-vis all psychic phenomena?  I mean, think about it; what if there was a televised launch of a rocket, and right there in the public eye, said rocket went up into space and ran smack into one of the "crystal spheres" that ancient astronomers thought made up the heavens?  Wouldn't that make you want to ask the astronomers a few trenchant questions?

But with Psychic Sally's analogous bellyflop, apparently the answer is "no."  With the exception of the few people who actually saw her epic fail, no one much seems to be convinced who wasn't convinced already.  My guess is that after a few weeks of laying-low, she'll dust herself off -- and her act will be right back out on stage, wowing gullible audiences and raking in the money.