Vinegar FTW

The frustrating thing about woo-woo ideas is that they never really go away permanently.

Take, for example, the Ancient Aliens thing.  It really came into the public eye with Erich von Däniken's 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods.  Buoyed up by his book unexpectedly catapulting him into fame, he followed it up with a number of sequels, including: Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Fucking Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else For A Change.

Ha!  I made the last one up, of course, because von Däniken is currently ninety years old and still talks about The Gods all the time, raking in huge amounts of money from conferences and keynote speeches (as well as book royalties).  And that's the difficulty, isn't it?  When there's money to be made (or clicks to be clicked -- which in today's social media world, amounts to the same thing), you can never really be confident of saying goodbye to an idiotic idea.

Which, unfortunately, brings us to "chemtrails."

Chemtrails -- known to us Kool-Aid Drinkin' Sheeple as ordinary jet contrails -- got their start in 2007.  A reporter for KSLA News (Shreveport, Louisiana) was investigating a report of "an unusually persistent jet contrail," and found that a man in the area had "collected dew in bowls" after he saw the contrail.  The station had the water in the bowls analyzed, and reported that it contained 6.8 parts per million of the heavy metal barium -- dangerously high concentrations.  The problem is, the reporter got the concentration wrong by a factor of a hundred -- it was 68 parts per billion, which is right in the normal range for water from natural sources (especially water collected in a glazed ceramic bowl, because ceramic glazes often contain barium as a flux).  But the error was overlooked, or (worse) explained away post hoc as a government coverup.  The barium was at dangerous concentrations, people said.  And it came from the contrail.  Which might contain all sorts of other things that they're not telling you about.

And thus were "chemtrails" born.

Since then, the Evil Government has been accused of putting all sorts of things into jet fuel, with the intention of spraying it all over us and Causing Bad Stuff.  Mind-control chemicals, compounds that can alter our DNA, pathogens (anthrax seems especially popular), chemicals that induce sterility.  Notwithstanding the fact that if you want to get Something Nasty into a large fraction of the population, sneaking it into jet fuel and then hoping that the right people are going to be outside when the jet goes over, and then will inhale enough of it to work, has to be the all-time stupidest Evil Plot I've ever heard of.  I mean, this one makes Boris and Natasha's Goof Gas thing seem like unadulterated genius.

Oh, but don't worry; this time the Good Guys are way ahead.  Chemtrail your little hearts out, Evil Deep State Operatives, they're saying.  Because they have a secret weapon in their arsenal that will neutralize all chemtrails.  You ready?

Vinegar.

And not even special magical vinegar; ordinary white vinegar that you can buy from the supermarket.  You're supposed to "gently heat (not boil)" it, and the vapors rise and do battle with the poisonous chemtrails.  How this supposedly works adds a whole other level of facepalming to the discussion.  "White vinegar is acetate acid [sic]," said one YouTuber.  "It eats alkaline metals which is [sic] what they spray to create the geoengineered clouds."

The problem here -- well, amongst the myriad problems here -- is that dissolving a chemical element doesn't destroy it.  If there really were alkaline metals in jet contrails, vinegar might react chemically with them, but the metals would still be there (and presumably, still be just as toxic).  It's like the claim I've seen about pillbugs (isopods) being our friends because they "remove heavy metals from soils."  Now, isopods might well be tolerant to soils with heavy metal contamination -- I haven't verified that possibility -- but if they do consume plant material laden with heavy metals, where do you think those contaminants go after they're eaten?  They're now inside the isopod's body, and when they isopod dies, the heavy metals leach right back into the soil.  Barium, cadmium, lead, arsenic, and so on are elements, and if you are unclear on why that point is relevant, I refer you to the definition thereof.

Notwithstanding, the anti-chemtrail people claim that simmering vinegar in your back yard can "clear contaminated chemtrails in a ten-mile radius in a few hours."  Which would be a pretty good trick, if it weren't for the fact that jet contrails themselves always disappear completely on their own in fifteen minutes or so.

The whole issue hasn't been helped by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in between sessions of Congress seems to spend her time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, proposing a bill prohibiting "geoengineering and weather modification," which includes chemtrails.

But of course, the bill conveniently says nothing about the carbon dioxide released by burning jet fuel, which actually is modifying our climate.  Can't mention climate change and piss off the corporate donors, after all.

So once again, we're confronted by a conspiracy theory that keeps rising, zombie-like, from its shallow grave.  At least in this case it'll keep the woo-woos busy simmering (not boiling) vinegar in their back yards, which is fairly harmless.  And it'll give a boost to the vinegar manufacturers.  Me, though, I'm kind of pining for the Ancient Aliens to come back around again.  At least they keep people interested in stuff like history and mythology and archaeology, even if their conclusions aren't any more grounded in reality than the vinegar/chemtrail people.

****************************************

Foot bath cure

A few months ago, I wrote a post about a guy who claimed that all you need to do to purge your home of "negative energies" (whatever those are) is to place a glass of vinegar and salt on your windowsill.  Vinegar, which clearly has magical properties, will then de-negativize you and your house.

The whole thing made me wonder why you couldn't achieve the same effect with, say, a jar of pickles.

Anyhow, a couple of days ago, a good friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link with the note, "Hey!  Here's something else you can do with vinegar!  I thought you'd want to know."

So I clicked the link, and was brought to the site Delishist, specifically to an article called "Soak Your Feet in Vinegar Once a Week, and You Will See How All of Your Diseases Disappear."

I am not, for the record, making the name of this article up.

My first thought, of course, was, "All your diseases?  Like, if you have a brain tumor and Parkinson's disease and narcolepsy simultaneously, you can get rid of all of them by soaking your feet in vinegar?  That can't possibly be what they mean."

But yes, that is in fact what they mean.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sander van der Wel from Netherlands, (391-365) Relaxing in bath (6427571119), CC BY-SA 2.0]

It will at this point be unsurprising to any of you that the whole thing revolves around "toxins."  What these specific toxins are, we're never told.  Maybe it's elemental mercury.  Maybe it's DDT.  Maybe it's battery acid.  Maybe it's all three at once.  In any case, we're led to believe that whatever they are, they're bad, and not only can't your body get rid of them by itself, there's no way to take them out except through your feet.

Which seems to me a little odd.  Why the feet?  Could I, if I wanted to, soak my ass in vinegar?  (Let me state for the record that I don't want to.  But my question stands.)  I mean, the human ass is much more directly connected to the process of getting rid of stuff we don't want in our body, although to be fair, the gluteus maximus muscle that makes up most of it has very little to do with it.

So I'm baffled as to why the feet are what we should be soaking.  Maybe it's because the feet are generally below the head, and toxins are heavy, or something.

In any case, here's how the authors explains the process:

You can also use ionic foot bath to detoxify your body from toxins.  This bath is based on electrolysis, which is a method that uses electrical current to make a chemical reaction.  You should use warm water to open your pores and salt is used as an anti-inflammatory astringent. Ions are absorbed through the feet and your body is getting a detox.  If the salt water becomes dark, that means you are eliminating toxins from your body.

Okay, so the basic principle is ions = good, and toxins = bad.  Got it.

But what about ions that are toxic?  Like the cyanide ion, for example?  I don't care what Delishist says, I'm not soaking my feet in cyanide.

And they're right about the definition of electrolysis, but the problem is, combining it with a vinegar foot bath would be a seriously bad idea.  Another thing I'm not going to do is stand in a tub of vinegar and then run an electric current through it and/or me.  Yes, it'd generate some serious ionage.  The downside, however, is called "electrocution."

The website also suggests soaking in a bath to which you've added ginger and hydrogen peroxide.  This is yet another thing I'm not going to do.  First of all, wouldn't that bleach your pubic hair?  I mean, it's fine if that's the look you're after, but I thought I'd mention it.  Another, and more serious, problem is that hydrogen peroxide works as an antiseptic because it kills nearly everything it touches, and given long enough, that would include your skin.  I know a guy who used peroxide on a cut, but it stayed open, and he decided it was infected, so he kept applying more and more peroxide.  Within a week he'd turned a minor cut into a gaping wound -- not from infection, but because he was putting something on it that was killing his own tissue.  So applying peroxide to my entire body, including my sensitive bits, sounds to me like a seriously bad idea.

So thanks anyhow, but I'll pass on soaking my feet in vinegar.  I find that washing them periodically keeps them relatively clean, and as for "getting rid of toxins," my liver and kidneys are perfectly capable of that.  My advice is to go back to using vinegar for making pickles, because a lot of the other stuff it's supposed to be good for is USDA Grade-A horseshit.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Vinegar cure

There's a single question that can keep us honest with respect to many aspects of life, and that question is: "How do I know this is true?"

It only works, of course, if you answer it honestly, and are willing to consider the possibility that you could be wrong.  If all you do is say, "Because of _____" (fill in the blank with your favorite combination of: the bible, Fox News, a political commentator, a famous actor or actress, a claim I ran into on the internet), and forthwith cease thinking about it, you haven't gotten very far.

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that was a good illustration of this principle, or more accurately, the kind of nonsense you can fall for if you don't apply it.  The link was to an article over at the site The Limitless Minds, called, "Leave A Glass Of Salt Water And Vinegar To Detect Negative Energies In Your Home."

Starting out with my pet peeve over the way woo-woos use words like "energy" (and frequency, and quantum, and resonance, and vibration, and on and on ad nauseam).  But fortunately for us, the author, Matteo Light, defines what he means right away:

This may seem a little weird at first, but it’s possible to have a reservoir of negative energy trapped in your home.  And by negative energy, I mean emotional energy that comes from humans.  It could be there from past tenants or homeowners, or from a year ago when you and your spouse were fighting a lot.

Once again, the principle applies: how do you know this "negative energy" exists?  Have you detected it on a Negative Energy-o-Meter?

No, apparently not.  In fact, the next thing Light does is criticize the scientists who would even expect such a thing:

Traditionally, science doesn’t like things it can’t touch, measure, or put into a tiny jar on the shelf to examine. 

Eventually, scientists discovered forces that exist in the world that are invisible.  One of those things is energy in its many expressions.  We usually can’t see it, but sometimes we can feel it.

How ridiculous, only believing in things for which you have evidence.  If you can imagine.

But Light says we do have evidence; a "feeling."  All you need, I suppose.

Then we're given the one fleeting nod to any kind of experimental support -- but he pulls out the tired old "nice words -- pretty ice crystals, mean words -- ugly ice crystals" research by Dr. Masaru Emoto, that has become the basis of every Quantum Resonant Vibrations of Love claim ever since.  I won't do a takedown of Emoto's claims here -- Dr. Steven Novella over at NeuroLogica did a thorough job of that in November of last year -- but I will mention two relevant points:

• Emoto could only claim to be a doctor because he got a Ph.D. from the Open International University of Alternative Medicine, a known diploma mill that requires no coursework whatsoever.
• His ice crystals experiments have been replicated dozens, possibly hundreds, of times, and in every case where there were appropriate controls, have generated uniformly negative results.

So we're already on mighty shaky ground, but Light soldiers on ahead to tell us what we can do to combat these invisible, undetectable "negative energies," presumably so that the ice cubes in our freezer don't form ugly shapes or something.

We are, he says, to put two tablespoons of white vinegar and two teaspoons of granulated salt into sixteen ounces of filtered water, mix it together, and put it somewhere that you'll be near.  Leave it for a day.  Once the salt has "stopped rising," it's collected all the negative energy it can, and you should move it to somewhere else in the house to de-negativize that room, too.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And I'm thinking: that's it?  How do you know that?  Did you look at the water, vinegar, and salt mixture after sitting there for a day, and decide that it seemed unhappy?  Did getting near the negative-energy-saturated water give you quantum fluctuations in your chakras or something?  But of course, we're never told why we should believe this works, or even what specifically it supposedly accomplishes.  All we're told is that we should rely on our feelings, and that'll be enough.

Well, I'm sorry, but that isn't enough in science.  Scoffing about how scientists like to be able to measure stuff (or put it in a tiny jar on the shelf, as the mood strikes) ignores the fact that when it comes to establishing the truth of a claim, science is kind of the only game in town.

Of course, the claim also raises some more prosaic questions, such as: does it have to be a particular, dedicated salt-vinegar-water mixture, or will any old salt-vinegar-water mixture do?  If the latter, then why don't our houses get de-negativized by, say, a jar of pickles?  This'd be a little worrisome, though, because the contention is that the negative energies get absorbed by the liquid, so there you'd be, raiding the refrigerator hoping for a nice half-sour, and instead you'd get the Fearsome Negative Pickle Spear of Doom.

So predictably, I'm unimpressed.  I'll just stick with whatever negative energies are hanging around my house.  Thus far, they haven't bothered me any.  Also, I have a container of salt and a bottle of white vinegar in a cabinet in my kitchen, and there's no reason they can't do their thing as is.

Homeopathic chemtrail remedies

Following on the heels of my post yesterday regarding how much smarter and saner the conspiracy theorists are than us skeptics, today we will take a look at: homeopathic anti-chemtrail spray.

Yes, folks, guaranteed to "alleviate symptoms of chemtrail exposure," this homeopathic preparation (i.e. a bottle of water) is to be sprayed up the nose "until symptoms disappear."

At first, I thought this had to be a joke.  Or, at least, unique.  Surely no one else would come up with the idea of using worthless remedies for nonexistent chemtrail exposure.

I was wrong.

Check out, for example, ChemBuster.  The website starts out by asking a very important question, namely: "Have you experienced symptoms of unknown origin?"  Because if you had "chronic fatigue," "chronic pain," "chronic headaches," or "mental and emotional problems," there could only be one answer:

The government is putting chemicals into jet fuel, so that when the jet fuel is burned, the chemicals are dispersed over the unsuspecting citizenry, where they are inhaled and cause you to feel crummy.

So who you gonna call?  ChemBuster!

ChemBuster contains 4 herbals and 9 homeopathics blended in a proprietary process designed to defeat, to annihilate, the pools of mycoplasma, heavy metals, respiratory problems and even mental problems associated with Chemtrail poisoning.

But ChemBuster has to be "activated" before use.  How do you activate it?  By purchasing an "orgone energy generator," setting the bottle next to it, and turning it on, which will "potentiate" it, increasing its strength by a factor of ten (following the mathematical principle that 10 x 0 = 0).

At this point, I should mention that the "orgone energy generator" uses the power of gemstones to "collect, concentrate, transmute and radiate all ambient subtle energy into life force," and that the person who came up with the idea of "orgone," Wilhelm Reich, believed that it was the "life energy" that was released suddenly during an orgasm.  I'm not making this up, by the way.  So here we have a claim that combines four ridiculous ideas -- homeopathy + chemtrails + gemstone energies + orgone.

Which may be a new record.

Now, if you don't want to buy homeopathic remedies and orgone energy generators to combat chemtrails, there could be a cheaper solution, namely: a spray bottle filled with vinegar.  Once again, I feel obliged to state outright that I'm not making this up.  Last year, we had a claim going around that was given some momentum by such pinnacles of rationality as Alex Jones and Jeff Rense, stating that if you were worried about the government dousing you with chemicals, all you had to do to "cleanse the air" was to spray some vinegar up toward the sky.  So people did it, because of course there never is an idea so completely idiotic that there won't be large quantities of people who will believe it.  Here is one explanation, if I can dignify it with that word (spelling and grammar as written, because you can only write "sic" so many times):

Vinegar does a lot as a support to our orgone devices. Why ? Reason is pretty simple:

It is all about the electrical charge of the atmosphere. Fellow gifters all around the world were trying to figure out how it is possible, that such cheap and funky substance, as vinegar, is delivering such spectacular effects on the chemtrail-rich atmosphere. Here is the simple explanation:

During the chemtrail attack, atmosphere is charged with a lots of positive ionts. Well, and dispersed vinegar is charging the atmosphere with negative ionts.

TRY IT YOURSELF. If you see the chemtrail attack in your sector is going on -  buy a liter or two of the vinegar, and disperse it on the asphalt surface of the road (it is the best platform for the vinegar to go up to the sky). Or throw black T-Shirt into the vinegar and leave it on the sunlight.  

Vinegar begins AT ONCE to vapor to the sky, and sky is getting charged with the negative ionts by very aggresive chain reaction. Within maximally ONE HOUR you will get the results.

Yup.  Using a "funky substance" to fight "positive ionts" from "chemtrail attack in your sector."  Gotcha.

And lest you think that this explanation was immediately laughed into oblivion, I read the comments, without even putting on my anti-stupidity protective eyewear, and immediately came across one that read, "The idea of countering thousand dollars of chemtrail with cheap vinegar is very apealing [sic].  I'll try it. Must be very humiliating to them."

Ah, yes, them.  Those evil guys who are chemtrailing the hell out of us.  You know, I think that's the thing I understand the least about all of this; if the Illuminati in the government are dousing the skies with chemicals via jet contrails, and those contrails can be seen every day from damn near any spot in the United States, why don't we see all of the government employees walking around wearing big ol' respirators?  No, they're breathing the same air that we unsuspecting sheeple are.  So are the families of the government employees.  Everyone, pretty much, is breathing the same air, Illuminati and sheeple alike, and it seems that only the sheeple are affected?

Oh, wait, I forgot.  The government employees are Reptilian aliens, and they're immune.  Duh.

So, there you have it.  Using homeopathy, crystals, orgasmic energy, and vinegar to fight the chemtrails created by the llluminati.  I really think they should find a way to work in astrology, chakras, and the planet Nibiru, which would create a perfect storm of woo-woo quantum psychic vibrations, raising us to the next level of enlightenment.

On the other hand, I'm probably not ready for that.  Just let me stay unenlightened for the time being, at least until I recover from the forehead bruises I got from all of the headdesks I did while researching this post.