Well, that should take care of your "Bieber Fever."

So San Francisco made it through yesterday without being obliterated.  I'm pleased about that, because San Francisco is a great place and it would suck if it was destroyed by an earthquake even if it is a hotbed of "sexual immortality" (as one of the prophecies of doom called it).

Of course, the same bunch of prophets also called it a "Bowl of Iniquity," which is just funny.  It sounds like the breakfast they serve in hell's deli, doesn't it?  ("Hey, hon, can I have another Bowl of Iniquity, with some milk and sugar?  Thanks.")

But of course, this failure of the Lord to keep his word and smite the hell out of California isn't going to stop the prognosticators of doom from moving on to the next Holy Warning.  In fact, a reader told me we already have one that has cleared the starting gate, and it's a doozy.  Ready?

FEMA has been caught in the act of sending shiploads of plastic coffins and other corpse-transport devices...

... to Puerto Rico...

... because there's going to be an asteroid impact in the Atlantic Ocean...

... causing an enormous, 200-foot-tall tsunami...

... in order to kill everyone at the October 19 Justin Bieber concert in San Juan.

Well.  I certainly can't top that.  And I have to state, for the record, that I can understand why the Lord might want to smite Justin Bieber.  Destroying Puerto Rico in order to do it sounds like it might be a bit of an overreaction, however.  On the other hand, if you read the Old Testament you'll find that this sort of thing happened all the time, with the Lord having a bad morning and smiting the shit out of everyone who happened to be in the vicinity, so I guess there's precedent.

The Lord Works In Mysterious Ways, after all, and if killing everyone in Puerto Rico is his way of dealing with Justin Bieber, then who am I to question it?

So, there you have it.  The next prophecy to look forward to.  Much more creative than a silly old earthquake, don't you think?  And just think!  If it's true, we'll never have to hear "As Long As You Love Me" again.

Smiting San Francisco

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but if you're a reader in the San Francisco area, you're doomed.

Today, in fact.

I know, I know, I should have warned you all sooner.  But I didn't even know until yesterday, and at that point, it seemed kind of late to start a wholesale evacuation.  So this is sort of a "thanks for your readership, hope you don't die too painfully."

You might be wondering how I know all of this.  It's a good question, and of course, the answer is that we have some self-proclaimed Prophets of the Lord who have said that God Almighty has told them that he's about to find downtown San Francisco on Google Maps and then press "Smite" on the Holy Keyboard.  The result, we are told, is that there will be an earthquake along the San Andreas Fault that will measure 9.7 on the Richter Scale (making it the strongest earthquake ever recorded), and a subesquent tsunami will pretty much obliterate anything that survives the initial shock.

Of course, in the scientific world, we always look for corroboration, don't we?  If I claim to have made some kind of groundbreaking discovery, then my fellow scientists will try to replicate my findings.  So just listen up, you naysayers: no less than three prophecies of doom have spelled out clearly that San Francisco has been Naughty In God's Sight, and as a result, the city is more or less screwed.

First, we have "Adam H.:"

This video is about what my mom has been telling me for the last day and a half.  She has been having dreams and visions about a large earthquake off the west coast of the United States.  She has had something like this happened to her once before.  It was right before the Japan earthquake and tsunami.  She basically predicted it.  It was pretty intense.  It was about two days before the event.  This one though she says she has seen numbers and dates and times.  It is early October in the daytime, sometime in the morning, on a Thursday.  The warning we are hearing is a 9.7 earthquake on the West Coast.

He was reluctant to pin down the date, but in the comments section he came out with it -- and today is, in fact, the day.

Then, we have the prophecy by "Pastor Joel:"

I received a call from a sister in the Lord (Kelly) who was frightened at a vision she had recently seen. She saw the upcoming date as October 3, with the Golden Gate Bridge breaking in half and going vertical, a huge tsunami covering San Francisco, an earthquake 9.7 in the city and water flooding the valley. Many souls perished. She felt compelled to warn people. Her fear came largely because she had seen a vision of the Boston Marathon Bombing the night before it happened.

As I was sharing these two events with my wife, she reminded me of a call she had received two weeks before. An intercessor friend (Margaret) from the East Bay area had warned Georgia not to go into San Francisco starting the last week in September through the first three weeks of October. Margaret had seen a tsunami and a devastating earthquake in the city, in a vision. Today Margaret told Georgia that many other intercessors have recently seen the same type of warnings.

Earlier this week, I was sharing some of this with our Tuesday Prophetic Luncheon Group. One of our sisters (Barbara) told me that the Lord had spoken to her clearly recently. He said that the “bowl of iniquity of San Francisco” was now full to the brim!

I didn't know there were "Prophetic Luncheons," did you?  What do you do at a "Prophetic Luncheon?"  Eat cold cuts and potato salad and jello mold, and speak in tongues?  What if you have a "Prophetic Luncheon" and the Lord is otherwise engaged?

It'd be kind of embarrassing to have a "Prophetic Luncheon" and then just sit around, munching potato chips for an hour, before finally giving up and deciding that if the Holy Spirit has anything to say, he would just have to wait until next month.

Then, finally, we have the alarming message from "Cindy Page:"

Wow! I have been given a date to “be prepared” (from the Lord) by October 2nd! In my dream there was chaos and madness going on. I asked the Lord when I should be ready. Will it be early October or late October? He told me the 275th day of the year, which is 10/2. I took that to mean the Lord wanted me to be ready by October 2nd.

In my heart I feel that shortly after October 2nd we are going to experience a great earthquake in California and we need to have food and water stored up. If possible, we should have enough for at least a month or two. If possible, be out of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay area by October 1-3 and again on October 23-24.

Of course, the danger in all of this -- for the prophets, not for San Francisco -- is in pinning down a specific date.  Especially a date that is really soon.  Because if you put it far enough ahead, you can stir people up for a long while before they get any kind of verification of whether you were correct or not, while if you say that disaster is going to strike today, you damn well better be right or you will lose any credibility you had.

Not that these folks have much anyway, of course.  I mean, even the seismologists can't predict earthquakes very accurately -- they can tell when a fault is showing signs of seismic stress, but they can't say anything close to, "And it's going to give tomorrow morning at 8:30."  Even the non-wingnuts don't quite get that, sometimes -- which is why six Italian scientists were jailed for malfeasance last year for failing to predict the L'Aquila earthquake of 2009, which killed 300 people.

The wingnuts, though... wow.  They just eat this stuff up.  If you don't mind doing repeated headdesks, go to the link I posted above, and read some of the comments.  A few of them questioned the prophets -- one even pointed out how many times (as in, 100%) that such prophecies have been wrong.  But the majority yammered out their thanks to god and to the prophets for giving them warning.  One will suffice, to get the flavor (spelling and punctuation is as written):

If you have made it here or have been led by Holy Spirit to this site, and this article be thankful and prepare. If any Christian will read thru the old testament you will see a pattern of the cause and effect of straying from the laws put in place by God. Sexual immortality, idol worship, and many other sins by the examples given in the Bible all resulted in judgement. We are blessed to know what is coming so we can prepare. We are supposed to stand thru the storm with a peace that only comes by knowing Jesus Christ. Our fellow brothers and sisters who may not be not be saved should be wanting what we have because we have peace thru the storm. Instead of criticizing take prophetic words to the Lord in prayer. .the Lord just may be trying to alert us to be ready so His light can shine thru us.

So, on the whole, they are wholly in favor of an earthquake obliterating the Bay Area.  But these are the same people who think that the whole Noah's Ark thing, with god wiping out virtually every human on Earth (infants included!) for some unspecified "wickedness," is an edifying story, suitable for telling children in Sunday school.

So I don't think this should come as any sort of surprise.

Me, I'm not worried, and I wouldn't be even if I lived in San Francisco.  An earthquake at some point is probably going to hit along the San Andreas Fault, plate tectonics being what it is, but the chances of it happening today are slim.  Of course, that is unlikely to shake the faith of the aforementioned wingnuts, who seem to forget about such failures nearly instantaneously.  And the next time god tells one of their prophets something -- a typhoon, maybe, headed toward Omaha on December 8 -- they'll be right back to believing it and thanking Jesus for warning them in time.

Letters from Ummo

I could write about a lot of things this morning, given the current state of world affairs.  I could write about US policy in Syria.  I could write about whether the world should believe the ostensibly rational overtures from newly-elected Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, given that most of what came out of the previous president's mouth could have qualified him for mental evaluation.  I could write about the way the current session of congress has devolved into "If you don't give me my way, I'm gonna take my toys and go home."

Instead, I think I'll discuss a topic that I know is equally pressing to all of you:  What the hell is an "Ummite?"

The question comes up because of a link that a reader sent me, along with the question, "What do you make of this?"  The link turned out to be to the website "Ummo: Ummite Physics and Metaphysics."  And we get an answer to the initial question right away, although all it does is invite more questions:

The Ummites claim to have landed on Earth in March 1950, in the area of Digne. Three crafts brought a crew from the planet UMMO that set up a base (see the summary in the book by J-P PETIT), probably on the Peak of Blache, between Digne and La Javie, in the south of France. They spent a certain time analysing our habits, walked around Paris (and undoubtedly elsewhere), and avoided drawing attention to themselves. In 1965, Mr. Fernando SESMA, the organiser of a slightly esoteric Spanish "association" which claimed to be in contact with other extraterrestrials, begins receiving letters. Other recipients also receive some. Contact is lost in 1970, then is regained in 1987, and continues until 1993 (at least, we do not have letters possibly sent outside these periods) with other recipients, particularly in France. We currently have approximately 200 to 300 pages of texts written by the Ummites but it is possible that many other letters exist. In a 1988 letter, reference is made to the existence of 3,850 pages, copies of which having been sent to several individuals represent the equivalent of 160,000 pages.

So I started to look through the "texts" that allegedly come from the Ummites of Ummo, and were treated to passages like the following:

During a conversation which you had with my brother on which I depend: DEI 98, son of DEI 97, you asked him for information about travel and the concept of SPACE. The topic is complex as you shall see in the documents that we will give you gradually. Of course, before describing the types of feelings we feel when we travel in a OAWOOLEA UEWA OEMM (lenticular vessel for intra-galactic displacement) it is better that you have a more precise idea of our concept of SPACE.

Until now in the many reports and conversations, we had spoken about the IBOZOO UU without explaining their meaning, and had limited ourselves to translating this phoneme by "PHYSICAL POINT." We also resisted the temptation to add a mathematical demonstration closer to our WUUA WAAM (mathematics of physical space), because that would require an initiation on your part to the to our UWUUA IEES (tetravalent mathematical logic); it is to the detriment of the scientific rigour of the concepts that we expose to you. 

I... okay... what?

I was particularly interested in the "tetravalent mathematical logic" part, though, because logic is kind of a special interest of mine.  And a little further along, I found an explanation of it, if you can call it that:

There is a reason: when it comes to analysing the properties of space, the normal postulates of mathematical logic, which is familiar to you and to us besides, are not useful to us. As you know, formal logic accepts the criterion you name "law of of non-contradiction" (according to which any proposal is necessarily true or false). In our WUUA WAAM (mathematics of Physical Space) this postulate must be rejected. One then has recourse to a type of multivalent logic that our specialists call UUWUUA IES (logical tetravalent mathematics) according to which any proposal can adopt four values indifferently:

- AIOOYAA (TRUE - CORRECT)

- AIOOYEEDOO (FALSE, ABSURD)

- AIOOYA AMMIE (can be translated: True outside from The Waam)
 
- AIOOYAU (untranslatable in Earth language).

So not only do these aliens not use Earth logic, they also apparently speak the same language as Charlie Brown's teacher in the Peanuts cartoons.

I also found an artist's rendition of an Ummite, which I know you'll all want to see:

 So the Ummites look, basically, like Jean-Claude van Damme.

Now, so far, all we have is a wacky idea, and as we've seen over and over in this blog, wacky ideas are plentiful out there.  What impresses me is how massive this wacky idea is.  There is page after page of prose like this:

To say that the IBOZOO UU are like small spheres or " that between them exists a vacuum " or that they "are tangent within a dense space filled with IBOZOO UU," does not make sense. Such mental images are those which appear to an UUGEEYIE when one speaks to him for the first time on UMMO about the design of SPACE composed by the IBOZOO UU. Its childlike mentality, accustomed to familiar perceptions, tends to materialise this concept of IBOZOO UU and to assign an existence to it.

So someone -- perhaps J.-P. Petit, the French gentleman whose name is associated with the first "contact" with the Ummites, decades ago -- actually had to sit down and write hundreds of pages of this stuff, with all sorts of formulas and diagrams (you should check out the mathematical parts; I minored in math and my eyes crossed after the first paragraph).

We're talking about wingnuttery on a significant scale, here.

Anyhow, I encourage you to go to the link and look around.  It's well worth glancing through, even though most of it falls into the "clear as mud" department.  And as to whether any of it could be true, or even sane, my general reaction is "AIOOYEEDOO."

So thanks to the reader who sent the link, but in answer to the initial question, "What do you make of this?", I'm not entirely sure.  It's impressive, I'll say that, but beyond that, I was just kind of left shaking my head in disbelief.

Which, now that I think about it, is the same way that I responded to the current nonsense going on in congress.

It's the voodoo, I tells you!

I just found something new for the Do-It-Yourself crowd; a how-to for making your own voodoo doll.

The idea of voodoo dolls has been around for a long time, long before honest-to-Baron-Samedi voodoo made its way from Africa into the Caribbean, and later to Central America, South America, and the Gulf Coast.  The whole thing is a kind of sympathetic magic -- creating an image of someone, often incorporating something from the person into the image (hair or fingernail clippings were common), and then doing something to the image in the hopes that the real person would respond in kind.  It was by no means limited to the Afro-Caribbean voodoo tradition; similar practices have been found in many parts of the world.  And like most magic, a lot of it was centered around getting the person in question either to have sex with you or else die.

Funny how those two seem to come up pretty frequently in these discussions.

In any case, the whole concept has been around for a good while.  Consider the following picture of a voodoo doll that is at the Louvre (and I'm using the colloquial name even given that this isn't really voodoo in the strict sense), from 4th century Egypt:

(image courtesy of photographer Marie-Lan Nguyen and the Wikimedia Commons)

Check the pin placement.  Not too difficult to tell what this magician was after, is it?

In any case, we now have a DIY guide if you'd like to try the whole thing out for yourself.  Here are some highlights:

Since this is an authentic method, only naturally available items are used. All you need is two sticks, a string, strips of fabric, adhesive and something to stuff the doll with, such as grass, pine needles, etc. Also, if you want to dress up your doll you will require pieces of cloth, buttons, feathers, etc. Since the doll is intended to resemble a living person, it is best to use that person's own belongings to dress the doll. Once you have gathered the paraphernalia, here's how to make it: 

• Take a long stick and a short one. Place the short one perpendicular to the long stick about a quarter from the top of the long stick. Tie up the two sticks with a string in an X-motion. When done it will look like the image alongside.
•  The two ends of the short stick will be the doll's arms and the short end of the long stick will be its head, while its long end will be the body of the doll.
• Wrap your stuffings around the sticks: starting from the middle, then wounding around the head, then an arm, then back across another arm, then down to the middle and finally to the bottom.
• Cover the doll with pieces of fabric using glue and stitching to make them cling to the doll. But remember to keep some part of the stuffing exposed at the ends of the arms, the head and at the bottom.
• Give the doll a face. Stitch two beads or glue down two peas for the eyes and another bead for the mouth.
• Now dress up the doll. Since the voodoo dolls are intended to resemble somebody, you should use belongings of the person the doll is intended to resemble to dress the doll. You can even put a piece of that person's hair in the doll.

The next step is to baptize the doll in the name of the person you're trying to establish a link with.  You can consult the site for the exact words you're supposed to use.  Your doll is then ready to... um... use.

The writer seems to be having some misgivings at this point, because (s)he cautions, "(R)emember, using a doll for evil purposes has horrible consequences, since the person using the doll may suffer badly and even die for dark voodoo practices.  So you should never use voodoo dolls for anything wrong."  And later, (s)he puts in a rather comical disclaimer -- "Please note that I am not a vodouisan myself and this article is best read for informative purposes only.  Me or All About Occult will not bear any responsibility should you try to use the above mentioned method practically."

Righty-o.  We'll just let you completely off the hook, then.  But being fearless experimentalists, and also considering that the entirety of the foregoing is unadulterated horse waste, we here at Skeptophilia don't have the need for such disclaimers.  In fact, I not only give you my permission, I positively encourage you to make a voodoo doll with my image, and stick it full of pins.  I realize you don't have any of my hair or fingernail clippings (at least, I sincerely hope you don't, as that would be a little creepy), but maybe just having a reasonable facsimile of my fortunately rather unique face will be enough.  My photograph is over there in the right sidebar.  So have at it.  Feel free to skewer me, in effigy, to the wall, and I promise I'll post here to report any ruptured gall bladders or brain aneurysms I happen to suffer.

All in the name of the scientific method, you know.

Music from beyond the grave

What do you do if you get tired of those nasty old scientists insisting that your woo-woo claims pass the test of hard evidence?

You move your claims into the realm of the untestable.

That, at least, is the tactic employed by one Jennifer Whisper, an 83-year-old musician from San Diego, who says that she gets her music and lyrics from dead songwriters who have provided her with what they would have written, if they were still alive.

Whisper started out channeling music from the dead in the 1970s, and began at the top, with none other than George Gershwin, who introduced himself in a straightforward manner: "I heard a knock on the door and no one was there," Whisper said to a reporter from The Huffington Post.  "Then I heard a voice say, 'Hello Jenny! It's me, George Gershwin.'"

After recovering from her surprise, Gershwin dictated a song, "Love Is All There Is," to Whisper.  He's come back a bunch of times since then, she says, and she now has over a hundred posthumous compositions by Gershwin.

She also has channeled songs by Judy Garland, Johnny Mercer... and Jimi Hendrix.

Oh, and Whisper also says that she found out that Marilyn Monroe adopted JonBenet Ramsay after her death.  So that all ended happily enough.

The problem, of course, is that you can't exactly prove that she's not getting these songs from the dead.  This is a claim that is outside of what is even potentially testable.  If you're curious, though, Whisper has attracted the attention of musicians and musicologists -- and not in a good way.  One, Los Angeles-based studio musician Jim Briggs, has analyzed her alleged Gershwin composition "My Stars Above"and said that he's not buying her story.

It's amazing, Briggs said, that "My Stars Above" is way worse than you'd expect from a composer who's had 78 years to improve beyond where he was when he composed his masterpiece Porgy & Bess.   "If [Gershwin's] communicating musically from beyond the grave," Briggs said, "I can't believe that at no point did he suggest 'My Stars Above' be an instrumental."

It's also opened up some legal challenges for Whisper, but the ramifications of what she is doing are unprecedented -- and unclear.  She could potentially be violating the publicity rights of the people who hold the estates of the deceased composers, but even so, it's hard to know how a court would decide the case.  Joy Butler, an attorney specializing in copyright law, has said, "I've never run across a case like this.  But she'd have a hard time convincing a court."

So that's the latest from the world of the woo-woo, and yet another case of switching your tactics if the heat is on.  It's a shame, though, that Whisper hasn't gotten in touch with some older classical composers, because I'm passionately fond of J. S. Bach, and I'd love to know what he's doing these days.

Other than decomposing, that is.

Homeopathy for gunshot wounds

I was just thinking about a study I read about years ago, done by Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper back in 1979.  Called "Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence," this study came to the following rather sobering conclusion:

People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant empirical evidence in a biased manner.  They are apt to accept "confirming" evidence at face value while subjecting "disconfirming" evidence to critical evaluation, and, as a result, draw undue support for their initial positions from mixed or random empirical findings.  Thus, the result of exposing contending factions in a social dispute to an identical body of relevant empirical evidence may be not a narrowing of disagreement but rather an increase in polarization.  To test these assumptions, 48 undergraduates supporting and opposing capital punishment were exposed to 2 purported studies, one seemingly confirming and one seemingly disconfirming their existing beliefs about the deterrent efficacy of the death penalty.  As predicted, both proponents and opponents of capital punishment rated those results and procedures that confirmed their own beliefs to be the more convincing and probative ones, and they reported corresponding shifts in their beliefs as the various results and procedures were presented.  The net effect of such evaluations and opinion shifts was the postulated increase in attitude polarization.

Argument, then, doesn't change people's minds; it makes believers believe more strongly.

This is why, I think, the homeopaths have been doubling down on their rhetoric as of late.  The critics of homeopathy have been outspoken -- from James Randi's fiery takedown of homeopaths to "What's the Harm?", a running list of people who are documented to have been harmed or killed by taking homeopathic "remedies" rather than seeking conventional medical care.

All of this has, I think, contributed to a "siege mentality" amongst the practitioners of homeopathy, leading them to espouse ever more extreme views -- a result that Lord, Ross, and Lepper would not be surprised by, I think.  Take, as an example, this webpage, the work of John Benneth, a strident homeopath who claims therein that homeopathy doesn't just work for your standard-issue colds, flu, headache, and heartburn, it works for... damn near anything.

Think I'm kidding?  Here are a few of the things that Benneth wants to "treat" with homeopathy.

Child abuse:

30,000 or more children were left permanently physically disabled from abuse and neglect. Child abuse in the United States afflicts more children each year than leukemia, automobile accidents, and infectious diseases combined. With growing unemployment, incidents of abuse by jobless parents increased dramatically. Homeopathy could have helped with individualized constitutional treatments and a remedy such as Magnesium muriaticum.

Gunshot wounds:

In one year 85,000 Americans were wounded by firearms, of which 38,000 die, 2,600 children. Homeopathy could have helped with ledum pelustre , aconitum napellum, arnica Montana and individualized constitutional treatments.

Diabetes:

In one year, 160,000 Americans died from diabetes. Homeopathy could have helped with remedies such as Apoc. Carc. Kali-n. Squil. and Uran-n.

AIDS:

1,000,000 Americans were estimated to have AIDS as of 1996; over 250,000 died of it. Homeopathy could have helped with a remedy such as Carcinosin.

Mental illness and mental retardation:

In one year 255,000 Americans mentally ill or retarded Americans, released in recent years were in flophouses or wandering U.S. streets. Homeopathy could’ve helped with remedies such as Arg-n. Arn. Bor. Calc. Carb-v. Form. GRAPH. Hep. Hyos. Kali-c. Nat-m. Nit-ac. Nux-v. Petr. Ph-ac. PHOS. Plb. Psor. Puls. Ran-b. Rhus-t. Sep. Sil. Sulph. Tab. and Tarax.

The trauma of rape:

700,000 American women were raped, one every 45 seconds. Homeopathy could have helped with remedies such as Staphysagria, AIDS Cench. Kreos. LSD. Petr. Posit. Sep.

Elder abuse:

1,800,000 elderly Americans who live with their families were subjected to serious abuse such as forced confinement, underfeeding, and beatings. The mistreatment of elderly people by their children and other close relatives grew dramatically as economic conditions worsened. Homeopathy could’ve helped the victims in their recovery and the victimizers with their anger with remedies such as Nux-v, Cere-s. LSD. Posit. Salx-f. Staph.

Drug addiction:

In one year six and a half million (6,500,000) used heroin, crack, speed, PCP, cocaine or some other hard drug on a regular basis. Homeopathy could have helped with remedies such as Agar. Ant-c. Bry. Chin. COLOC. Hydr. Lach. NUX-V. Op. Ruta and Sulph, indicated in drug poisoning.

And finally, amazingly, child abduction:

150,000 American children are reported missing every year. 50,000 of these simply vanish. Their ages range from one year to mid-teens. According to the New York Times, “Some of these are dead, perhaps half of the John and Jane Does annually buried in this country are unidentified kids.” Homeopathy could have helped with individualized treatments. Homeopathy could have helped with remedies like Absin. Cimic. OP. Phos. Plb. Rhus-t. Staph. Stram., Falco-p, and Magnesium muriaticum .

Mad yet?  I hope so.  Benneth and his fellow purveyors of sugar pills have, as the opposition grows louder, grown louder themselves, making ever wilder claims about what their magic remedies can do for you.  And if you think that Benneth himself is just a lone voice, read the comments section on his webpage -- you'll find that the vast majority of them agree with him.  (I realize, of course, that this is a skewed sample -- the comments on the page represent those who (1) found Benneth's site, (2) read it all the way through, (3) felt motivated enough to write a response, and (4) Benneth himself didn't delete.  But still.)  Here's an example:

At the foundation of John’s extremely informative post, with statistics that should humble our allopathic arrogance, is that humans in an imbalanced condition are sick, damaged, damaging and in pain.

The arguments presented here , critical of JB’s information, deny, overlook or dismiss the philosophical proposal that healthy people do not become criminals and that healthy, victimized people can heal from their traumas. Socially, economically, emotionally, politically, physically and psychically, – health is a fundamental condition. Without it every outcome is a compensation and a handicap. Every solution We have lowered our expectations for health. Shame on us for acquiescing to the precepts of a patriarchal system that wants to keep us sick, sad and hopeless.

Right.  Because all of the "allopathic" (i.e. effective) doctors I know have, as their main career goal, keeping their patients "sick, sad, and hopeless."

I can only draw one positive message from all of this, and it comes from looking at the converse of Lord, Ross, and Lepper's main thesis; that the wild and desperate claims of the homeopaths are an indication that their anti-science, zero-evidence views are on the way out.  But "on the way out" and "gone" are two different things, and I can't help but wonder how many more lives will be lost before homeopathy joins the "four humors" model of human health in the dustbin of history.

The Masonic Red Cross vampire conspiracy

Well, I have reached the woo-woo equivalent of Nirvana.  I just ran across the single stupidest claim in the world.  This one beats the previous odds-on favorite, which was the medicines that you pay for online, and which then download directly into your body as you sit in front of your computer monitor.  Because of quantums, of course.  Everything woo-woo has to be because of quantums.

But nope.  That one is a weak second-place finisher by comparison to what showed up on the David Icke forums last week.  Are you ready?  Here we go:

You shouldn't participate in Red Cross blood drives.  Because the Red Cross is working hand-in-glove with the Masons, who then use most of the donated blood to drink in their Satanic, animal-sacrificing, devil-worshiping rituals.

If you don't believe me, here's the link.  But in case you're understandably reluctant to push David Icke's hit tracker up, and give him the impression that what he hosts on his website is even vaguely connected with reality, I will quote the relevant passages for you.

So we have all heard of the Red Cross, and how they hold blood drives around the world.

In America, many of these blood-drives occur at your local Masonic/Satanic Lodge.

We, as donors, are misled into believing that this donated blood will "saved the lives" of many people, and no doubt a LITTLE of this blood DOES help save lives. But there is something more sinister, more satanic, goin gon [sic] with these blood-drives than meets the eye.

Clearly, 90% of the donated blood is, literally, drank by Masons, Illuminati, and the Church, with about 5% going to help those who need it, the rest spoils before it's used.

Oh, clearly.  Do go on.

The Red Cross could care less if you live, and prefer that you die. But the demand for "fresh" blood by these Vampires is what started this whole blood donation thing. Think about it. Someone from your family needs blood, then a family member can donate within a few minutes. If there are no family members alive to donate, then a list a people willing to donate is/has been/still is, available. Nothing better that "super-fresh", minutes-old blood.

But you see, people like the Royals in the U.K., the scum buckets in The White House, Senate, Congress, your local Masonic Mayor, Police Chief, Masonic business owners....well, they drink blood like you and I drink beer.

Blood is the "life" in a body, and these vampires believe that drinking blood will keep them young (and other reasons).

The Red Cross. Feeding Masonic/Illuminati Vampires for decades. If you give to this Masonic controlled organization....STOP IT.

Righty-o.  And that explains why the Red Cross is always on the scene in disaster-stricken areas -- so they can find new and helpless victims.  To exsanguinate.  And then bring the fresh blood to the Masons, so they can drink it.

Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Initially, I hoped that this was just the work of one lone wacko, and that no one else could possibly believe it other than the delusional individual who wrote it.  So when I came across this post, I Googled "Masons Red Cross blood drinking rituals," thinking that I'd get "No Relevant Results," and would have my faith in humanity assuaged.

This turned out to be a mistake.  I got over 30,000 hits.  The first few not only implied that the Masons and the Red Cross were working together to deprive you of your life's blood, but that they were in cahoots with various combinations of the following, depending on which version you go for:

• the Vatican
• the Jews
• the Reptilians
• the Jesuits
• the Muslims
• the Bilderberg Group
• the Knights Templar
• the Rosicrucians

And I cannot help but think it is significant that the two ads on the webpage about the Masonic Red Cross Blood Drinking Conspiracy have to do with (1) removing "flouride" [sic] from your tap water because the government is trying to poison you, and (2) claims that the medical establishment has been wrong all along, and "cancer is a preventable fungus."

So.  Yeah.  I feel like this is sort of the mother lode, the most concentrated vein of sterling-pure stupidity ever discovered.  It almost makes me feel like my job as a blogger is over -- that anything I could say or do after this would be an anticlimax.

Of course, the problem is, saying "this is the dumbest idea ever conceived" is always a false statement, because no sooner do you say it than the woo-woos take it upon themselves to prove you wrong.  They take that kind of thing as a challenge.

But even so, I think they'll have a hard time beating this one.