Good morning Acowlytes! How are your livers this morning? Nice and squeaky clean? Not sure what I’m on about? Then allow me to introduce you to Tsetsinka, Goddess of Liver Cleansing. If you travel over to CureZone.com (‘Educating Instead of Medicating’), you can read Tsetsinka’s mind-boggling instructions on how to cleanse your liver without using oil or lemon juice! Incredible, I know! To you and me it sounds completely ridiculous, but it’s true! Instead of unpleasant oil and lemon juice concoctions, Tsetsinka has come up with a method that uses… oil and LIME juice! And egg yolks!
“But Reverend,” I hear you exclaim, “My liver isn’t even dirty!” Well, Tsetsinka begs to differ. According to her, your liver is a filthy steaming worm-infested putrid lump. You might want to read the entire text of her ‘method’ before we carry on (I was tempted to quote the whole damn thing here, but on reflection I decided you might just prefer to come back for the highlights).
OK. Has the urge to laugh (or vomit) subsided? Very well, let’s begin.
Have you asked yourself… why do i have to endure such unpleasant moments when flushing my liver of Gallstones and filth? I have!
Yes, but more importantly my dear Tsetsinka, have you asked yourself why you have gallstones in your liver?
You certainly don’t have feel unconfortably during the flush at all. there is a much easier and more pleasant way of cleaning your liver ducts and gall bladder, and even your intestants get cleaned from this procedure.
Intestants! Now there’s a word you don’t hear every day.(i)
I believe you will look at least 10 years younger and more beautiful! No need for oil and lemon juice, when you are using this method. it amazes me that this information is not posted here or anywhere else on the liver detox knowledge pages of this website.
Us it doesn’t amaze so much.
you will experience a perfectly pink tounge in just 3-4 days and your skin will begin to glow like a peach and you will get long, very shiny hair, your nails will grow rapidly and you will feel like you can lift a mountain.
I’m not entirely convinced I want to look like a hairy peach with long nails and a pink tounge. Or tongue, for that matter. Even if I was preternaturally strong.
Tsetsinka goes on to give us a step-by-step outline of her recipe, which consists solely of limes, egg yolks and sunflower oil. A cup of sugar and you could make a nice Key Lime pie, but I digress.
8. using a wooden utencil (any utencil except for metal), gently beat the mixture only a couple of times. simply a couple of stirs are sufficent to get the juice and yolks to mix.
Gee whiz – that’s so EASY! Almost as easy as being able to spell ‘utensil’ and ‘sufficient’ correctly!
11. you may feel the urge to sleep almost immediately after that, so you may want to drink this potion right before bedtime, instead of in the morning. most importantly, be sure that you have not eaten or drank anything in the last 3 hours.
12. when you wake up from your nap, after 2-3 hours have elapsed, you will feel like you have 10 horse powers instead of 1 human power. the energy you will aquire from this is instant and perminant.
Your horse powers come at a cost, however – a depletion of your spelling powers. It’s a small price to pay for having a mane and hooves.
13. your nose will feel clogged. this is because your liver has just purged an incredible amount of tixins and dirt into your intestine. even if there is nothing blocking your nose cavity, your nose will feel clogged. for those who have done Liver Flushes will know what i am talking about. this is the very feeling of stones and gunk leaving the liver and entering the entstine.
Ah, the ol’ enstsine! Just next to the intestants, if I remember my medical studies correctly. Of course I didn’t aquire my doctorate, but luckily I had sufficent utencils to deal with tixins and was confortably able set up my site at CureZone.com!
14. finally, if you have an enema kit, you need to use very warm water to clean out your intestines, and it is imperative that you use 2 full enemas with very warm water, in order to draw the gunk out from the top of the small upper instestine to the lower one and then out.(ii)
I guess if you try every possible combination of letters, you’ll get it eventually.
15. unbelieveable things will come out of you, sometimes green stones, sometimes plaque, sometimes worms and parasites and sometimes just black, black, black filty water.
I…. er… well… BLEURRGGGHHHH. Oh. Sorry about that. Green stones? Plaque? Worms and parasites? Tsetsinka, my dear, you really might like to think about changing your diet.
you will be literally wowed at the results after the first day and double-wowed of the results after the 2, 3,4th day. by the end of the week, you will feel like you can take over the world! yes, the feeling is incredible!
Ehhhh. I dunno…. I’ve never been ‘double-wowed’ by anything Oh… yeah I guess there was that thing that Cindy Lawler could do with her tongue… but passing black black black filt(h)y water doesn’t sound like it would be double-wowing so much as just plain disgusting.
If you feel unconfortable using an enema, stones, gunk, mucouid plaque, worms, parasites and eggs can still come out, but not as full-capacity as when you flush with an enema
Oh, well, yes, with a sales pitch like that everybody definitely wants the full capacity enema. How could anyone possibly resist the allure of a comprehensive flushing sluice of worms, parasites, eggs and mucuoid plaque! My imagination is just going wild here – maybe Tsetsinka should consider whipping that sentence up into a screenplay and seeing if she can get some traction in Hollywood with an Alien sequel!
If you have any questions, email me at neprotivo@yahoo.com! i answer all emals.
There ya go Acowlytes. She answers all emails! Your mission, should you choose to accept it – ask Tsetsinka some questions and get back to us here with the answers!
And if your brain isn’t reeling after all that, then I suggest that for some further mucuoid plaque fun you might like to delve into the thread replies of Tsetse’s(iii) post. Me, I’m having a hard time believing it’s not all some kind of elaborate practical joke. And yet….
Above all, remember : CureZone.com ‘Educating Instead of Medicating’!
How often have you noticed the numbers 11:11, 12:12, 10:10, 22:22, 12:34, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44 or 5:55 popping up all over the place? These number sequences are not necessarily only time prompts. They can also be number sequences, like 333, 1111 etc. To your mind, is this a coincidence, or are they too frequent to be random? Perhaps you are puzzled or amused by this phenomenon? Possibly even a little bit nervous?
The question everyone is asking is “What does 11:11 mean?” and “Is there a reason for this?”
That’s actually two questions, as it happens, and I have, in fact, asked each of them exactly NO times in my life in relation to any of the ideas advanced on 1111 Spirit Guardians, the website from which this information comes.
1111 Spirit Guardians is a spectacular outpouring of mindless claptrap, which sounds almost like it could have been put together by the same people who brought you Special One Drop Liquid.
The basic gist of the site is that celestial beings called Midwayers are communicating with humans by arranging numbers in such a way as to send ‘signals’ to chosen recipients via digital clocks. Apparently (according to the site) this is happening to a lot of people.
11:11 signals are driving me nuts!
This is a very typical comment from folks who reach this site.
I should think a more typical kind of comment is “Wow, what a load of gobbledygook”, or “Do you also sell Space Diamonds?”
So how is it that these strange supernatural entities have become fixated on the numbers 11.11?
O-k-a-y… So they asked the digital chip makers to reserve them a few numbers…? I guess that does demonstrate some forward thinking. It seems like a kind of a roundabout way of communicating though – why the rigmarole?
Hey – they started it! I would have simply suggested conversation in the first place. It’s extremely tedious trying to get your ideas across in clock language.
What do I have to do?
Acknowledge it out loud. Say – OK guys I hear you, tell me what you want. This speaking out loud is to get around the problem that Midwayers do not automatically have access to our thoughts.
Our clocks, yes, our thoughts, not so much.
What proof have you got?
Well it’s getting so that this is now pretty much proven, simply because by following our instructions, so many other people have found these guys, and talked with them.
Yeah, now see, that’s not actually proof. That’s just you telling us something that may or may not have any truth in it. Proof is independent of personal opinions. You might like to see if you can dig up any of that.
The 1111 Guardians site is, apparently, the handiwork of one George Barnard, a self-styled ‘psychic’ and writer. Barnard claims to be able to ‘channel’ the Midwayers and has transcribed a mind-boggling amount of material from them.
George has been dealing with these guys for over 60 years. He sees them, and talks to them. Mostly he sees with his spiritual eyes, but there have been cases of physical manifestation as well. You could not expect a psych (George) to believe in the voices in his head if they did not turn up physically, could you?
The last sentence seems somehow metaphysically tautological. I don’t think anyone would be surprised if George has, aside from seeing the Midwayers with his ‘spiritual’ eyes,(i) talked to them, shaken hands with them or stayed up late playing poker with them.
What I find intensely (and fascinatingly) strange about people like George, is that they are somehow completely unable to understand the process whereby our brains naturally knit together unrelated incidents in an attempt to find some kind of cohesion for them. We all do this, but most of us realise that it’s just a curious ability that evolution has bestowed upon us – some vestige of our pattern-matching skills honed way back in our time on the veldt, that has now gone into idle mode and leaps to the fore when our brains aren’t productively engaged. Sure you notice the clock is on 11:11. It’s a pattern. As is 12:12 or 10:10 or 12:34 or a wide variety of other numerical combinations. Our brains like patterns. We notice patterns because they are pretty. If the number on the clock is 10:52 or 09:48 it doesn’t ‘stick’ as much and therefore goes completely unnoticed, like nearly every other set of numbers on a digital clock that denote the time.(ii) People like George are completely unable to see that this process is totally normal. It’s as if their world filters are somehow broken and they are obliged to find meaning in the vast drifts of meaningless trivia that the rest of us are able to tune out.
Sometimes I feel a little guilty making fun of people like George. It is quite probable that he has come to completely and profoundly believe his fantasy about Midwayers and meaningful communications via clocks. How is he different, for instance, from the millions upon millions who believe they have meaningful dialogue with a discarnate entity called ‘God’ who lives in a place called ‘Heaven’ and has an adversary called ‘Satan’? How is George’s communication with his Midwayers any different from praying to God, or taking Communion or giving Confession?
Yes, sometimes I feel a little guilty, but then I glance at my digital clock and see it flip over to 4:44. And then I realise that it’s the Midwayers telling me to make fun of him. And everything is alright again.
Some entertaining links from the 1111 Guardians Site:
Cowpokes! The End is Nigh! Run for the hills! What with the threats of terrorism, biological warfare, solar flares, tsunamis, the flipping of the magnetic poles, an atheist woman as head of the Australian government and a black man as the head of the US government, it will be a MIRACLE if we last even another week! But, dear feiends, have no fear! Should one (or more!) of the aforementioned catastrophes overtake us, the folks over at Vivos have anticipated every eventuality for the approaching apocalypse and are offering the ultimate ‘life assurance’ and ‘the greatest chance of future restoration of the world as we know it, regardless of the catastrophe’.
Here – let them tell you about it in their own words:
Millions of people believe that we are living in the “end times”. Many are looking for a viable solution to survive potential future Earth devastating events. Eventually, our planet will realize another devastating catastrophe, whether manmade, or a cyclical force of nature. Disasters are rare and unexpected, but on any sort of long timeline, they’re inevitable. It’s time to prepare!
Vivos is a privately funded venture, with no religious affiliations, building a global network of underground shelters, to accommodate thousands of people. Vivos will provide a life assurance solution for those that wish to be prepared to survive these potential events, whether they occur now, in 2012, or in decades to come
Yes, by purchasing a share in a Vivos community bunker, or getting them to build your own bespoke shelter, you can survive the End Times and walk out refreshed into a world full of bracing post-catastrophe horror! To see what you’ll get for your money, you can take a tour around a typical Vivos facility, furnished with all the comforts of home, including attractive paintings of idyllic landscapes that you’ll never see again:
Geez guys, could you have found a more gloomy and depressing piece of music for that? Are you selling a shelter or a tomb here?
Seriously, no matter how hard I try, I can’t think of any calamity listed on the Vivos site that seems worse than ending up in some underground IKEA nightmare with a bunch of people who are inclined to believe that the world is going to end in 2012 ‘because the Mayan calendar says so’.(i) Let me see: Electromagnetic Pulse? Nope. Killer comet? Nope. Planet X? Nope. Super volcano? Nope.(ii) I’d rather take my chances with any of those.
What are these people thinking? Have they never seen a post-apocalyptic movie? Have they never played Fallout? Do they really want to climb out of their bunkers after a year of mind-numbing boredom to find themselves wandering around a planet full of shotgun-wielding mutant vigilantes with no morals and bad personal hygiene? Or worse, Fundamental Islamic militia?
There are so many things wrong with this unhinged doom-laden vision that it’s hard to know where to start. From the hysterical countdown to annihilation (905 days, 06 hours, 31 minutes, 24 seconds remaining) to the hyper-paranoid ‘scenarios’ videos (Nuclear Terrorism! Surviving Anarchy! Secret Government Shelters!) the website plays out like some bad Hollywood projection of the Apocalypse. It takes mere seconds to find places where this plan will start splitting at the seams.
Take a quick tour around the Vivos Knowledge Base and see how many opportunities for failure you can find. The spectacular promises (hydroponic gardens to support 200 people for more than a year, 24 hour power generation with supplemental wind and solar, hotel-style amenities, impregnable defences to resist volcanic eruption, seismic disturbance and biological contamination) fairly reek of hyperbole.(iii) Half these things are all but impossible to achieve. And if Vivos doesn’t deliver, what are you going to do when the anarchist Muslim terrorist bio-freaks come pouring through your Vivos shelter airlock? Ask for your money back?
Tetherd Cow Advice: If you’re worried about the Apocalypse arriving in 2012,(iv) stock up on single malt whisky and plan to be somewhere with a good view. In the meantime, send me your bank account details. After all, you can’t take it with you.
You can watch a video on the Vivos site about how the ‘incredibly precise’ Mayan calendar (‘… a calendar more accurate even than our own’) predicts the world will end in 2012. [↩]
I’m a little surprised to see that Zombie Attack and Alien Invasion aren’t featured, to be honest. If nothing else, they’d make for some really cool additional icons. [↩]
For a start – where are they getting their air from? Filtered air from outside will be useless in a case of chemical attack, and it’s not like they can stockpile a year’s worth of oxygen for 200 people… [↩]
You can bet your Nigerian fortune that I’ll be revisiting all these predictions in 2013! [↩]
Good morning Faithful Acowlytes! I hope you got plenty of restful sleep last night because today you’ll need to have your wits about you as we start off with a quiz. This is the kind of quiz where I show you two images and you have to spot the differences between them. I’m sure you’ve done one of those before. OK, are you ready? Here we go then:
No? Look very very carefully. Still nothing? Hahaha! I apologize dear friends – I’ve tricked you with this one because image #1 is a teapot and image #2 is ALSO a teapot! In fact the only tiny difference between them is that the first one is a Royal Doulton, and the second one is a royal dolt.
Generally I try to refrain from picking on Royalty(i) here on The Cow because, well, it’s a bit too much like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean, it’s not their fault, really, is it? All those centuries of inbreeding does tend to take its toll. Luckily, most Royals are safely out of harm’s way for the most part, but sadly it doesn’t stop them from opening their mouths and gabbing when they have an audience.
In a presentation last week to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Prince Charles places culpability for all our climate problems on ‘mechanistic thinking’ which ‘goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion’. The prince thinks that the reason for our current environmental difficulties is because the Western world is having a ‘deep, inner crisis of the soul’.
This is a banal piece of reasoning that is as antiquated as the concept of the Royal Family itself. The Prince of Wales pulls one of the classic tricks of the religiously-inclined of equating a quest for knowledge with an abrogation of moral responsibility. In other words, science equals heartless amoral exploitation; religion(ii) equals warm and fuzzy caring and sharing. Even a schoolkid can see the stupidity inherent in this simplistic notion.
Prince Charles’ view of science as ‘cold and mechanistic’ is one that is beloved of science detractors and shows no understanding at all of scientists or scientific pursuit. Additionally, the Prince is either willful or stupid by ignoring (in favour of its perceived ills) the extraordinary benefits so obviously brought to us by science. How about the science that gave us the cure for smallpox, Your Highness? Or the science that has allowed millions of people access to clean water and nutritious food? How about the good deeds of the scientists who figured out how to clone insulin so that diabetics can have affordable treatment? How about the wonderful achievements of science that let us talk to our friends and family wherever they may be on the planet, at any time of the day or night? Or the science that allows us to make great adventures inwards to our consciousness and outward to the cosmos?
Like many of the purveyors of woo, the Prince of Wales wants it both ways; he eschews science because it is ‘evil’, but is quite happy to enjoy the countless improvements it brings to our lives. He blames science for our creating our ‘materialistic culture’ and for the ‘damaging way it is used to exploit the world’, yet offers no practical alternatives – just notions of vague, superficial, wistful magical thinking.
He advocates a world without science and without individual material aspirations.(iii)He pines for a world with a folky agrarian culture where superstitious thinking rules.
It’s not surprising in the end. Royalty has always done very well in such climates.
Well, except for King Willy of course – but he’s such good sport. [↩]
The Prince doesn’t specifically campaign for religion as such, but it’s the same kind of thinking – the mention of ‘souls’ and the faux surprise when he says that he finds it ‘baffling that so many scientists profess a faith in God yet this has little bearing on the ‘damaging’ way science is used to exploit the natural world’ all mixes in to his diffuse religious view of how things work. [↩]
I just love it when event transpire such that I can bring you two of my favourite subjects in one Tetherd Cow Ahead post. Today’s is such a post and it’s brought to you by the Melbourne Age which is carrying an article that combines the stupidity of the newspaper business with the beliefs of a loony. It runs under the headline ‘Weather has conspiracy theorists strung out’
INEXPLICABLY odd images(i) on Bureau of Meteorology radar. Cyclones off the Australian coast and the most intense storm to hit Melbourne in living memory. A controversial US military facility in Alaska suspected of research into weather control … It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi conspiracy thriller.
Yes, there’s no quibbling there – that’s exactly what that hodge-podge of unrelated factoids sounds like (although I’d be inclined to add the word ‘bad’ just before ‘sci-fi’). So the implication here is that it’s going to turn out to be The Truth, right, as opposed to the fiction of a ‘sci-fi conspiracy thriller’? Well, you’d be totally wrong if you were thinking that.
The story goes on to detail the following points:
•The Bureau of Meteorology radar has been recording ‘a number of very strange patterns – rings, loops, starbursts’ around Melbourne.
•There have been some big storms here.
•The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility in Alaska has powerful transmitters and radars.
From this, the correspondent spins up a vacuous story that says in essence that websites ‘specializing in pseudoscience’ have ‘leapt on the notion’ that the three things above are connected and the ‘government’ is trying to control the weather.
Is anybody else feeling the need to stick their head in a bucket of ammonia?
To simplify: this is a story which is actually just a free plug for the nutty ideas of lunatics, while all the while pretending to ‘news’ by distancing itself from aforementioned lunatics. And, to put the icing on the cake, the story is embellished with an image of the recent SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, which has exactly NO relevance to anything at all.
As I’m reading this, I find myself thinking ‘Who the hell is responsible for this guff and how do they get to be working on a news desk?’ So I scroll up to the byline. It will probably come as no surprise to you at all to find that the literary genius behind this story is none other than reporter Stephen Cauchi, who has provided us with much mirth previously here on The Cow with his non-news style of journalism.
Which brings me to the second of my favourite Tetherd Cow subjects – insane people. Mr Cauchi’s main source for the above-mentioned conspiracy turns out to be someone who is very familiar to anyone who’s spent time around the pseudoscience traps – a fellow who goes by the name of Colin Andrews. Now, just to set you up, Mr Andrews has about ZERO credibility as any kind of authoritative source. In fact, if you were actually trying to find a less credible spokesperson (for anything except nutty ideas I guess) you’d have your work cut out for you.
Colin Andrews first came to prominence as an ‘expert’ on crop circles back in the 1980s, and contrary to all common sense, still believes that they are made by ‘aliens’. Since that time, he has advanced all manner of implausible conspiracies across numerous disciplines. In this case, Mr Andrews’ ‘government weather control’ paranoia centers on some ‘anomalous’ radar screen captures from earlier this year when the south coast of Australia suffered some unusually fierce storm activity. This is a couple of them:
Well, yeah, sure, these ones are from the Bureau of Meteorology radar in Broome in Western Australia, but close enough, right?
These are the ‘inexplicably’ odd radar images to which Mr Cauchi refers in his first paragraph. Rather than conclude (as might any rational person) that the radar images are simply quite explicable as imperfections in the way that a meteorological radar functions, Mr Andrews’ brain oscillates to the most wildly improbably alternative – that the images are some kind of government weather control experiment that has been cunningly contrived to appear like a radar imperfection.
Mr Andrews persists in this belief even when told as much from someone who works for the Bureau of Meteorology:
Re: The round radar prob in WA, it is a BOM Radar unit which has its lower rain level threshold setup too low, ie, too sensitive, which gives the noisy radar reading like that. Nothing to do with HAARP, which, as you know, is in Alaska. I see images like this a lot, as I work for the Bureau of Meteorology in QLD.
And you know what? You too can see images like this on Australian meteorological radars if you feel like clicking on every radar station that the BOM offers. If you think like Mr Andrews, you’re likely to find a LOT of government hanky panky. It’s a wonder the government has any time for actual governing.
After giving plenty of airing to Colin Andrews’ hair-brained ideas, the Age article goes on to seek opinions from authoritative skeptics, who quite reasonably call the idea ‘silly’. We could have started with that conclusion and made the whole story one sentence long, viz:
We asked a sensible person, Mr Tim Mendham (president of the Australian Skeptics), what he thought of noted loony Colin Andrews’ idea that the government is controlling the weather, and he said it was silly.
I guess that doesn’t make for ‘pizazz’ but the content is exactly the same as the story as it stands.
Anyhoo, after a lot of stupid waffle, the article rounds off with:
The Sunday Age tried to contact Mr Andrews, who is based in the US, but there was no reply. That could be because, according to his website, he was in Oregon for last weekend’s 11th annual UFO Festival.
Smirk smirk smirk. Well if that’s your attitude Mr ‘cynical’ Stephen Cauchi, why are you making this nitwit’s ideas out to have any credence at all?
It makes me feel quite nauseous to note that this was No. 1 on the ‘most read’ list of Top National Articles in The Age today.
Well done Melbourne Age! Another pin on the board for the Great De-Braining of the Human Race.(ii)
UPDATE: At the time I wrote this yesterday, there were no comments on the article. Now there are 19. After reading them I actually feel like walking over to the train line near my house and throwing myself in front of the 10:15 to Flinders St Station. WHY WAS I BORN INTO A WORLD WITH THIS MUCH STUPID?!
The comments are now closed and the one I left was evidently deemed unsuitable for inclusion – evidently it made a little too much sense.
Why, why, why do reporters continue to use this kind of language? The images are ENTIRELY explicable in any number of ways. They are ONLY inexplicable in the mind of Colin Andrews. Stephen Cauchi, you are an IDIOT. [↩]
Or, one optimistically hopes, another nail in the coffin of the old news media. [↩]
There are in the world some truly detestable human beings, and Fred Phelps, pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas is one of them. This poisonous hate-filled individual is about as repugnant as anyone living on this planet can possibly be. His peculiar Fascist-Calvinist view of Christianity holds that Christ died so that only a few ‘elect’ people will be ‘saved’ and believes he is one of the elite on Earth who is worthy of God’s Grace. You decide what kind of a God might want to claim this man:
That’s one seething humanity-loathing mess of a person. That’s a man who has hate infused so thoroughly in his being that I doubt he can experience much else. I imagine that being inside his head is like living in a perpetually mouldy rat-infested sewer. How does someone get to be like this? More to the point, how does a person like that get through their obviously misery-saturated day? If ever I need to remind myself how much I love life, living, my friends, my family and this wonderful experience of EVERYTHING around me, I think I need only watch that video again.
You’ve been reading Tetherd Cow Ahead: proudly brought to you from the Land of the Sodomite Damned.
Just over a year ago (April 1, 2009, as it happens) I made my first post in what was to become a bit of an ongoing series – the ShooTag saga. Had Melissa Rogers, one of the CEOs of ShooTag, refrained from calling me ignorant at that time, and had not attempted to air her preposterous faux scientific notions on my blog, my interest in the dubious ShooTag might have blown away in the wind like so many other tumbleweeds of pseudoscience that have rolled my way. That wrong step by the ShooTaggers was just the first of many that has kept them in the focus of my attention and led us to this moment, which I think you will agree when you get to the end of this post, is a defining one for the credibility of this product and its makers.
When I first visited the ShooTag site, my main attention was, of course, on the science that was claimed to be behind this remarkable gadget, and, to that end, one of my first stops was the ShooTag Science page. It was immediately obvious that the scientific sounding language that was used there was utter waffle (you can read the full text of what was on the original Science page in the footnotes to this post).(some lines of vague noncommittal nonsense.
The page also featured a link to a report called ‘Subtle Magnetic Repulsion of Insect Pests’ by someone called Professor William Nelson, which allegedly appeared in a periodical called The Quantum Agriculture Journal. It took me a scant second to establish that The Quantum Agriculture Journal didn’t exist [Note: See update at the bottom of this post]. The linked paper was an incoherent ramble through Chaos Theory Lite, MRI mechanics, the electro-sensitivity of sharks and the effects of magnetism on cell cultures – much of it inaccurate, most of it contextually adrift and the sum of it an addled mess of gee-whiz pop-science ideas that would be at home in a bad science fiction movie. [See more about this, also, below.]
Unsurprisingly, this link was also rapidly removed from the ShooTag site after my post, along with all references to the Quantum Agriculture Journal and Professor William Nelson. You can still see the original full text here though, complete with reference to ‘The Quantum Agriculture Journal’ edited by Prof. William Nelson for IMUNE.(ii)
At the time I thought that the reason for these excisions was simply that the ShooTaggers didn’t like being sprung for their silly science. Fair enough – it does make them look pretty incoherent. However. Our recent investigations into the magnetic strips on the ShooTags prompted me to re-examine some of the scientific claims made for the gadgets, in particular, the notion of the ‘trivector electromagnetic signature’ that seems to be of such importance in the ShooTag promotional literature.
So I plugged that phrase into Google. The very first result throws up a link to a pdf of a document called ‘QUANTUM ELECTRO DYNAMICS and The VOLT-AMMETRIC TRIVECTOR SIGNATURE For DUMMIES’ by William Nelson MD Prof of Medicine IMUNE.
The pdf is a disjointed mish-mash of misunderstood science and erroneous analogies all whirled up into ball of unfathomable conclusions. It sounds, in fact, not unlike the incomprehensible babblings of a certain Dr Werner.
And there he is again. That Professor William Nelson guy.
Now, we’ve had cause to mention him before here on The Cow, but only in passing reference to the ShooTag scam. I think it’s time we turned the magnifying glass onto Professor William Nelson himself.
Here is a clip of him ‘explaining the trivector’:
Whoa. That was even more incomprehensible than the pdf we just looked at.(iii)
Researching Dr Nelson isn’t hard. There are literally thousands of references to him across the net. These are just some of the things that have been claimed of him (mostly by himself):(iv)(v)(vi)(vii)
•He was childhood genius and accepted into Mensa at age 16(viii)
•He is an accomplished golf, tennis and basketball player and was selected to compete in gymnastics in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.
•He worked at NASA and was involved in the Apollo program, notably in the trajectory mathematics of the first moon landing(ix) and the rescue mission of the astronauts on the aborted Apollo 13 flight.
•He is an accredited quantum physicist, medical doctor, mathematician, computer expert, naturopath, acupuncturist, and homeopath.
•He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine on numerous occasions.
As well as the comprehensive reference links I’ve added above, you can read Professor William Nelson’s personal Curriculum Vitae here, courtesy of the Seattle Times. (Note that he tones down the more egregious exaggerations when writing in his own hand, and adds the caveat that ‘Whatever Dr Nelson says about himself can be relied on as true. Information that is not direct from Dr Nelson may be distorted’. O-k-a-y. Very convenient. And not that he bothers to correct any of this ‘distorted’ information anywhere, as far as I’m able to determine. To the contrary, as we shall see, he has a ‘friend’ who is very happy to take it one step further still…)
Depending how far you want to trawl and how much time you want to waste, you can find all kinds of other accomplishments for Dr/Prof Nelson. Needless to say, most of them can be established pretty quickly to be false. He (or anybody else) simply can’t know if he has ever been nominated for a Nobel Prize because Nobel Prize nominees aren’t advised they’ve been nominated and all nominations are kept secret for 50 years. So unless his Nobel Prize nomination was made when he was 10 or younger, that’s just plain rubbish.(xi) NASA explicitly denies(xii) having any involvement with a Professor William Nelson and it is possible that he is hoping to dupe people into mistaking him for Clarence William ‘Bill’ Nelson – a NASA mission payload specialist of some achievement.(xiii) And, investigation into ‘Professor’ Nelson’s degrees reveals that they all come from dubious unaccredited institutions and mail-order or online courses. He is certainly not a quantum physicist.
There is no shadow of a doubt that Professor William Nelson is not the man he paints himself to be. Indeed, sometimes the man Professor William Nelson paints himself to be is actually a woman. A woman who goes by the name of Desiré Dubounet. It turns out that William Nelson is a gender switcher.
Now, I want to say right off the bat that when it comes to gender identification and sexual preferences and fantasies, I’m fairly open-minded. There’s a pretty big sliding scale with sexuality as far as I’m concerned, and as long people don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses, I really don’t care. William Nelson’s right to be Desiré Dubounet is unassailable in my book, but his right to cheat, lie and swindle people out of good medical care is what I have in my sights here. To that end, I present a clip of Desiré Dubounet that is as frightening for its dreadful taste as it is for its demonstration of William Nelson’s mental state (WARNING – this is NSFW. It contains torrents of venomous bad language and it is quite surprising that it is still up on YouTube):
That’s a deeply troubled person by any reckoning. And Desiré Dubounet is not at all shy about promoting her ‘accomplishments’, either, be it for herself or for William Nelson. This from the Desiré Dubounet website:
Desiré is by far the most colourful, interesting, intelligent and courageous person in the world today… Nobody has changed the world as much as Desiré. Desiré as a super intelligent child was the first to max several intelligence tests, she was able to save the Apollo 13 astronauts, and has developed several patents that have revolutionized life.(xiv)
As we’ve seen in the video above, like a good many of the peddlers of pseudoscience, William Nelson/Desiré Dubounet portrays herself as being ‘persecuted’ for her beliefs. Claiming to have switched gender to ‘prevent the powers-that-be’ from killing her’ she makes her pseudoscience cause corporeal by dressing it up in a gender issue; that way, if her ideas are criticized she can make the accusation that it is her person that is being persecuted and that she is being witch-hunted by those who are intolerant of her human rights.(xv)
The truth of the matter is that in 1996(xvi) William Nelson fled his home in the USA to take up residence in Budapest because he has been indicted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on nine counts of felony fraud charges in relation to various ‘bioenergetic’ healing devices sold through his companies. These expensive (and needless to say completely bogus) devices, which are claimed to be effective for the treatment of all manner of ailments including debilitating diseases such as AIDS and cancer, have been implicated in the deaths of several severely ill people in the United States, and are responsible for the lengthening of the illnesses of numerous others. This is a monstrously repellent scam and William Nelson has made millions of dollars out of it. Consequently he lives extravagantly in a restored five story building in Budapest with his personal staff of about a dozen, including a cook, hairdresser, nanny, security guards and chauffeurs. He uses his money to make terrible movies,(xvii)even worse music, and run his nightclub Bohemian Alibi, among other things.(xviii)
William Nelson’s network for the sale of his machines (which go variously under the names EPFX, SCIO and QXCI) is widespread. He uses chiropractors, homeopaths, physicians, nurses and volunteers to sell the machines worldwide and there is no question that he knows that they do nothing at all (the disclaimer on the QXCI site says, in part ‘No claims are made of the system or of its results.’ which, in anybody’s language, is the ultimate ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card).
And the ‘scientific’ basis for these completely fraudulent, dangerous(xix) devices is the ‘trivector electromagnetic’ principle that Nelson promotes.
Which brings us, I believe, right back to ShooTag. As we have seen, Melissa Rogers and Kathy Heiney were at first very happy to invoke Professor William Nelson’s name when it suited their purpose(xx) and are still flaunting the ‘trivector electromagnetic’ principles behind their device. It seems to me very likely that Kathy Heiney, in her ‘training’ as a ‘Quantum Biofeedback Technician and Stress Management Specialist‘ could have come across the work of William Nelson. So, no real coincidence there. But now an obvious question arises: Is there any really tangible link between Professor William Nelson and ShooTag, Melissa Rogers and Kathy Heiney? Let’s see what a quick search brings up…
The link is protected with a login, but Google can see it, so it should be there… somewhere… Aha! Some further detective work from Dewi (who you will recall was our chief decoder of the data on the ShooTags a few posts back) reveals the complete schedule for the QX World Conference in Budapest, part of which features:
QX World Conference 2009. 8-11 October 2009. Budapest, Hungary.
Sunday, Oct. 11.
09.00, Prof. William C. Nelson/Desiré Dubounet. Introduce ShooTag – Melissa Rogers and Kathy Heiney.
09.15, Dr. Amanda Velloen. AIDS research.
12.00, Coffee Break.(xxi)
And the pieces of the puzzle all fall resoundingly into place. The QX World Conference is an event that has, over the last few years, been held annually in Budapest by William Nelson/Desiré Dubounet. At this conference, Nelson assembles the faithful from his Quantum Bioenergetic flock, and here they presumably shore up each others’ belief systems, trade war stories and have an opportunity to touch the hem of the Master’s (Mistresses?) garment. From this snippet of information we can deduce that Melissa Rogers and Kathy Heiney were there, were sheduled to be there, or at the very least were represented there in some way.(xxii) However you cut it, a visceral, and certainly not insubstantial link with the fraudulent, criminally culpable William Nelson is established.
Now, I will quickly add that the act of associating with a criminal does not make you yourself a criminal. It can in no way be construed that the Shoo!TAG sisters are involved with the felony fraud committed by William Nelson. But the inference is written plain – William Nelson is wanted for fraud by the FDA because the ideas behind his gadgets have no scientific substance and are, through their complete lack of efficacy, misleading and liable to cause harm. Melissa Rogers and Kathy Heiney, by all the available evidence, advocate those exact same pseudoscientific ideas for their Shoo!TAG products.
No wonder they were so quick to divest themselves of any relationship to Nelson. Once they realised that they simply didn’t need to have the endorsement of a nutty ‘professor’ like Nelson to get their product to sell, they ditched all reference to him quick smart.
The credentials of Shoo!TAG can no longer be in any doubt. With absolutely no scientific evidence to back up their claims, a product that is revealed to be nothing more than a stock-standard magnetic swipe card, some third party testing that demonstrates clearly the complete ineffectiveness of the tags, and an indisputable link to the unsubstantiated irrational beliefs of a person who is a fraud and a swindler wanted by the FDA, it is more than clear that Melissa Rogers and Kathy Heiney are ripping off pet owners wherever they have managed to get their silly product into a retail outlet. Worse, by encouraging the use of their product for humans, they are putting the lives of people at risk.
I consider that what we have here, then, on the matter of the Shoo!TAG’s bona fides, is an emphatic QED.
[UPDATE] – Dewi points out that something calling itself the Quantum Agriculture Journal does indeed exist as a one-off document in exe format. I want to make it very clear that the Quantum Agriculture Journal did not have any web presence at the time I searched for it originally – and I was extremely thorough. All available references to it at the time pointed back to the ShooTag site. I did some further searching and turned up another online version of the ‘scientific’ paper (attributed to Professor William Nelson) that was purportedly carried by the QAJ (and originally linked to the ShooTag site). You can read the complete paper here.
This is what I said of it in my original ShooTag post:
The ’scientific’ document itself (if you can be bothered) is a hare-brained ramble through a whole mess of abracadabra, beginning with some descriptions of chaotic attractors, jumping through magnetic resonance imaging and the electrical sensitivity of sharks, and ending up with the conductivity of chemicals in cells. It’s the most meaningless agglomeration of waffle that I’ve attempted to read in a very long while. If you’ve ever even seen a scientific paper, you know this ain’t one of those.
In light of recent comments by the ShooTaggers, though, it does have some interesting points. The ‘paper’ says that:
‘This three dimensional or trivector signature has been imprinted onto the magnetic field of a three-field magnetic memory card. This card is then hung around the neck of an animal and the magnetic field can stimulate the biology of the animal to build up defense to invaders.This is completely safe and proficient. In our preliminary farm tests the researchers found 75% less infestation of the insect pests when using the pests than in control populations. Further testing is presently being done in Europe.’
These words have been spoken in larger or smaller part by promoters of ShooTag at various times over the last year. It establishes quite clearly that they are using the exact same pseudoscience which underpins William Nelson’s fraudulent medical devices.
This is the ‘scientific explanation’ originally offered on the ShooTag Science page:
All things are composed of atoms that are mostly electrons and protons. In between the electrons and protons and in between the atoms is mostly empty space, filled with magnetic static, quantum and gravitational fields. The science of voltammetry tells us of the electrical principles of all biological entities. Our research has shown that subtle inductance/capacitance fields (magnetic and static) can have dramatic effects on biology.
The only true measurement in electricity is the voltage and amperage, everything else is a mathematical variation of the two. These calculations are referred to as virtual or mathematical measures. Variations in flow of amperage and voltage give us a way to measure capacitance, inductance and frequency. These measurements reflect the static and magnetic effects of bio-electricity.
This is straight out of the textbook of Professor William Nelson, without a shadow of a doubt. [↩]
A search for IMUNE shows it to be another of William Nelson’s projects; it features references to a course in ‘Quantum BioFeedback’ featuring instruction in EPFX, SCIO and QXCI devices. So this ‘reference’ is to a an article in a non-existent journal attached to a website belonging to the person who supposedly wrote the article. Do I need to point out the fraudulent nature of that circuitous process? [↩]
I could really rip this apart if I could be bothered, but honestly, it’s just one dumb concept warped into another dumb concept mashed into another dumb concept for its entire length. There’s no point even trying to attack all the daft pieces of it because the whole thing is just utter nonsense. [↩]
This really means nothing at all, even if it’s true – the Mensa tests don’t screen for lack of rational or logical thinking. You can still solve puzzles and be dissociated from a rational thought process [↩]
He would have been only 18, had that been the truth. [↩]
‘Motion picture’ is a very floppy term, and could simply indicated the huge number of YouTube videos attributed to Professor Nelson/Desiré Dubounet. [↩]
Digging deeper we can find evidence that maybe William Nelson worked in a minor capacity for a company that worked for NASA. That’s not the same as ‘working for NASA’ and certainly not the same as ‘saving the lives of the Apollo 13 crew’. [↩]
Omniscience – The narcissist often pretends to know everything, in every field of human knowledge and endeavour. He lies and prevaricates to avoid the exposure of his ignorance. He resorts to numerous subterfuges to support his God-like omniscience. Where his knowledge fails him – he feigns authority, fakes superiority, quotes from non-existent sources, embeds threads of truth in a canvass of falsehoods. He transforms himself into an artist of intellectual prestidigitation. Many narcissists are avowed autodidacts, unwilling to subject their knowledge and insights to peer scrutiny, or, for that matter, to any scrutiny. The narcissist keeps re-inventing himself, adding new fields of knowledge as he goes. This creeping intellectual annexation is a round about way of reverting to his erstwhile image as the erudite ‘Renaissance man’.
And she does do this, there is no question about that. There are numerous instances of this tactic in her writings and in the many online videos. [↩]
Or 1998 – like everything about William Nelson, the actual facts seem variable [↩]
Hollywood is not interested in his movies because they have been ‘pressured by the drug companies’ to avoid dealing with him. It has nothing to do with them being so bad as to be laughable. [↩]
Just an aside: if you thought the trolling by the various ShooTag supporters was bad, you should see how the supporters of William Nelson behave. It is very interesting to me that the tone of the commentary that I’ve read across various sites that have criticized Nelson is eerily similar to the way the ShooTaggers express themselves. I fully expect we’ll get trolled by both camps for this post. [↩]
Dangerous because they are completely ineffective. [↩]
And ditch it mighty fast when it didn’t, I might point out. [↩]
Dewi was able to reconstruct the entire schedule for the conference, even though none of it was directly available. He’s a good man to have on your side! [↩]
For their literal 15 minutes of fame in bioenergetic circles, it seems. [↩]
You may remember that I wrote, some time back, about Dr Masaru Emoto, a man who believes that water has feelings. Dr Emoto has a fairly substantial following in the magic water fraternity and his name is used to promote products such as H²Om Vibrational Water, which we’ve had cause to discuss previously on The Cow.
Well, it seems that Dr Emoto is happy to lend his name (and image, it would appear) to quackery, but is most reticent to appear anywhere that is critical of his ideas. This morning I received a letter from his office:
Hello,
I’m Michiko Hayashi from OFFICE MASARU EMOTO LLC in Tokyo, Japan.
I would like to let you know that your use of water crystal photos has not been approved by OFFICE MASARU EMOTO. Please find attached the letter “Use of water crystal images on websites” and make the appropriate procedure to use water crystal images legally.
This is part of the attached letter:
- IMPORTANT NOTICE –
Use of “water crystal” images on websites without permission
Please be informed that water crystal images are intellectual property, and OFFICE MASARU EMOTO LLC owns the copyrights to the water crystal photos that you have posted on your website. It is important that you obtain an official permission for such use authorized by OFFICE MASARU EMOTO LLC. The fee for the use on the website is 1,200€ (one thousand and two hundred Euro) or $1,400(one thousand and four hundred US dollars) for one year.
You what? 1,400 US dollars! Hahahahaha! I wonder if anyone would be daft enough to actually pay that? And I wonder even further whether they try this on with people who aren’t critical of Dr Emoto? Let’s do a quick image search, shall we… Oh, what a surprise! almost a hundred thousand images of Dr Emoto or his water crystals. And virtually none of them on sites that are critical of his silly ideas. The letter goes on to say:
If you have Mr. Masaru Emoto’s face photo (portrait rights) and/or his name on your websites, please delete it/ them IMMEDIATELY. The use of “Masaru Emoto®” and his portrait rights are strictly prohibited.
Ha. I hope that they aren’t thinking they can get away with his name being intellectual property too! Just sticking a ® on the end of something means toss-all folks.
I won’t bore you with the rest of the letter – it’s basically just repetitions of the same thing, coupled with a vague threat of legal action that doesn’t really scare me in the least. I have, however, um… altered the images I used on the original post because, quite frankly I can’t be bothered getting into any kind of legal dispute with people who aren’t able to think rationally.
I am a little disappointed in Dr Emoto and his office, if the truth be told. He got off pretty lightly on The Cow, all things considered. I cut him a bit of slack because I think he’s just a misguided old duffer, rather than a cynical con artist,(i) and he certainly didn’t get the roasting that many of his fellow loonies have copped on my pages. But it is immediately apparent from today’s letter, that, like all practitioners of pseudoscience, one of Dr Emoto’s raisons d’être is the financial reward his nutty beliefs bring.
Michiko signs off…
With love and gratitude,
Michiko Hayashi
… an unusual (to say the least) salutation for a legal letter. Perhaps you will not continue to feel much gratitude towards me Ms Hayashi, when you know I have no intention of paying you any money, and have not changed my opinion of Dr Emoto in the least. As for the love, well, I have a feeling that yours is nothing more than the watered-down kind.
Emoto is one of the very few of his ilk that has, at least, the courage to call his ideas ‘magic’. The problem is that he does so while wearing a lab coat and calling himself a doctor. Unfortunately most people aren’t able to understand that just because he has a laboratory and does ‘experiments’ doesn’t make him a scientist [↩]
Do you like these bottles of coloured water? Me too. I’ve always liked coloured bottles, and coloured glass and even stained-glass church windows. But little did I realize that it was not the visual pleasure that was at work on me, but the homeopathic effect of said items!
Here at Tetherd Cow Ahead, as we continue our support for World Homeopathy Awareness Week,(i) the boffins in the TCA labs have whipped up some potions that, believe it or not, have absolutely nothing absorbed in them except light! The homeopathic effect of merely the colour in these elixirs will cure you of everything from mild ennui to autism. I know, I know – hard to believe I could make up something quite so implausible and expect anyone to swallow it. (Hahahaha. Little joke there.)
Well, it probably won’t surprise you to find out that it wasn’t actually my idea at all. Over at The Institute of Life Energy Medicine you can buy ‘homeopathic colour remedies’ just like these (only not anywhere near as pretty) that promise all kinds of marvels.
How are the color remedies made?
Homeopathic color remedies are made by taking pure water in glass tumblers and placing them in the sun. Auspicious days are chosen such as the winter solstice and summer solstice, days of maximum and minimum light on which to make these remedies. The tumblers are placed in a quiet place without much commotion and colored theatrical gels or colored silks are placed on top of and around the glasses. The glasses are placed on small mirrors to maximize the color vibrating in the glass.
Trawling around the site will take you on a veritable guided tour of this kind of fruitloopery and you can finish up with a sobering reflection on just how much money is to be made from selling water that has been sitting in your backyard under a piece of coloured cellophane.
The colours all have particular ‘powers’ of course – red is the colour of ‘passion, violence and danger’ (oh surprise) and green is the colour of ‘the healing power of nature’ (yawn).(ii) The efficacies of these solutions, no matter what their ‘colour’ are all amorphous and diffuse; they help with ‘recovery from shock or illness’ or ‘detoxification’ or they ‘calm frayed nerves’. They are, unsurprisingly, most effective on the stock standard hard-to-pin-down vagaries of human existence – the vast grey area that provides so much nutrition for wacky beliefs to flourish. There isn’t one concrete or unequivocal promise on the entire site.
The contra-indications for use are particularly amusing:
Yellow:
This remedy should not be used by people who are overly confident or have an excessively developed ego. It should not be used at night.
Why? What could possibly happen – they might get even more confident and their ego might EXPLODE? It’s a bottle of water for Pete’s sake.
I’m not going to dwell on this too long. The Institute of Life Medicine site is really just another flavour of Special One Drop Liquid, only not quite as entertaining.
I just want to finish with one question directed to Ms Wauters: What happens if I drink a glass of water that’s been sitting on the table outside my studio in the sun? Since sunlight is a combination of all colours, does that mean I’ll I be cured of all my ailments?
In the bizarre reality of the world of homeopathic colour remedies, it seems pretty logical to me.
Ms Wauters also spruiks homeopathic ‘sound’ remedies, but I tire – maybe another day we can find out why Middle C ‘promotes grounding, connection and engagement’.
I say ‘support’ in reference to the ‘awareness’ part of the process – I’m definitely up for bringing awareness of the stupidity of homeopathy to the attention of the world [↩]
Why are these people always so damn leaden and pedestrian. It’s magic for chrissakes! Show some imagination! [↩]
The capacity for stupid people to part with huge amounts of cash on schemes concocted by morally bankrupt swindlers never ceases to amaze me. It’s as if there’s a reservoir of schmucks out there who are just busting to empty their bank accounts into the pockets of criminals. Here on The Cow this is very familiar territory. Over the years we’ve seen the duplicitous Shoo!TAG™ scammers bilking all and sundry with their nutso pest repellent scheme; the smarmy Steorn with their ‘free energy’ shell game (a scam that’s centuries old in one form or another); the Space Diamond fraudsters who promise untold wealth via implausible interstellar retrieval schemes. And the list goes on.
Sometimes I like to play this game in my head where I make up the weirdest scheme I can imagine and speculate on whether people would pay money for it. For instance, I’ll look out my window and see something like, oh, let’s see – bird shit – and then make it the centre of some daft scam. I’ll imagine, for instance, that there’s some place that offers to rub bird shit on your face for money. Maybe I’ll even elaborate on it a bit to make it even more implausible – maybe this place has some kind of whacky oriental-sounding name like Ten Thousand Waves and it’s not just bird shit they’re offering to smoosh all over your dial but, oh, let’s see something really off the wall… I’ve got it! Nightingale shit!
Hahahaha! There we have it then: a place called Ten Thousand Waves that charges you money for a nightingale shit facial. Hahahaha! No-one would believe that in a BILLION years. No-one on the PLANET is dumb enough to fork out for that.
Anomalous Radar Activity Around Melbourne
