Hokum


This diagram relates to this post (just in case you came here randomly).

What do you get, Faithful Acowlytes, if you take one big frakking Pile of Stupid, and then multiply it by another big frakking Pile of Stupid? Give up? You get this article (kindly pointed out to me by dinahmow) called ‘Trituration Proving of the Light of Saturn’ on a website named Interhomeopathy. Or, to speak technically for a moment, you get a Great Mountain of Steaming Horseshit. What we’re talking here Cowpokes, is astrology meets homeopathy.

I know you just can’t wait.

In brief, the ‘Trituration Proving of the Light of Saturn’, provides a detailed account of a group of people chopping up lactose powder that has been exposed, via a telescope, to the light of Saturn, and then attempting to discover the ‘homeopathic effects’ of the substance so prepared.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The method employed to gather this data involves the process of homeopathic ‘proving’. In case you don’t know what that is (and why would you, really?), it involves a bunch of volunteers dosing up on the material in question and then writing down any and all kinds of shit that occurs to them. By processes unfathomable, that shit is then distilled into less shit, and whatever that shit is, the homeopathic remedy is the opposite of it. Got that? No? Well, I can’t say as I blame you, but there it is.

What we have here, in essence, is an outpouring of inebriated hogwash so profound as to make the documentation of Special One Drop Liquid look like Einstein’s ruminations on the Photoelectric Effect. Only I fear that unlike the SODL proprietor, the people behind TPLS could not be technically labelled clinically insane. Frighteningly enough.

To give you a flavour, from the convenor’s notes:

The trituration process began with lots of giggling and silliness; and throughout there was talk of getting high, stories about getting high. Senses were distorted. ((This is probably the most accurate assessment in the whole debacle.)) One prover kept seeing smoke rise from the milk sugar as she ground and scraped.

And to think some people say there’s no science in homeopathy!

The conversation kept circling back to pizza: “Any food in the universe can be better with cheese… One prover demonstrated a seductive way of eating a sandwich.”

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.

The timekeeper had tremendous difficulty keeping track of the time for the grinding and scraping of the remedy throughout the entire process.

Yeah, I can see how this would be challenging. I’m experiencing something of a time-dilation effect just trying to follow it all.

Head pain over eyes. Sharp pain right temple. Pressive pain right temple.
Head ache over left eye.

I’m with you, provers! I’m getting a head pain just reading about it. That shit sure is powerful.

The female provers especially experienced a great deal of itchiness: Head, nose, eyes itchy. Head itchy. Back itchy, breasts itchy, thighs. Waves of itchiness in various parts of body, especially head.

YES! YES! I too have an itchy head. Right inside my head, where my brain is, specifically the part of the brain that tries to understand how a group of evolved hominids can be so mind-numbingly daft. It’s so itchy I want to stick a knitting needle through my eye cavity in an effort to scratch it.

And on, and on, and on it goes, in an elliptic waffle of hippie noodling that just makes me sad that these people were snorting the fumes of lactose rather than inhaling the spores of some kind of exotic fungus. From all this, it is concluded, somehow, that the Saturn-exposed milk sugar…

…might be effective for accident-related trauma, bone and nerve damage.

Yes, that’s right. Not that it might cure itching, or inhibit cheese cravings, or headaches or giggling, but that it might be effective for accident-related trauma. How they reached that conclusion, I have no fucking idea. It’s simply boggling that anybody can think there’s actual medical value in this whole process.

I know you’ll be right there with me, loyal Cowmrades, when we tune in next week for the next instalment of this astonishing adventure: Beneficial Effects of the Light from Uranus on Unicorn Rainbow Powder.

Please, someone wake me up.

It was, Faithful Acowlytes, merely a matter of time before someone other than ShooTag figured out that there was still plenty of ore to be mined from the vast goldfields of pet owners who are not in possession of functioning critical faculties. Today I am pleased to bring you yet another way to keep fleas off your pet ‘naturally’: the Only Natural EasyDefense Flea & Tick tag. Here, please allow The Only Natural Pet Store explain it in their own words:

The Only Natural Pet EasyDefense Flea & Tick Tag is a safe, chemical-free way to keep harmful pests off of your pet. Using state of the art holistic technology, the EasyDefense Tag utilizes your pet’s own energy to create a natural barrier to pests.

Oh golly gee. Doesn’t that sound awfully familiar? But how, pray tell, could such a thing possibly work?

When opened and placed on your pet, it uses your pet’s own inherent energy to send out frequencies that repel pests. The process operates with quantum mechanic’s refined frequencies, and is somewhat similar to the basic principles of homeopathy. (It does not use traditional energy forms like electrical, chemical, thermal, magnetic, or radioactive.)

That’s right folks. It does not use ‘traditional’ forms of energy, oh no. It uses quantum mechanics, which everybody KNOWS is similar to homeopathy. ((Next those SCIENTISTS will be mutating pigs and bison to come up with some kind of Higgs Boson or something.))

But wait, there’s more!

This holistic energetic approach combines the knowledge of Eastern medicine with advanced Western technology, and is the result of more than 10 years of targeted research in collaboration with renowned doctors and scientists.

Awesome! Renowned doctors and scientists! 10 years of targeted research! I’m impressed. Please give us the details!

Although it has proven to be completely safe and effective, no large scale studies or clinical trials have been done on the EasyDefense Tag because the application of the underlying technology when used as a pest repellent for pets is relatively new.

O…k…a…y… So what actually happened was that a bunch of renowned doctors and scientists were toiling away for 10 years on something completely unrelated to the topic at hand, but you somehow just accidentally typed that into your press release. What you meant to say was ‘We have toss-all evidence that the thing works’. But it’s cheap, right – being just a bit of plastic blessed by the Quantum Fairy? What’s that you say? $80-fucking-dollars???? You’re kidding me!

Sigh. If it wasn’t for these frikkin’ morals I was born with, dear Acowlytes, I’d be a billionaire.

This morning I had cause to do a YouTube search for one of my favourite artists, Luke Jerram, who has been mentioned in despatches previously here on The Cow. The landing page at YouTube featured a Meet the Artist video with Mr Jerram, which I highly recommend you watch, not because it has anything at all to do with today’s post, but simply because he’s a smart and funny fellow and his work is incredible.

But you know how YouTube gives you a list of selected associated links down the side of the page when you go to a particular video? Well, amongst a bunch of similar ‘meet-the-artist’ offerings, and other videos from Mr Jerram, there was, perplexingly, a link to this: ((There is a rule of thumb when reading any kind of speculative ‘journalism’, whether it be on paper or on the internet: if the headline proposes something as a question, the answer is always ‘No’.))

I really have no idea whatsoever what it was doing sitting amongst videos of practising artists talking about their work and I’d love to know what kind of berserk algorithm matched it up. Anyway, there it was, sticking out like a pig at a christening, just daring me to click on the link. Which, unfortunately for you, I did.

Now, I don’t blame you if you are not inclined to watch it all. I did, but only because I found it hard to tear myself away from the sheer wrong-headed thinking of the whole thing (and because I’m a masochist, evidently). And despite the warning:

Well, it did both scare and depress me, but probably not for the reasons the creator of the video anticipated. So that you don’t have to experience the fear and depression yourself ((Unless you really want to, of course, in which case be my guest…)) I will sysnopsize the content for you (with annotations, of course):

•The World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 was predicted widely in popular culture before it happened. [Yes folks, everybody from the creators of Super Mario brothers, through the artists behind Marvel Comics to the illustrators of The Simpons knew it was gonna happen, but instead of simply telling us, ((I bet you didn’t even know that cartoonists and game creators got to know all that Top Secrety information and stuff. Of course they couldn’t tell us because, oh, well, they were in on it, and well, just BECAUSE!)) they drew it in cryptically in the background of their characters’ amusing antics.] ((I will admit that the episode of The Lone Gunman that aired a few months before, that depicts a plane almost crashing into the Twin Towers is a little eerie, but the crucial thing to note is that IT MISSED. Also, the aircraft concerned was being remotely piloted by factions within the US Government in order to facilitate arms trade, and the incident happened at night, not in daylight. I don’t think I need to point out how cherry-picked this ‘evidence’ is.)) , ((Even so, I can’t help but wonder if the Al Qaeda minions who executed the operation saw that show and wondered if their mission had been compromised.))

•The London Underground bombings of 2005 were predicted by a BBC Panorama episode that aired a year before. [Yep, that’s right – the BBC, the London police force, security agencies, politicians and emergency services were all in on it and they all got together to carry out an elaborate mockup televised by the BBC to let the entire world know it was going to happen beforehand so that, well, so that, um… OK, well BECAUSE. I dunno. Can anyone follow the logic of what the video maker is meant to be asserting here? All these people knew the exact details ((Well, not exact details, exactly… The three bombs on the Underground didn’t happen in the same places, and the fourth bomb – a vehicle aboveground – was a substantially different affair. In the reality it was a bomb on a bus, in the fiction it was the much more devastating scenario of the targeting of a chlorine tanker chosen for its catastrophic consequences. Sure, these similarities appear spooky, but the fact is (as the Panorama programme even points out) it was a scenario that had been advanced by numerous people on numerous previous occasions. Like the World Trade Center – which had already even been attacked some years before – the London Underground is an obvious terrorist target. You need no real brains to figure out that if you want to cause destruction and panic, one bomb is effective, two bombs are better, but three will really cause some serious problems.)) about bombs that were really going to go off in the Underground a year later and they went to the trouble of making a tv show just to hint at it. Whyyyyyyyy?]

•Based on the compelling prescience of these two events, it is suggested that a spinoff of the British tv series Spooks – Spooks: Code 9 – has predicted that a hundred thousand people are going to be killed in a nuclear attack this year at the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Before we go on, I’d like you to ruminate on the following images, all of which are just samples of numerous examples that I found on a lightning fast web search:

Quite unsurprisingly, popular culture likes to conjure images of the destruction of well-known landmarks. And yet, every one of the above buildings is still, in reality, completely intact. ((I guess the ‘terrorists’ intend to bring ’em all down eventually, they just haven’t gotten around to it yet…)) Similarly, there are countless comics, tv shows, movies and books that use, as their mise-en-scène, catastrophic, apocalyptic scenarios. Hear me, Mr Conspiracy Video Guy: this is called IMAGINATION. We in the creative industries like to imagine the kinds of things we think people will get a kick out of, and make stories about them. And the thing about the stories we imagine? There are a SHITLOAD of them. Thousands and thousands and thousands. Millions, even. The fact is, somewhere, sometime, some imaginative person is going to imagine something – based on real situations, perhaps – that will have things in common with something that actually happens. It just isn’t that remarkable.

The video goes on to wheel out all the usual daft conspiracy theory ideas: the logo for the 2012 Olympics can be rearranged to read ‘Zion’[It’s those bloody Jews again…] ((For Pete’s sake – how much paranoia can these people have? It’s the Muslims. It’s the Jews. It’s the US government. What a fearful and miserable way to live a life.)); the ‘eye’ symbol – a well known ‘Illuminati’ trademark – features throughout the Spooks episodes [That Illuminati really has its fingers in everything. Why, even my local optometrist is controlled by them. Oh, and what’s that up there in the TCA header… wooo-ooo-oooo]; There are also lots of ‘special’ numbers in the Spooks show. Like 9, and 33, and 7, and 13, which as everybody knows are all numbers reserved by the Illuminati to sprinkle through the imaginings of popular culture in order to HINT that they are controlling everything because… well… because that’s what you do when you are an evil force controlling humanity. It goes along with the obligatory white fluffy cat, the black robes and the maniacal gloating laugh.

Anyway, you get the drift. What we have here, Acowyltes, is a kind of paranoia pareidolia. Mr Conspiracy Video Guy looks at a vast raft of unrelated events – images and stories and movies and comics – slices them into tiny little slivers of convenient resolution (single frames; words; numbers, even) and then sees a picture that simply isn’t there.

The 2012 London Olympics will come and go without so much as a fizz, and Mr CVG will make up some daft story about how the Illuminati chose to take the weekend off or something, and next year he’ll have another clip up about the forthcoming dirty bomb attack in New York in 2013. Which is a much more logical prediction because 13 is an Illuminati number. And if you add 20 + 13, you get 33, another Illuminati number. If this isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is. I just can’t believe he missed all that.

Everybody singin’

I’ve got no strings
So I have fun
I’m not tied up to anyone
They’ve got strings
But you can see
There are no strings on me

Copyright Image Tetherd Cow Ahead

Acowlytes! Do you suffer from quivering? Nervousness? Fear? A compulsion to flee? Visual blurring? Panic? Nausea? Can you rule out having glimpsed Tony Abbott in budgie smugglers as the cause of these ailments? Then it is possible, dear friends, that you may have Wind Turbine Syndrome, or WTS. A more fitting acronym for this affliction would probably be WTF? but I digress.

Wind Turbine Syndrome is aligned with other forms of paranoia-induced woo such as EHS (electrical hypersensitivity) which evince a plethora of diffuse and non-specific symptoms ((Symptoms of electromagnetic radiation sickness are for example sleep disturbances, dizziness, heart palpitations, headache, blurry sight, swelling, nausea, a burning skin, vibrations, electrical currents in the body, pressure on the breast, cramps, high blood pressure and general unwell-being.”)) attributed to technology of which the sufferers (and their doctors) are afraid and/or ignorant (or just plain don’t like).

WTS is rather more irritating than EHS, though, because of its implementation in a political agenda. The story generally goes like this:

A land owner makes a deal with a power company to host (usually for a reasonably healthy figure) a bunch of wind turbines on a nice windy ridge on his/her property. Other people who are within visual distance of the turbines (and sometimes not even that) who are not making any money out of them, claim to have developed WTS. There is not one single case of WTS being developed by the franchisee of a wind farm operator. ((As far as my research has been able to determine, anyway. If anyone has heard of one I’d love to get a link.))

For reasons that are not at all clear to me, many country people seem to have taken against wind turbines with an amount of vitriol that is perplexing. Personally speaking, I think the lazy rotating blades are quite elegant and attractive, and the airy whooshing sound they make fairly inoffensive.

But WTS is not, of course, about common sense. It’s about political agendas, ignorance and NIMBYism.

You will recall that the first push by objectors to wind farms took the form of ‘Oh noes!! The horrible mincing blades are killing all the birds!’ This, from people who up till then had pretty much never even noticed the green speckled parrot or the golden-throated lark. ((Fictional birds because there are so many that are supposedly affected by wind turbines that you may as well say ‘any bird’)) Well, it turns out that on the list of things-that-birds-need-to-worry-about, wind farms are pretty damn far down, so, with these newly-adopted eco concerns of the anti-wind lobby not getting much traction, another bogeyman was needed to put the scare into folks. They found one with WTS. Deciding without evidence that something is, a priori, bad, and then finding multiple, disparate reasons to attempt to support your supposition, is, as you will all know by now, a glittering trademark of irrational thinking.

I was going to tell you next about exactly what it is that’s supposed to be the cause of WTS, but after reading pages of print about it, I’m finding that difficult. Mostly, though, the Big Bad is infrasound: sound frequencies that are so low they are literally inaudible to humans. Other sources claim that it’s ultrasound – high frequencies that are above the range of human hearing.

Dr Nina Pierpont, a New York paediatrician and self-styled expert on Wind Turbine Syndrome (she lays claim to coining the term) says:

…infrasonic to ultrasonic noise and vibrations emitted by wind turbines cause the symptoms

To be clear, she is saying that the problem is all the sound they make, from the highest part of the audio spectrum to the lowest. This kind of catch-all generalizing should immediately ring your woo-woo alarm bells.

In The Independent where the above quote originates, Dr Pierpont goes on to say that:

…the wind turbine companies constantly argue that the health problems are “imaginary, psychosomatic or malingering”. But she said their claims are “rubbish” and that medical evidence supports that the reported symptoms are real.

‘Rubbish’? That would be an effective scientific rebuttal if ever there was one. Professor Gary Wittert, the head of Medicine at the University of Adelaide, would be one person who would take exception to to Dr Pierpont’s claims that medical evidence supports WTS. Using data from the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Professor Wittert has demonstrated that a sampled population of around 10,000 people living in the vicinity of wind farms in Victoria and South Australia shows no variation in quantities of usage of sleeping pills or cardiovascular medications from that which can be seen in the overall general population. Either people who live near wind farms aren’t seeking treatment for their WTS, or it doesn’t exist. This kind of data is, of course, exactly what would expect to see if WTS was a psychosomatic condition experienced by a small number of impressionable people rather than a discrete medical phenomenon in the community at large. Prof Wittert’s figures have still to be published and peer-reviewed, but we know that even when they are found to be solid (as they will be) the anti-wind farm campaigners will simply start crying that he’s a wind farm shill.

Copyright Image Tetherd Cow Ahead

Setting aside the statistical science for a moment, and wandering briefly into my own field of expertise, let’s consider that claim that infrasound is the cause of the WTS. First, there is no medical evidence at all to suggest that infrasound itself has detrimental impact on human health unless encountered at enormous levels – levels well in excess of what you’d find even directly underneath a wind turbine. When you know that low frequency sound can be detected in your bones, it’s the sort of thing that seems like it might be possible, but that’s about it – no-one has collected data on such speculations. ((It’s perfect territory for woo – a vaguely plausible mechanism that is ‘sciency-sounding’ enough to give it a sort of ersatz currency.)) So to prove that wind farms are producing infrasound that affects human health detrimentally, you need to do three separate things: show that wind turbines produce infrasound in the first place, demonstrate that infrasound has adverse effects on humans and then establish that the amount of infrasound coming from the turbines is sufficient to trigger those adverse effects. So far, the data accumulated for each of these scenarios is not at all promising for advocates of WTS.

Without even doing that, though, there is a much more persuasive argument against infrasound being harmful to humans. Let’s take a situation that arises in nature where large volumes of infrasound (and ultrasound and everything in between for that matter) are generated in a constant and repetitive manner, just as wind turbines are supposed to do…

Yes, that’s right – the sea. Crashing ocean waves create at least as much infrasound as a wind turbine, probably more by several orders of magnitude. And yet, living by the ocean has not been demonstrated by any science I’ve ever seen to cause people to exhibit any of the symptoms of WTS. On the contrary, the sound of the surf is considered, by anyone who is lucky enough to have a beach house, to be restful and relaxing. ((But God made the sea, right, so that’s OK.))

Another insidious aspect of the anti-wind farm lobby when it comes to WTS is their habit of attempting to align the wind power industry with the tobacco and asbestos industries. This is, of course, the cynical employment of the logical fallacy of Weak Analogy (mixed with a bit of conspiracy-theory style paranoia). In other words, they’re saying that because the tobacco industry and the asbestos industry claimed their products were causing no human health problems and were found to be engaged in coverups, then it follows that the wind power industry is doing the same. There is no logical equation that you can make between those two things – it’s nothing more than a semantic trick designed to befuddle sloppy thinkers. What will speak here, is the science, as it did in the cases of tobacco and asbestos. So, what’s the state of the science on the side of the WTS advocates? Not very persuasive at all. ((And, like all pushers of pseudoscience, when the science is not on their side they freely wheel out the anecdotal evidence, the testimonials and the conspiracy theories.))

Nina Pierpont, who is a vocal objector to wind farms, bases all her science on one small self-generated study (10 families who were already ‘diagnosed’ as having WTS), that was sloppy in protocol, was based on subjective self-reporting and was not controlled. It’s the kind of experiment that would get you a C- if you handed it in to your science teacher. In the UK, the NHS found that Dr Pierpont’s study:

…provides no conclusive evidence that wind turbines have an effect on health or are causing the set of symptoms described here as “wind turbine syndrome”. The study design was weak, the study was small and there was no comparison group.

In Australia, Sarah Laurie, an unregistered doctor and ‘Medical Director’ of the climate denialist affiliated Waubra Foundation is the chief ‘expert’ campaigner for people who supposedly have WTS. Laurie claims to have conducted research into the causes of WTS, but what she offers up is embarrassingly spare and scientifically awful. This article at Crikey examines Sarah Laurie’s claims and highlights an hysterical ‘Explicit Cautionary Notice’ from the Waubra Foundation that effectively challenges wind farm companies with a series of claims that are highly dubious. It is without doubt designed as a propaganda tool rather than as a document of sincere concern. The notice refers to Nina Pierpont’s study, incorrectly endorsing it as ‘peer reviewed’ which it was not. ((Well, not in the properly understood scientific sense of the term, anyway. Pierpont showed her results to some friends, and then published the positive things any of them said. This is the same kind of peer review that made me Scientist of the Year in 2011.)) It also raises the spectre of ‘Vibroacoustic Disease’, a malady which is contentious in the field of scientific medicine, and is certainly irrelevant when dealing with the sound levels generated by wind turbines. ((Vibroacoustic disease is associated with people who are subjected to extremely loud noise for extensive periods of time. Think military personnel on cargo aircraft, or engine-room workers on ships. Even so, pinning the problem on infrasound is speculative. These kinds of noisy environments are assaulting workers with exceptional levels of sound of all frequencies, and separating out infrasound as the culprit would take a specific kind of research that – to my knowledge – has never been undertaken.))

Now, I want to make it clear that I do believe it is quite likely that most sufferers of so-called WTS are experiencing the symptoms they claim. Based on a rational appraisal of the science we have, though, it’s just not reasonable to conclude that those symptoms have got anything at all to do with any mechanical effects of wind turbine operation. An extremely balanced examination, by commentator Dave Clarke, sets out the state of play in the WTS debate with amazing clarity. Clarke examines every facet of the WTS phenomenon in thoughtful detail. It is effectively distilled down into one simple sentence:

It seems that complaints regarding nearby wind farms, regarding illness or simply annoyance, are often related to negative feelings about the wind farms.

In other words, for reasons that are hard to determine (but are most likely to do with politics or NIMBYism), people who don’t want the wind farms near them get stressed enough about it to make themselves ill. That is all.

At the very least, this explanation must be unequivocally ruled out before the promoters of Wind Turbine Syndrome can even begin to make claims that wind turbine technology is, by some unknown mechanism, causing the illness, and that ‘Big Wind’ is conspiratorially endeavouring to make it look like it’s not.

[Many thanks to Dr Rachael Dunlop for some of the source materials for this post]

« Previous PageNext Page »