Home > History > Front page updates August 2006
|
 Vacuous legal threat counter:
days and still waiting. |
And more suing is promised (12/8/2006)
A person lacking the courage to use a real name has posted a message to the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative which says:
CCRG sues CTV News and W-Five
see http://www.ccrg.com/w5_ctv.htm
Good News for complimentary and alternative healthcare.
The first thing I noticed (after noticing the gutless anonymity of the writer) was that it was good news for free medical care. Isn't that what "complimentary" means? I had a look at the page in the link and I saw that CTV were being sued for both libel and defamation. I always prefer it when kooks say they are going for the trifecta of libel, slander and defamation because the acronym LSD reminds me of the delusional state of that which passes for minds in kooks. If you wonder what the suing is about, it is about a television show in which the head honcho at CCRG was shown to be a liar and a blowhard. You can see the show here.
But wait, there's more ... (but not yet) (12/8/2006)
There has been a resurgence of Gutless Anonymous Liar activity over the last week or two, but enough is enough for this week's update. I have received several electronic greeting cards and some other collected drivel, but I will save them for later. Just as I will the promised Part 2 of the examination of money-sink advertisements in the local paper. A correspondent has pointed out that one of the mystery "opportunities" which was keeping its details secret was Herbalife, so that makes at least two different versions of the same scam in the same set of advertisements. And if you want to know why I do what I do, it's so that people don't need to write to me to say "I just wish I had found your website before I found theirs, as I blew six grand on this B.S.".
Some good news for once (12/8/2006)
It is very rare for authorities to act against sellers of snake oil, but someone finally has. The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission has commenced action against a company called The Menopause Institute of Australia. You can read the media release from the ACCC here. In this news item about the story it mentions that the man behind the Menopause Institute seems connected to another person who runs male impotency clinics, was prosecuted recently for misleading and deceptive conduct in their advertising and who was also found a few years ago to be importing unregistered drugs into Australia. Am I surprised by these connections? Not really.
More good news - a politician talks sense (yes, really) (12/8/2006)
Most politicians can be expected to stay away from any subject which might offend potential voters and to exhibit vacillation when it comes to anything controversial. The previous Minister for Education and Science in the Australian Federal Government, Dr Brendan Nelson, managed to score a record number of nominations for the Australian Skeptics' Bent Spoon Award by a silly statement which seemed to offer support to the disguised creationism misnamed "Intelligent Design". Dr Nelson is an intelligent man and I don't think for a moment that he would believe anything as silly as ID or not be able to see it for what it is - an attempt to disguise superstition as science. He was acting as a politician at the time and showing "balance".
It is very good to see that Dr Nelson's successor in the portfolio, Julie Bishop, has come out unequivocally against the nonsense and has declared that there is no place for the rubbish in the nation's science classrooms. And she has such an appropriate name for the headlines about this, too. See the story here.
Here is my letter to the Minister:
Update August 31, 2006Dear Ms Bishop.
I would like to personally thank and congratulate you for your comments about the teaching of religion disguised as science in the nation's schools. The farce of "Intelligent Design" has no place in any course where it might be seen as any sort of legitimate scientific hypothesis, although it would be totally appropriate to examine it in a course on the philosophy of science where it could be lined up with astrology and other examples of unscientific thought.
If people want to teach religion to children it should be done openly and honestly and not be used to subvert other areas of human inquiry or pretend that it is something it is not.
Again, thank you and congratulations. I expect that you will be the recipient of some well-organised letter writing campaigns over your comments. Ignore them. Religion has its place, but that place is not in science classes.
Look what came back.
Talking across the ether (12/8/2006)
Get out those old crystal radios or maybe even one of those new-fangled valve contraptions and get ready to listen to radio 4BC in Brisbane between 7:30 and 8:00pm on Saturday, August 19, when I will be on the wireless with Loretta the Jelly Bean Lady. We will be talking about quackery. If you can't find your radio set and the one in the car is broken or if you live somewhere other than Brisbane, Australia, there's this amazing thing called "the Internet" where you can point your computer to www.4bc.com.au and listen through the speakers on your desk. If you live somewhere which has a different time to Brisbane you can go to www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ to find out when to listen.
Finally, it's here! (19/8/2006)
The article I have been writing about suspicious advertisements in my local paper is finished, and you can read the whole thing here. The second part didn't require as much work as I had anticipated because several of the advertisements were for Herbalife, although none of them got round to mentioning this small fact. Not even the one which described itself as "ethical".
Something new (19/8/2006)
I get the occasional email asking about the random quotes from famous people which appear in a few places on this site. I have gathered them all together and you can see the collection here.
Let's misinform some parents (19/8/2006)
The Australian Vaccination Network held a public seminar on August 15, the purpose of which was to provide some information to parents so that they could make informed choices about vaccinating their children. 
I was a bit too busy to go (my sock drawer needed reorganising). (I might not have been welcome anyway. When they held one of these liefests once before someone volunteered to stand at the door and identify me if I tried to get in.) There were three speakers advertised, and it is worth looking at what they were going to talk about to see what sort of information was going to be imparted to the eager parents.
The first speaker was Meryl Dorey, President of AVN. Ms Dorey achieved a certain fame a few years ago by telling everyone who would listen that I and my group of friends had left an AVN seminar early, despite knowing full well at the time that she wrote the words that the person who left early was not me and I only had a single companion at the event. Here is what she was going to be talking about this time.
You will notice that she was going to mention the "up to 50 vaccines" that children receive by school age. It's just as well she said "up to", otherwise some people might think that she was being a little deceptive. The table below lists all vaccinations given in the current Australian schedule for all children up to school age. You might like to count them, and you will see that the total number is 10 vaccines given in 26 doses. If you take out the three shots which are only recommended for "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in high risk areas" you get back to 8 vaccines and 23 shots (Hepatitis B is given at either 6 or 12 months, but not both). If you generously allow that some shots vaccinate against more than one disease, the total is 35 vaccinations. Not 50. Not even near 50. By the way, I notice that AVN has changed the name of its magazine from Informed Choice to Informed Voice. This is consistent with AVN's agenda to ensure that no parent makes an informed choice about vaccination. It's best not to even mention the phrase.
The next speaker describes himself as an "Anthroposophical Medical Doctor". The only mention of him that I can find is on the web site of a New Zealand purveyor of magic homeopathic nostrums. (I actually found him in Google's cache, because the page has been removed from the site.). I'm not sure what an "Anthroposophical Medical Doctor" is, but according to Wikipedia "One of the most prominent and well-researched anthroposophical treatments is a range of mistletoe extracts used to treat patients with cancer". If this is anything like a true statement then the term "Anthroposophical Medical Doctor" is synonymous with "quack". I am sure that he would have much good advice for parents, especially if he is going to tell them not to "fear childhood illness" and therefore not bother to protect their children against such illnesses. I suppose that in the day or two between being exposed to meningococcal disease and dying from it children can be given lots of love and care, and the same treatment might even be useful for a child with measles or diphtheria. What's there to fear about a little blindness or suffocating?
The third speaker presents a conundrum, as he is a homeopath espousing something called "homeoprophylaxis".
The problem with this is that the principles of homeopathy quite distinctly reject any idea of homeopathy being used to protect anybody from anything. A system of medicine which states that the only things which can be treated are symptoms and that each person is so individual that there can be no standard medication cannot accommodate prophylaxis. Samuel Hahnemann was quite clear on this, and he should know because he invented homeopathy. You might think that Dr Golden had moved on from Hahnemann's teachings and was promoting the new, more scientific homeopathy. Well, you might think that until you found out that Dr Golden was the founder of the Australasian College of Hahnemannian Homoeopathy. Perhaps he thought that the people attending this seminar wouldn't know that, or, if they did, would not detect (or would not care about) the almost incredible irony of him standing up on a stage and preaching something completely contrary to Hahnemann's philosophy.
But we are talking about an anti-vaccination seminar, so why should consistency, common sense or facts be of concern to the promoters and the speakers?
Radio Ratbags (19/8/2006)
I was on the radio on Saturday, August 19, venting about health fraud. You can listen to the program and also some previous appearances by going to the podcast page.
What's an astrologer to do? (19/8/2006)
Astrologers 
at the world's leading universities and cosmology research institutes have been thrown into confusion by the suggestion that the number of things called "planets" might be about to change. We all know that Ceres used to be a planet but isn't any more, except that it might be one again under the new rules. Pluto seems to be out but Charon is in, something which is a bit surprising as they are right next door to each other. And as for Xena, for some reason I can't hear that name without thinking of a twin-planet system. But I digress ...
My plans for the week are in chaos as well because I was supposed to have my horoscope cast on Wednesday at 11:12 am. The timing was determined by my last horoscope, so that will probably have to be revised before I can adjust my calendar and change the appointment time. Life's never easy, is it? I hope that the recasting doesn't give me a new set of Lotto numbers for the weeks when I didn't win anything. It would be terrible to look back and see that predictions for the past had come true but I hadn't known about them until after the event.
Maybe the computers are now fixed! (26/8/2006)
Because I do software sales and support for a living I am always installing and uninstalling various pieces of software for evaluation. Even with some excellent tools to protect existing programs and clean up detritus left behind by inadequate uninstall procedures my computer still gradually accretes a collection of small errors over time. The thing went critical last week when I tested some addition to Microsoft Office and it broke the function in FrontPage which took files produced by Access and other programs and used them to assemble web pages. Specifically, FrontPage could not detect which pages had been updated so the only way I could be sure that all changed pages ended up on the server was to upload the complete site. When the program that I make a living with told me that some vital component of Windows was broken and it could not do everything I wanted until I reinstalled something and then Adobe Acrobat started issuing meaningless warning messages I decided that it was time to bite the bullet, grasp the nettle, carpe the diem and take the opportunity for a Nuke'n'Pave. The longest parts were making sure that everything was backed up and locating all the registration numbers for all those software packages, but I am now looking at a computer with everything installed from scratch. It runs faster, starts faster and everything seems to be working well. I look forward to a peaceful life. For a while. Now back to the hobby ...
Bad doctors (26/8/2006)
It is almost an article of faith for alternative medicine supporters that real doctors can do whatever they like and will never be disciplined but the orthodoxy is right there to suppress and destroy any competition who offers an alternative. The fact that there are procedures for reporting problems with real doctors but the only recourse available for anyone hurt by a quack is through the courts is glossed over. The fact that there are systems for reporting deaths in hospitals and adverse drug reactions but no comparable systems for tracking problems with magic herbs is either ignored or lied about. All I have ever asked for is that everyone claiming to treat disorders of the human body be treated the same - claims must be backed by evidence and legitimate research, and problems must be identified, recorded and addressed.
Sometimes the system for real doctors does break down, and it is a testament to the efficacy of the regulation process that it makes news when someone slips through the cracks. A case of this has been running through the courts in my city for the last few weeks. It involves a doctor who has been found guilty of performing an illegal abortion. Abortion has had a de facto legality here for some time (a doctor just has to certify that the procedure is necessary for the health of the mother), so it seemed a bit strange that someone should be before the courts for this today. It turns out that this was the only way to get this doctor away from victims, and because the foetus was actually born alive in this case the authorities could not fail to act and had the opportunity to do something. After the conviction was recorded it was possible to reveal that this doctor had been sued by patients in the past, with several being awarded damages, and had been the subject of several disciplinary actions related to improperly conducted abortions. The reason that this was not revealed sooner is that the criminal justice system restricts the ability of prosecutors to inform judges and juries of prior misconduct.
As I said, I want all people offering medical advice and services to be subject to the same rules, and I want those rules to include transparency about registration, qualifications and disciplinary action. If a real doctor is behaving badly, through incompetence, ignorance or going over to the dark side, I want them in the stocks next to the cancer quacks and energy medicine charlatans. When I was trying recently to find out the licence status of a qualified medical doctor who was promoting quackery I was amazed to find that there is no public record of registered medical practitioners in my state. If lawyers can't avoid a public record of who is licensed to practise as a solicitor then I can't believe that there is any legal barrier to a public database of doctors. It gets worse when you find that a doctor can be subjected to a continuous stream of validated complaints but nobody can find this out without a court order. Did I mention that this particular doctor has been allowed to continue hacking at women's insides until an appeal is heard? It's a disgrace.
It's official! (26/8/2006)
Pluto is no longer a planet. This decision by the International Astronomical Union has caused consternation in many parts of Earth, one of the remaining planets. One rather ridiculous question posed by someone pretending to be a journalist was how this would affect the current NASA New Horizons mission to the ex-planet, but it seems that NASA have decided that it would be a bit of a waste of money to turn off the lights and the computers and tell all the New Horizons staff to go home and wait for their next assignments. There has been mention of the political incorrectness of the term "dwarf planet", although "vertically challenged planet" doesn't sound quite right either. Others have commented on Gustav Holst's foresight in not having a Pluto movement in his Planets suite, a predicting ability which is somewhat tempered by the fact that he wrote The Planets in 1917 and Pluto wasn't discovered until 1930. It is rather embarrassing, then, for British composer Colin Matthews who fixed the apparent oversight in 2000 by writing a Pluto addition to Holst's original work. Isn't he looking a bit silly now? (In honour of the demotion of Pluto, I have added Colin Matthews' composition to the list of Millenial podcasts.)
Listen to Pluto by Colin Matthews
Other jokers have made silly comments about the odds of Mickey, Minnie or Goofy being the next to go, but the real question for Australians, particularly Australians who live in Sydney, is the future of the Pluto Pup. These things are a mainstay of the Sydney Royal Easter Show, and have even been described by some as an essential RES food experience (although there is some dispute over whether the word "food" is appropriate). Words cannot do justice to these objects, but I will try. To make a Pluto Pup you start with a double-sized hotdog frankfurt and mount it on a wooden stick. The frankfurt is then dipped into high-carbohydrate batter and the whole thing fried in highly saturated fat, stick and all. When done the concoction is festooned with tomato sauce before eating. Salt is optional for those watching their health and diet. There have been no recorded deaths from eating these delicacies (at least no immediate deaths). One suggestion has been to adopt the alternative name, "Dagwood Dog", but that would surely change the taste. We can only wait until next March to see the outcome of this dilemma. (It won't affect me personally as I will be carrying a letter from my doctor exempting me from the requirement to eat at least one Pluto Pup before going on the giant ferris wheel. Who would have thought that a diagnosis of diabetes could interfere with participation in society's rituals?)
I'm not sure about this (26/8/2006)
The
following email was sent to me and several people whose email addresses indicate that they might be in the Nonsense Juice business. Should I trade my principles for some foreign exchange and contact a wholesaler for pricing? What is the best way to get a pallet of wellness to Ghana? Does the buyer have a MasterCard? What is a skeptic and debunker to do in the face of such an opportunity?
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2006 02:28:59 -0700
From: kelvin osei
Subject: Order EnquiryHELLO,
AM KELVIN FROM GHANA AND WOULD LIKE TO MAKE AN ENQUIRY OF ONE PALLET OF NONI JUICE AND I WANT THEM SHIPPED TO GHANA, PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU HAVE THEM IN STOCK. AND PLEASE LET ME KNOW YOUR PRICE PER ONE AND TOTAL COST OF THE ONE PALLET INCLUDING SHIPPING. PLEASE ADIVSE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, LOOKING FORWARD TO HEAR FROM YOU SOON. THANK YOU
I'm not sure about this one either (26/8/2006)
Someone
seems concerned about my comments about Benny Hinn. The subject line of the email indicates that I probably don't need to take too much notice of what Judith thinks, if, in fact, she can think at all.
From: "Judith"
Subject: sandnigger go home
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2006 20:32:49 -0500In being as familar with Binny Hinn only goes to show that your governing of the copyright(c), and being any little bit associated with his scam. You are pulling money out of his thief and putting it into your two-faced pocket. You need a proctologist.
Thank you for your kind thoughts and bigotry. Your message has been passed on to someone who knows a linguist who, in turn, will attempt to translate it into English.
Radio Ratbags Redux (26/8/2006)
My good friend Richard Saunders from the Mystery Investigators and Australian Skeptics has resurrected The Tank, an Internet radio program that we used to take part in some years ago. The second edition of the new season featured a shy, retiring web site owner who just happens to wear bright shirts and sound like me. You can find the show on the podcast page.
or listen to it here
In other podcast news, I hope to have a regular Internet radio program of my own shortly. There is still some organising to do and technology to test and learn, but you will read about it and hear about it here when it happens.
Digg this page 
Add to Reddit 
Post to del.icio.us 
Share on Facebook
| Back to The Millenium Project | Email the
|
I don't know who Yuri is, but he sent me a lovely religious card. Well, the card was lovely as was the thought, but the story on the card would have not been out of place in the old Twilight Zone television series as it was a horror story featuring one of mankind's greatest terrors. I don't think I will be converting because of the card, but I might be a bit careful who I get to help me escape from prison if I the need ever arises. 
should be so ashamed that I have offended people with what I had to say about a multi-level marketing scheme going down the drain. What was I thinking when I laughed about 
be hidden from the public, lest the public start to believe their eyes and doubt some myths. This is just what some church leaders in Kenya are demanding, as if hiding the fossils will make the truth disappear. I hope that the museum can resist this attempt to corrupt its purpose and reduce its ability to educate and inform its visitors.
