Category: scams
This is what evil looks like
A protest forced the temporary closure of a COVID-19 vaccination site in Los Angeles. They’re literally willing to kill people for the fiction that COVID-19 doesn’t exist.
They’re willing to kill for a lie. I literally can’t think of worse evil. Bigger evil, sure, but not worse.
To quote a post from one of the protestors, “… please refrain from wearing Trump/MAGA attire as we want our statement to resonate with the sheeple. No flags but informational signs only.” Naturally, they had to lie about who they were.
Internet Archive Promotes Woo
I have used and liked the Internet Archive since it was just the Wayback Machine. I have donated money on multiple occasions.
And now they’re promoting The Secret. Yes, the infamous peak-nonsense idea that if you just want something really badly, you get it. The literal apotheosis of blame-the-victim, The Secret implies strongly that if you die of cancer it is your own fault, because if you wanted it to go away badly enough, it would have. Your own bad attitude is responsible for anything bad that happens to you.
And the Archive invited one of its best-known promoters, Michael Beckwith, to speak at their event.
I am discouraged. I believe that I will be donating to something else this year.
You’re fat because toxins
So I bought some groceries today, and this store has ads on the back of its receipts. I got this one.
So this … establishment is claiming that overweight (but only between 10 and 40 pounds of it?) is caused by both toxins and acid?
No.
I suppose, in some cases, overweight could be caused by real toxins. Say they cause dropsy. You just can’t remove toxins by bathing your feet in water and minerals. This is clearly the “Ionic Foot Bath” scam. They literally claim that the system draws toxins out through the soles of the feet–that is, some of the thickest, most impermeable skin the body has. It’s literally a con game. The bath shown above (illustrated better at the linked article) contains a water-based solution that turns black after you submerge your feet in it. The claim is that the discoloration is the toxins dissolved in the water. The truth is that the water changes color whether or not you put your feet in! It’s just iron compounds created the apparatus itself.
The acid part sounds like traditional pH quackery, which attributes various diseases and syndromes to the body’s being too acid or basic (pH imbalance). As Dr. Steven Novella explains here, the body just doesn’t work that way. If you’re “too acid” you’re in immediate danger of death, not just overweight.
With some trepidation I checked out their web site. Phountain Health is a pretty full-service stuff-not-actually-shown-to-work company. The first item on their site is a “Detox Body Wrap”. They sell dietary supplements, a “Vitamin D sun bed”, alkaline water, dietary diatomaceous earth (which is literally dirt they recommend you eat), and many other things. Oddly, no foot bath seems to be listed. They do list cryotherapy.
You should be ashamed of yourselves, Stop and Shop. That’s two of the three remaining major grocery chains near my home, what with Best Yet Market‘s homegrown pseudoscience.
Peter Popoff: religious scammer still scamming decades after being caught
Waaay back in 1986, James Randi appeared on the Tonight Show and demonstrated that faith healer Peter Popoff had a source other than God’s word for his surprising insights into the lives of those healed. I strongly urge you to watch the video of Randi pulling back the curtain on Popoff’s blatant and despicable fraud. (Johnny Carson, the then-host of the Tonight Show, was a former magician like Randi and a like him an exposer of spiritual/religious scams, in the tradition of Houdini.)
After his exposure, Popoff lost most of his income and ended up declaring bankruptcy the following year.
He’s back. Unbelievably, he’s making money by the simple expedient of lying to people. Lots of money. He is literally raking in millions, again.
Recently, a video-maker got one of Reverend Popoff’s solicitation letters. He seems to have stolen a lot of his techniques from the late Oral Roberts and other colleagues in the field of promising miracles in a non-legally-actionable manner. Some of the things Randi documented in his classic book The Faith Healers:
- Give the mark a cheap gift. This creates a sense of obligation to give something in return.
- Offer miracles but only if a donation is made.
- Suggest a minimum donation and imply that larger ones show more faith and get bigger miracles.
- Write your letter as if you (the scammer) personally sat down and hand-typed it (with fake handwritten parts) and personally mailed it to the sucker, even though your organization sends out millions of them a week.
Popoff’s letter does all of these. There’s more. Watch the video. If you want to educate yourself about the subject, read Randi’s book.
Mike Jeavons made his video funny, but Popoff is just infuriating. He exists to suck the money out of vulnerable believers. He’s exactly what people hate about religious leaders, maybe part of one step short of Jim Jones.
Preying on Believers With Bad Critical Thinking Skills
It’s perfectly possible to be a religious believer, and still be smart and sane.
But that isn’t the target audience for the spam I just got.
Screen Capture showing the spam I received
(Click the image to expand.)
Essentially they’re selling rocks from the “Cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem”. The cave is part of the Church of the Nativity–the reader is meant to believe that the various Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Orthodox priests who administer that temple would let pebbles be taken from the cave and sold via email spam.
Interestingly, the links go to fundybuzz.com. The spammers obviously know that smart, knowledgeable people won’t fall for the scam, so they aren’t making any effort to hide their contempt from anyone who is awake.
Reasonably Literate 