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April 6/08
THE PSEUDOSCIENCE HALL OF INFAMY: WORTHY INDUCTEES
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
The literal meaning of science is “knowledge,” from the Latin, scientia. (Omniscience means “knowledge of everything.”) Idiomatically, science today means both the sum total of human knowledge obtained by scientific experimentation and observation, and the methodology used to obtain such knowledge. Pseudoscience is pseudo-knowledge and the pseudoscientific methodology used to derive such pseudo-knowledge.
All alleged knowledge can be divided into three categories: science, pseudoscience, and fantasy. Validly obtained information is science. Information obtained by an invalid methodology posing as scientific is pseudoscience. Information attributed to a metaphysical source that cannot be scientifically tested is fantasy. The postulation that the universe began with a Big Bang is science. The postulation that the universe was created by a god is fantasy. The postulation that a god has revealed its existence is pseudoscience, since all such claims have been traced to the same “sacred” books that also assure their readers that the earth is flat.
The biblical claim that the universe is less than 10,000 years old is pseudoscience, since it is incompatible with facts known from legitimate science. The biblical claim that a man rose from the dead is pseudoscience, since the only testimony for such a violation of the laws of biophysics is the same book that dates the origin of the universe 15 billion years later than it actually occurred. The belief that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor because a god so decreed is fantasy. The belief that humans and apes did not evolve from a common ancestor is pseudoscience, since a comparision of human and ape DNA establishes common ancestry beyond sane dispute.
Religion per se is fantasy. But every one of humankind’s 10,000 or more religions incorporates elements of fully falsified pseudoscience. A religion that did not could have no “sacred” writings that could be tested and falsified. No such religion exists.
The following list of candidates for a pseudoscience hall of infamy is limited to individuals and disiplines that continue to have some degree of popular support. Jeremy Rifkin is included because as recently as 2007 he was cited by news media as an “expert,” even though he does not have even have an undergraduate degree in any science. The Jupiter Effect is not included because it prophesied specific consequences of a forthcoming alignment of planets, and it is now known that those consequences did not occur. The Jupiter Effect was pseudoscience when it was proposed, since no astrophysicist took it seriously, and it violated the Prime Directive of science: First, peddle no bullshit. It is now a relic of the discredited past.
Sheik Abdel-Aziz ibn Baaz:- Saudi Arabia’s supreme religious authority, who wrote, “The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished.”
Alcoholics Anonymous:- propaganda agency of the god hoax that tries to wean drunks from the bottle by replacing the mind crippling opiate of alcohol with the even more mind crippling opiate of religion.
Alternative medicine:- euphemism for various forms of pseudoscientific therapy that continue to find gullible believers who think, post hoc, propter hoc, that because an alleged treatment was followed by an alleviation of a medical problem, that the treatment caused the alleviation. In fact 80 percent of all ailments heal spontaneously with no treatment whatsoever. Among the various quack therapies that claim to be alternative are acupuncture, chiropractic, faith healing, herbal medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and therapeutic touch, all of which have the same 80 percent cure rate as would have happened without the pretended “treatment.”
Armageddon:- The authors of chapters 5 to 19 of the Book of Revelation, writing between July and August, 70 CE, prophesied that the Jewish-Roman War currently in progress would end with a Jewish victory in a final battle to take place at har Megiddo, north of Jerusalem. In fact the final battle took place at Masada, south of Jerusalem, and the Jews lost. Since the scientific discipline of documentary analysis has established that continuing belief in Armageddon as a future event stems from an incompetent interpretation of an already failed prophecy, Armageddon beliefs constitute falsified pseudoscience rather than untestable fantasy.
Dan Aykroyd:- actor and disinformation peddler responsible for the television series, Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Pananormal, that passed off imaginative fairy tales as true stories from the case files of a pretended government agency called Office of Scientific Research. No such agency ever existed. Aykroyd was the recipient of the Council for Media Integrity’s first Snuffed Candle award, presented by “encouraging credulity, presenting pseudoscience as genuine, and contributing to the public’s lack of understanding of the methods of scientific inquiry.”
Ellen Bass:- author of Courage to Heal, a book that destroyed hundreds of innocent lives by pretending that fantasies of sexual abuse put into the minds of patients by self-styled “therapists” were “recovered memories” of events that in reality had never happened, Despite the awarding of damages in the millions of dollars against therapists whose patients had driven accused caregivers to suicide and otherwise disrupted families, Bass’s vicious pack of lies is still in print, and pseudomedical humbugs are still deluding gullible patients into fantizing what “therapists” tell them, and then believing that the fantasies are “recovered memories.” All allegedly ”recovered” memories are false memories.
Michael Behe:- author of a book touting Intelligent Design, a euphemism for “God,” for the purpose of passing off religion as science. Courts have consistently ruled that Intelligent Design is pseudoscience, and attempts to teach it in science classes are a violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition of any “law respecting an establishment of religion.” Since Behe continues to argue for the legitimacy of Intelligent Design, that makes him a worthy candidate for the Pseudoscience Hall of Infamy, even though his inability to grasp that his pseudoscience has been annihilated raises the possibility that he really belongs in an institution for the rationally challenged.
Charles Berlitz:- author of several books peddling superstitious hogwash as nonfiction. The crash of a spy ballon at Roswell, New Mexico, had long disappeared from the public consciousnees, due to publication of the reality that the crashed ballon was not a spaceship containing dead aliens. Berlitz, confident that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of conspiracy theorists, revived the Roswell fantasy with a book filled with disinformation that he knew perfectly well was a pack of lies. He also in effect created the ”Burmuda Triangle” by publishing disinformation that concealed the reality that no higher percentage of aircraft have disappeared in the alleged triangle than in any other equally large area of deep water. Berlitz has rightly been described as the Barnum of bullshit.
Bermuda Triangle:- pseudoscientific name attached to an area of the Atlantic Ocean for the sole purpose of creating a mystery where none exists. When all sinkings attributed to the “Triangle” are added together, as was done in a BBC documentary in the 1970s, it becomes evident that “Bermuda Triangle” is simply another name for the Atlantic Ocean.
Morey Bernstein:- author who capitalized on the willingness of persons who either believe they are hypnotized or are pretending to be hypnotized, so say whatever the hypnotist wants to hear. By instructing an allegedly hypnotized woman named Virginia Tighe to think back to a time and another place, he manipulated her into describing an alleged past life in which she was a nineteenth-century Irishwoman named “Bridey Murphy.” Tighe has since acknowledged that she has no belief in reincarnation, and borrowed the name, Bridey Murphy, from a woman who lived in her neighborhood in Chicago. While Tighe’s fantasy contained no demonstrably false information that proved she was fantasizing, later claims of past-life memories solicited under alleged hypnosis have been riddled with statements proven to be inaccurate.
George W. Bush:- possibly the most superstitious, scientifically illiterate, self deluded president America has ever had. Bush told an Israeli newspaper that “God” had instructed him to wage his wars of personal glorification. As Thomas Szasz commented, “When you talk to God, you are praying. When God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”
Chris Carter:- scientifically illiterate ignoramus who created and wrote many scripts for The X Files, a science fiction television series about alleged alien encounters. As science fiction, such a series would have been legitimate. But Carter, because he is either a lying prostitute or a scientifically illiterate ignoramus, salted various episodes with dialogue that implied that his fantasy story lines had a factual basis.
Carlos Castaneda:- hoaxer who passed off pseudoscientific fantasy as anthropology, and so fooled gullible professors at UCLA’s antropology department into granting him a Ph.D. that it still has not been revoked. Reviewer Richard de Mille identified Castaneda as a “former hoaxer” — for Castaneda is now telling tales with such reckless abandon that reasonable men (male or female) will not believe he is trying to deceive anyone.”
Ann Coulter;- fanatic propagandist for the pseudoscientific hypothesis that women are so intrinsically inferior to men that they should not be allowed to vote. While Coulter has all the appearance of being a caricature invented by liberals to put into her mouth Republicanazi doctrines so insane that she will discredit the entire Religious Right (e.g., preventing women from voting will prevent a democrat from ever being elected President), there is sufficient evidence to conclude that she is a real person and is really the epitome of absolute evil that her writings reveal.
Rosemary Crossley:- inventor of the “facilitated communication” delusion, in which self-styled facilitators manipulate the fingers of an autistic or retarded person into punching words on a keyboard, and deluding themselves that the patient rather than the facilitator is the author of the typed message. FC has been totally discredited. When a patient was shown a picture and asked to describe it, and the facilitator was shown a different picture that she was deceived into believing was the same picture, the typed message described the picture shown to the facilitator, even though the patient had not seen that picture. Crossley’s institution continues to tout facilitated communication as a legitimate means of communicating with the developmentally handicapped, even though she has been made aware of the falsifying evidence.
Tom Cruise:- brain amputee who was conned into becoming a shill for the confidence swindle that is fleecing him, appearing on television as a propagandist for the pseudoscientific fantasy of Scientology.
Eric von Daniken:- crank and humbug (it is possible to be both) who authored several books, starting with Chariots of the Gods, postulating that ancient gods such as Zeus and Apollo were astronauts from an alien star system. While von Daniken’s earliest books appear to propound a theory that he really believed, publishers eventually rejected his last offerings after it was discovered that his most recent books had been centered on alleged artifacts that had in fact been manufactured to his specifications.
Stockwell Day:- Canadian theofascist politician whose belief that the Christian bible is literal truth, and that dinosaurs coexisted with humans until they drowned in Noah’s flood 5,000 years ago, caused one commentator to remark that, “Day thinks the Flintones is a documentary.”
William Dembski:- brain amputee who knows perfectly well that “intelligent design” is religion posing as science, but who cannot get it through his head that the I.D. claims he continues to tout in his books have been shown to stem from a totally incompetent interpretation of the archaeological evidence that the human body was not intelligently designed, and that humans and all other animals did evolve from common ancestors.
John Dewey:- daydreamer whose “progressive education” theories opened the door for the teaching of pseudoscience in schools, on the ground that pupils should be allowed to decide for themselves whether they wanted to learn anything. “Progressive education,” combined with the takeover of much of American society by the Christian Taliban, has led to a situation in which a majority of Americans believe that the universe is less than 10,000 years old.
Allison DuBois:- lying humbug whose masturbation fantasies became the basis for a television series called Medium. When DuBois’s claims to have aided law enforcement agencies were shown to be unmitigated lies, NBC removed such claims from its website–but it went ahead and broadcast the series because the network’s programmers were uneducated morons who refused to be told that Dubois’s alleged psychic powers do not exist. There is no such thing as a “medium.”
Bob Dylan:- folksinger who converted from Judaism to Christianity. Since switching from a mythology that cannot be falsified without simultaneously falsifying Christianity, to a mythology that can be falsified without falsifying Judaism, is logically absurd, it is a reasonable assumption that all such conversions, including Dylan’s stem from social and economic considerations. Any change of belief not based on evidence that at least appears to be scientifically valid is pseudoscience.
Mary Baker Eddy:- hypochondriac who became a patient and then assistant to mesmerist Phineas Quimby. After Quimby’s death, Eddy continued to practice Quimby’s form of placebo talk therapy, but changed its name to “divine healing.” She called her final hodgepodge of mesmerism, mysticism, and masturbation fantasies by the oxymoronic name of “Christian Science.” Eddy’s son tried to have her declared mentally incompetent but, even though she was observably not of a sound mind–and even taught that the human body does not exist–a court ruled that she was sufficiently rational to be allowed to bequeath her property as she wished. The earliest version of Science and Health, which Eddy published under her own name, was an expansion of a manuscript by Quimby. The current version has undergone so much reediting that it has the appearance of being written by someone with more than a grade school education.
Milton Erickson:- medical hypnotist who, in refereed articles in medical journals, claimed to have achieved results far exceeding those of any other hypnotist, past or present, results that even believers in hypnotism acknowledge to be impossible. Erickson’s most preposterous claim was that he had simply looked at a member of an audience to whom he was lecturing and, by thinking what he wanted the subject to do, “hypnotized’ him into walking onto the stage and carrying out the act Erickson had mentally put into his mind. For Erickson’s published articles to be anything but unmitigated lies, first hypnotism would have to exist (it does not), and second mental telepathy/extra sensory perception would have to exist (it does not).
Hans Eysenck:- to quote an article by Martin Gardner in Discover (Oct. 1982), “Imagine that you are reading a book, by an eminent British astronomer, called Flat Earth: Science or Superstition? You find that the first three-fourths of the volume marshals impressive evidence against flatness, then the rest of the book proves that the earth is shaped like the Great Pyramid.” Gardner then goes on to explain that Hans Eysenck’s book, Astrology: Science or Superstition, begins with nine chapters that give all the reasons why traditional astrology is humbug, then in two remaining chapters champions a new astrology concocted by French nut job Michel Gauquelin. Even before his death, Gauquelin was exposed as a practioner of fraudulent methodology, choosing for publication only those statistics that supported his theory and ignoring those that refuted it. Gauquelin was a pseudoscientist, and Eysenck was a pseudoscientist.
FBI:- agency run by scientifically illiterate unteachables who cannot grasp that there is no such thing as a lie detector, and polygraphs are only marginally more reliable than tossing a coin, “heads” for truth and “tails” for lie.
FOX News:- propaganda ministry of the Republicanazi Gestapo, that promotes Republicanazi religion as science.
Eileen Franklin:- inventor of the “recovered memory” hoax. When Franklin claimed to have suddenly remembered witnessing her father rape and strangle a child twenty years earlier, the father was convicted in the absence of any substantiating testimony whatsoever. The conviction was overturned when it was ascertained that every detail the daughter gave police had been published in newspapers to which she had access. Nonetheless “recovered memory” was accepted as a legitimate phenomenon by psychoquacks, and hundreds of innocent caregivers were accused of sexual molestation on the basis of fantasies put into their minds by self-sytled therapists.
Sigmund Freud:- originator of the psychoanalysis scam that all but unteachables now recognize as serving no function except curing patients of hypertrophied wallets.
John Fuller:- author of Ghost of Flight 401, a fantasy novel that the crew of flight 401 have repudiated as having no factual basis whatsoever. Fuller also wrote books endorsing psychic surgery and UFOs. Since at least one of his books has been shown to be a product of his imagination, the possibility that he is a deluded crank rather than a lying humbug can be dismissed.
Uri Geller:- humbug who passes off conjuring tricks as a “psychic power” that he certainly knows he does not have and almost certainly knows does not exist.
Mel Gibson:- neo-Nazi pusher of a neo-Catholic superstition, who preaches that the Vatican is infallible when it predestines all non-Catholics to hell, but diabolic when it refuses to canonize Gibson’s even more psychotic father, and appoints popes who permit masses to be conducted in languages other than the Latin that is the only language Gibson’s slow-learner god understands. Gibson is an embrarrassment to primates.
God:- the ultimate pseudoscientist, a literary creation whose official biography shows him teaching that the earth is a flat disk at the center of the universe, the sky is a solid crystal dome to which the sun, moon and stars are attached, snakes and donkeys can talk, and the universe is less than 7,000 years old. God is also the most sadistic, evil, insane serial killer in all fiction.
Stephen Jay Gould:- creator of the pseudoscientific delusion he called NOMA. Gould argued that religion and science are Non-Overlapping Magisteria that are not interrelated and therefore not mutually exclusive. While religion’s methaphysical claims, such as the dogma that a god created the universe, cannot be subjected to scientific investigation, critical elements of religion have been tested and falsified, such as the age of the universe, the shape of the earh, the nature of the sky, and the origin of species. But Gould’s most incredible claim, the one that destroyed his reputation as a legitimate scientist that he had spent a lifetime establishing, was his delusion that morality fell within the Magisterium of religion–in other words, if a religion says that eating meat on Friday, or going outside without a turban, is immoral, then it is immoral. Logic, a scientific discipline, says that immorality means the unnecessary hurting of a nonconsenting victim, and nothing but that.
Ernst Gräfenburg:- pseudoscientist who announced the discovery of a center of erotic stimulation inside the vagina that came to be called the Gräfenberg spot or G spot. It is now generally conceded that the inside of a vagina is no more sensitive to erotic stimulation than a clipped toenail. The “G spot” does not exist.
Billy Graham:- backwoods hillbilly who believes that morality is whatever a fantasy novel says it is. Graham is on record as favoring the execution of persons who engage in the victimless, non-procreational sexual recreation with a non-spouse that he defines as “adultery,” even though the authors of the fantasy novel from which he takes his beliefs defined adultery as the robbing of a fellow Jew of his right to pass on his inheritance to his biological heirs by fraudulently impregnating his wife.
Mary Hart:- notorious pusher of pseudoscience who is either a scientifically illiterate ignoramus who has no awareness that psychics and mediums are swindling humbugs, or a prostitute who is willing to peddle whatever lie will boost the ratings on which her income depends. Either way, she is a worthy inductee into the Pseudoscience Hall of Infamy.
Charlton Heston:- brain amputee who believed that the Wild West, when anyone was allowed to own devices that had no function except homicide, should not be allowed to disappear. Like virtually all moral retards, Heston had no ability to distinguish the pseudoscience of religion from reality.
J. Edgar Hoover:- believer in the pseudoscientific theory that races are genetically unequel, whose thought police hounded actress Jean Seberg to death for marrying a black man. Hoover likewise encouraged the persecution of homosexuals–except himself and his longtime lover, of course.
Bud Hopkins:- author of Intruders, a fantasy novel posing as an autobiography, describing his alleged abduction by humanoid aliens. Unlike Whitley Strieber, Hopkins did not couch his lies as vague memories that could conceivably have been dreams. While Strieber took steps to avoid being identified as a conscious liar (which in fact he was), Hopkins had too much contempt for the suckers willing to swallow his fairy tales to bother doing likewise.
Fred Hoyle:- astronomer who carried pseudoscience to what may be its ultimate limit, declaring that the existence of a creator of the universe can be established by mathematics, with a probability greater than 10 to the 40,000th power. He got the “steady state” universe wrong too.
L. Ron. Hubbard:- inventor of the Scientology confidence swindle, who told science fiction editor John Campbell that he wanted to start a religon, “because that’s where the money is.” Hubbard showed his contempt for the suckers capable of taking his science fiction seriously by naming the planet from which aliens allegedly first brought humans to earth, “Arslycus.”
Mike Huckabee:- Republican presidential candidate in 2008 who ran on a platform of being a believer in the literal truth of his evangelical supporters’ bible, including its claim that the universe is flat. Huckabee was too obviously a fruitcake even for the averge Republican bible-thumper.
J. Allen Hynek:- the only astronomer associated with Project Blue Book, the ten-year study of UFO reports by the US Air Force, who failed to concur with the study’s final recomendation that no further research be funded because there was nothing there to research. Hynek’s inability to reach conclusions compatible with the evidence led him to publish an endorsement of the reality of UFOs in Technology Review, and to provide a spurious respectibility to Steven Spielberg’s scientifically illiterate propaganda movie named for a concept Hynek invented, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Intelligence Quotient:- measure of a puzzle-solving skill passed off as a measure of intelligence. Competing I.Q. tests utilize different standard deviations, so that an I.Q. of 130 on one scale is equal to 148 on a different scale. And since no I.Q. test can measure a score above four standard deviations, alleged scores above 164 on the Stanford Binet scale are propagandistic guesses. A high I.Q. score is no indication of an individual’s ability to engage in rational human thought. As a former member of Mensa concluded, “Just because someone is intelligent, that doesn’t mean that he’s not stupid.”
David Irving:- pseudo-historian who initially argued that, since no surviving documents showed Hitler authorizing the Final Solution, it must have been carried out without his knowledge. Irving later changed his position and declared that there never was a “Holocaust,” and that the hundreds of thousands of death camp survivors were all liars who perpetrated a successful decades-long hoax without a single one ever breaking ranks and admitting that they made it up.
Andy Kaufman:- gullible believer in the confidence swindle of “psychic surgery,” who allowed his cancer to be “treated” by a conjurer posing as a surgeon, and rejected the legitimate medical treatment that may have saved him or at least prolonged his life. Kaufman is now the poster boy for suicide through ignorance.
C. S. Lewis:- author of children’s literature whose books crossed the line separating delighful fantasy such as Harry Potter and Alice in Wonderland from pseudoscience, by manipulating his juvenile readers into believing that biblical fairy tales have more reality than those of Hans Anderson or the Brothers Grimm.
David Letterman:- intellectually challenged ignoramus who invited astrologer Jeanne Dixon to appear on his late-night interview program. When she threatened to put a hex on him if he failed to show butt-kissing respect, instead of demanding that she defend her pseudoscientific swindle, he appeared to be terrified that she could do it.
Percival Lowell:- astronomer who, in the mistaken belief that the canali (Italian for “channels”) Giovanni Schiaparelli thought he saw on the surface of Mars meant “canals,” aimed his own telescope at Mars and, when he convinced himself that he also could see “canals,” drew a detailed map of what he imagined that he saw even though it is now known that Martian canals do not exist and never did exist.
Lucia dos Santos:- co-creator of the fairy tale that the Catholic goddess Mary spoke to three children at Fatima, Portugal, and gave to them information about the future. In 2000 CE, when Lucia was safely ensconced in a convent from which no nun had ever escaped, the Vatican published a document allegedly written by Lucia, so inaccurate that the claim that it foretold the attempted assassination of Pope Wojtyla could only have been taken seriously by the intellectually challenged. Now that Lucia is safely dead and can never reveal that her tale was a practical joke, it is just a matter of time before the Catholic Church deifies/canonizes (same thing) her.
John Mack:- psychoquack who published a book authenticating alien abductions in the belief that his patients’ masturbation fantasies must be true, because he would have known if they were lying. Mack maintained that fatuous delusion even after one of his patients informed a CSICOP convention that she had fed him a pack of lies for the specific purpose of determining whether he used any valid methodology to determine whether his patients were simply telling him what he wanted to hear.
Shirley McLaine:- high priestess of pseudoscience whose books on reincarnation and “channeling,” helped revived the long discredited “spiritualism” hoax and helped part thousands of new marks from millions of dollars. While MacLaine was originally the gullible victim of confidence swindler A. Z. Knight, MacLaine became such a prolific pusher of the channeling scam that her place in the Pseudoscience Hall of Infamy is well deserved.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi:- confidence swindler whose “transcendental meditation” scam has fleeced suckers of more than $5 BILLION. The Maharishi’s disciples seriously believe that he has achieved such violations of the laws of physics–and can teach them to do so–as “yogic flying,” walking on water, leviatation, astral projection, and making themselves invisible. If P.T. barnum had even a small gaggle of Maharishi marks to sucker, he would not have needed Bailey.
Gerald McRainey:- braindead actor whose contribution to the propagation of pseudoscience consisted of starring in a short-lived TV series that utilized the prostitute tactic of manipulating viewers into believing that the central character’s communication with metaphysical entities has parallels in the real world.
Margaret Mead:- Since pseudoscience includes conducting scientific research by unscientific methodology, that makes Margaret Mead a pseudoscientist. Her form of pseudoscience was what is usually termed experimenter bias. In interviewing adolescent Polynesian women for a thesis that became Coming of Age in Samoa, she allowed her interviewees to discern what she wanted them to say, and they obediently said it. She then published her finding that the women she interviewed were pagans who practiced free love at every opportunity, and that such behavior was the Samoan norm. Only after Mead’s death did her interviewees come forward and acknowledge that they were Catholics and that they did not want to spoil Mead’s fun by telling the truth. Because of Mead’s reputation, based on her Samoan book, she was able to persuade the American Association for the Advancement of Science to recognize parapsychology as a science, and grant it AAAS membership. Among her pseudoscientific belief were alien visitations, dowsing, psychics, including Uri Geller, “trance” phenomena, auras, communication with plants, and dreams as information from ”outside the bounds of time.” Margaret Mead was a fruitcake first class.
Mensa:- organization of puzzle-solvers posing as intellectuals. One third of Mensa members are intelligent, one third are mediocre, and one third could take smart lessons from George W. Bush. Mensa contains the same percentage of believers in religion, the paranormal, humanoid aliens, astrology and other pseudoscience as the population at large.
Franz Anton Mesmer:- Viennese doctor who discovered that some ailments could be alleviated by mumbo jumbo that later came to be called “hypnotism” or “suggestion therapy,” that he interpreted as “animal magnetism.” An investigating committee that included Benjamin Franklin found that Mesmer’s technique had no intrinsic value, and all benefits derived from the placebo effect, but Mesmer himself was sincerely self-deluded that his methodology worked.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory;- pseudoscientific question sheet concocted by psychoquacks to enable them to intrepret each testee’s responses to mean anything the psychoquack wishes. No two psychoquacks will interpret the same patient’s answers to the same questions in the same way.
William Moore:- morally bankrupt fiction writer who passed off a novel about invisibility and time travel as nonfiction under the title, The Philadelphia Experiment. There was no Philadelphia Experiment. Moore also wrote endorsements of the lie that an alien spacecraft crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, and intentionally suppressed the known fact that the crashed object was a surveillance ballon used to spy on the USSR.
Malcolm Muggeridge:- brainwashed Catholic (there’s another kind?) who invented the “Mother Teresa” fantasy, much the way Lowell Thomas invented Lawrence of Arabia, by turning an obscure parasite who preyed on Calcutta slum dwellers into a “saint of the gutter,” by telling the world that she was a Father Damien equivalent. In fact, Mother Teresa was a liar, thief, and tinpot dictator who collected millions of dollars in the pretence that it would be used to feed the starving, and left it in banks to gather interest for the Catholic Church while the starving continued to starve.
National Inquirer:- supermarket tabloid devoted primarily to fictitious gossip about celebrities, but also America’s most prolific purveyor of pseudoscience. Every December National Inquirer publishes prophecies for the following year by about a dozen psychics, many of them the same ones whose prophecies a year earlier had a 100 percent failure rate.
NBC:- TV network that has long been controlled by brain amputees who lack the intelligence to grasp that “paranormal” is a euphemism for “superstitious nonsense.” In the 1980s NBC affilates carried the independently produced, In Search Of, a series that allegedly investigated “great mysteries, past and present.” As an article in Discover, 1982, reported, “In Search Of deals with them in a pretentious, semi-documentary, and fraudulent way, blatantly distorting or ignoring facts… The producers of the show apparently view [a misleading disclaimer] as a license to misinform.” And when NBC indicated that it was preparing a series based on the Big Lie that Alison DuBois’s fairy tale autobiography was nonfiction, representaives of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), after failing to make the network executives responsible for programming realize that DuBois’s alleged powers not only do not exist but cannot exist, came away convinced that those executives were unteachables who could not grasp the basic reality that information cannot travel backward in time, as it would have to do for anyone to have knowledge of the future.
Nobel Peace Prize;- imitation gold brick that is consistently awarded to malefactors due to propagandistic media manipulation that portrays them as public benefactors. The most obscene award was to the Albanian nun, Mother Teresa, who spent her life sponging on Calcutta’s destitute, while pretending to be working for their welfare. She collected millions of dollars allegedly to feed the starving, and left it in bank accounts to collect interest for the Catholic Church while the starving continue to starve.
Omnipotence:- At first glance, omnipotence appears to be a fantasy concept, incapable of falsification. And indeed it cannot be demonstrated directly that omnipotence does not exist. But it can be logically proven that omnipotence cannot exist. Omnipotence is the ability to do absolutely anything, including creating a number that is more than ten but less than nine. Since it can thus be proven that omnipotence does not exist, that makes it a pseudoscience concept rather than a fantasy concept.
Omniscience:- knowledge of absolutely everything–including the future. But for any lifeform to foreknow the future, information would need to travel backward in time, in violation of the axiom that an effect cannot precede its cause. Such a violation of the laws of logic is pseudoscience.
Hubert Pearce:- divinity student who conned Joseph Rhine that he could read minds, resulting in Rhine publishing credulous accounts of ESP tests in which Pearce had produced significantly better than chance results by cheating.
Pope Benedict XVI:- (Joseph Ratzinger—or should that be Ratzinazi?) certifiable psychopath and former Grand Inquistor who has revived the long-discredited concept of demon possession, and ordered the training of hundreds of new exorcists. Ratzinazi has cemented his absolute power by promoting the BIG LIE that condoms increase the probability of contracting AIDS. Since there is no possibility whatsoever that he believes that, he must be recognized as the most unspeakably evil mass murderer since Adolf Hitler, whose mindset, that the Führer can do anything he wishes, he shares. Ratzinazi not only preaches that his imaginary Sky Führer has predestined all non-Catholics to Hell; he praises it for doing so. Not since Hitler has anyone matched Ratzinazi’s indisputable claim to the title of the most evil, anthropocidal, anti-human, raving mad dog on earth, with Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush fighting it out for second and third place. Any Catholic who does not demand Ratzinazi’s immediate impeachment is himself braindead.
Pope John Paul 11:- (Karol Wojtyla) pope who may never have been diagnosed as having Down syndrome, but whose intellectual capacity was strongly suggestive of such a handicap. Wojtyla demonstrated his commitment to pseudoscience when he urged Pope Paul VI to retain the ban on birth control on the ground that changing a discredited pseudoscientific policy might encourage the masses to believe that “God was on the side of the Protestants.” As the enforcer of an insane policy that caused 60 million homicides, from starvation, malnutrition, and AIDS, Wojtyla was the most prolific mass murderer in human history.
Pope Paul V:- pseudoscientist who declared that, “the doctrine of the double motion of the earth about its axis and about the sun is false, and entirely contrary to Holy Scripture.” And these guys claim to be infallible?
prayer:- the ultimate pseudoscience. “Pray for a person, and he’ll let you pick his pocket once. Teach him to pray, and you’ve hooked a sucker for life.”
preachers:- there are two kinds of preachers: those who preach pseudo-knowledge because they are themselves brainwashed ignoramuses with no ability to disinguish fairy tales from reality, and those who are fully aware that they are parasites who sponge on the gullibility of the brainwashed because, “that’s where the money is.”
profiler:- pseudoscientist who imagines that his guesses about the perpetrator of a particular crime are more accurate and useful than those of a bartender or tealeaf reader. Except as a euphemism for a fatuous oaf with delusions of grandeur, there is no such thing as a profiler.
psychology:- collective name for a large number of incompatible theories of human behavior, such as Rogerian, Freudian, Skinnerian/Behavorist, Jungian, Adlerian, gestalt, and several others, each of which could be a useful contribution to human knowledge only if all the others are incompetent pseudoscience. In fact psychology is pseudoscience. A “knowledge of the mind” may one day exist. As of 2008 it does not.
Lobsang Rampa:- (real name, Cyril Hoskins) fantasy novelist whose pretended autobiography, A Doctor From Lhasa, became a bestseller after it was revealed that he had never been to Tibet in his life, raising the question: Just how stupid are pseudoscience believers?
Nancy Reagan;- scientifically illiterate moron who convinced her intellectually challenged husband to base America’s foreign policy on astrology.
Ronald Reagan:- B-list actor, long thought to be the stupidest President America would ever have–until George W. Bush took the title from him in a canter. Reagan may not have been the first President to believe in the pseudoscience of astrology, although he was first to base America’s foreign policy on astrology. But he was probably the first President who believed in a geocentric universe.
religion:- collective name for about 10,000 different belief systems, any one of which could be true only if all others are imaginative fiction, and only if all science is pretentious fiction.
restless leg syndrome:- the public relations drone who concocted this pseudoscience equivalent of Barnum’s ”rose colored horse” was probably not trying to prove that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of persons who take television commercials seriously. That was just the way it turned out.
Jospeh Rhine:- incompetent statistician whose thousands of tests of extra sensory perception in volunteer subjects first established that ESP almost certainly does not exist. Unfortunately, Rhine’s misreading of equal-to-chance results as better-than-chance led to widespread dissemination of the delusion that ESP does exist and has been demonstrated to exist. Anyone who has taken Statistics 101 can recognize at a glance that Rhine’s interpretation of his results was totally fraudulent.
Jeremy Rifkin:- author of a book called Algeny in which he denounced genetic engineering experiments on human sperm and egg cells on grounds that a presidential commision dismissed as nonsense. An article about Rifkin in Discover, August 1983, declared “Jeremy Rifkin gives new meaning to the cliché, ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing.’ Scientists who are taken in by his nonsense should be ashamed of themselves.”
Charles Russell:- inventor of a religion called Jehovah’s Witnesses that bases its lifestyle on the delusion that, when Torah authors demanded that the blood be drained from food before eating, so that the blood could be spilled into the ground as a sacrifice to the god Yahweh, they were prohibiting the use of blood to save lives by transfusing it into accident victims, a procedure that was not even thought of until several centuries later. In several American states, Jehovah’s Witnesses are allowed to kill their children by denying them lifesaving blood transfusions.
Santa Claus:- fairy tale entity that children are encouraged to believe is real, even though the Santa Claus lie encourages children to believe any lie related to them by a “usually reliable source,” and thereby conditions them to believe in Santa Claus’s adult equivalent, “God.”
Scientology:- belief system that could be true only if humans have no DNA in common with any other terrestrial lifeform, since it teaches that the first humans were brought to earth from a planet called Arslycus, a name chosen to demonstrate the cult’s creator Ron Hubbard’s total contempt for the brain amputees capable of mistaking his confidence swindle for a religion.
Tom Selleck:- theofascist Republicanazi actor who first revealed his true self in a Magnum P.I. episode when Magnum cold-bloodly executed his friend’s murderer instead of arresting him, a scene that could never have been written into the script unless it accurately portrayed Selleck’s true moral retardation. All theofascism is pseudoscience, since it mistakes a book of fairy tales for nonfiction. But whether an individual’s philosophy is evil because he is a theofascist, or he is a theofascist because he already espoused a philosophy of evil, has never been researched.
Rod Sterling:- overrated TV writer of the 1960s whose breakout series, The Twilight Zone, was honest science fiction and made no pretence to be anything else, in his subsequent series, Night Gallery, Sterling wrote a parapsychology professor into the script, even though no such occupation existed in the real world, in order to imply that the series’ science fiction scripts were based on real cases that had been investigated by real professors and found to be unexplainable. In doing so, he opened the door for the lying prostitutes who produced Psi Factor, who took Sterling’s implication to the next level and stated categorically that their imaginative fantasises were cases from the files of an organization that did not exist. In Sterling’s favor is that he had far less control over Night Gallery than he had over The Twilight Zone, and by the series’ final season he virtually disowned it.
B. F. Skinner:- psychoquack who taught that there is no such thing as free will. Perhaps Skinner himself had no ability to make a free choice whether to behave in an ethical or a criminal manner. Most reasonable persons view the accusation that they have no such ability as unmitigated bullshit.
Joseph Smith:- American boy who, about three years after the 1816 death of author Solomon Spaulding, found Spaulding’s unpublished manuscript of a historical novel in which the imagined ”lost tribes of Israel” migrated to America and became the American Indians, and rewrote it into the semblance of nonfiction under the title, The Book of Mormon. In recent times scholars have established that twelve pages of The Book of Mormon are in Spaulding’s handwriting.
Social science:- any discipline in which two dissertations, so incompatible that for either one to be valid the other must be incompetent hogwash, can both receive Ph.D.s from the same department of the same university in the same year.
Sociobiology:- pseudoscience concocted by E. O. Wilson that could be a usful contribution to knowledge only if history, biology, anthropology, genetics, paleontology and several other sciences are pretentious fiction.
Cardinal Francis Spellman:- purveyor of the “God” superstition based on the pretence that a book of fairy tales is nonfiction. But what makes Spellman a more worthy candidate for the Hall of Infamy than some other preachers is that, in accordance with the dogma of his cult, he preached homophobia, while simultaneously practising regular and repeated homosexual recreation himself.
Steven Spielberg:- scientifically illiterate movie director responsible for such paeans to pseudoscience as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist, and Taken, all of which were scripted to pander to the ignorance of conspiracy theorists. Since most of Spielberg’s movies are legitimate works of art, his endorsement of superstitious hogwash seriously undermines an otherwise illustrious reputation.
Oliver Stone:- amoral film producer who in all likelihood had no ability to grasp that contributing to the dumbing of America by reviving the long discredited “second gunman” fantasy about the JFK assassination was morally repugnant. To Stone, all that mattered was his awareness that there was a market for a movie that told conspiracy theorists what they wanted to hear, and he was no more obliged to adhere to truth or rea
“It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain,