Tetherd Cow Ahead

Cowpokes! The End is Nigh! Run for the hills! What with the threats of terrorism, biological warfare, solar flares, tsunamis, the flipping of the magnetic poles, an atheist woman as head of the Australian government and a black man as the head of the US government, it will be a MIRACLE if we last even another week! But, dear feiends, have no fear! Should one (or more!) of the aforementioned catastrophes overtake us, the folks over at Vivos have anticipated every eventuality for the approaching apocalypse and are offering the ultimate ‘life assurance’ and ‘the greatest chance of future restoration of the world as we know it, regardless of the catastrophe’.

Here – let them tell you about it in their own words:

Millions of people believe that we are living in the “end times”. Many are looking for a viable solution to survive potential future Earth devastating events. Eventually, our planet will realize another devastating catastrophe, whether manmade, or a cyclical force of nature. Disasters are rare and unexpected, but on any sort of long timeline, they’re inevitable. It’s time to prepare!

Vivos is a privately funded venture, with no religious affiliations, building a global network of underground shelters, to accommodate thousands of people. Vivos will provide a life assurance solution for those that wish to be prepared to survive these potential events, whether they occur now, in 2012, or in decades to come

Yes, by purchasing a share in a Vivos community bunker, or getting them to build your own bespoke shelter, you can survive the End Times and walk out refreshed into a world full of bracing post-catastrophe horror! To see what you’ll get for your money, you can take a tour around a typical Vivos facility, furnished with all the comforts of home, including attractive paintings of idyllic landscapes that you’ll never see again:

Geez guys, could you have found a more gloomy and depressing piece of music for that? Are you selling a shelter or a tomb here?

Seriously, no matter how hard I try, I can’t think of any calamity listed on the Vivos site that seems worse than ending up in some underground IKEA nightmare with a bunch of people who are inclined to believe that the world is going to end in 2012 ‘because the Mayan calendar says so’. ((You can watch a video on the Vivos site about how the ‘incredibly precise’ Mayan calendar (‘… a calendar more accurate even than our own’) predicts the world will end in 2012.)) Let me see: Electromagnetic Pulse? Nope. Killer comet? Nope. Planet X? Nope. Super volcano? Nope. ((I’m a little surprised to see that Zombie Attack and Alien Invasion aren’t featured, to be honest. If nothing else, they’d make for some really cool additional icons.)) I’d rather take my chances with any of those.

What are these people thinking? Have they never seen a post-apocalyptic movie? Have they never played Fallout? Do they really want to climb out of their bunkers after a year of mind-numbing boredom to find themselves wandering around a planet full of shotgun-wielding mutant vigilantes with no morals and bad personal hygiene? Or worse, Fundamental Islamic militia?

There are so many things wrong with this unhinged doom-laden vision that it’s hard to know where to start. From the hysterical countdown to annihilation (905 days, 06 hours, 31 minutes, 24 seconds remaining) to the hyper-paranoid ‘scenarios’ videos (Nuclear Terrorism! Surviving Anarchy! Secret Government Shelters!) the website plays out like some bad Hollywood projection of the Apocalypse. It takes mere seconds to find places where this plan will start splitting at the seams.

Take a quick tour around the Vivos Knowledge Base and see how many opportunities for failure you can find. The spectacular promises (hydroponic gardens to support 200 people for more than a year, 24 hour power generation with supplemental wind and solar, hotel-style amenities, impregnable defences to resist volcanic eruption, seismic disturbance and biological contamination) fairly reek of hyperbole. ((For a start – where are they getting their air from? Filtered air from outside will be useless in a case of chemical attack, and it’s not like they can stockpile a year’s worth of oxygen for 200 people…)) Half these things are all but impossible to achieve. And if Vivos doesn’t deliver, what are you going to do when the anarchist Muslim terrorist bio-freaks come pouring through your Vivos shelter airlock? Ask for your money back?

Tetherd Cow Advice: If you’re worried about the Apocalypse arriving in 2012, ((You can bet your Nigerian fortune that I’ll be revisiting all these predictions in 2013!)) stock up on single malt whisky and plan to be somewhere with a good view. In the meantime, send me your bank account details. After all, you can’t take it with you.

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Big thanks to Atlas for bringing Vivos to my attention.

A recent Cow commenter, Nancy, from Sweden, tells us that ShooTag is now on sale in her country. ((And TCA saved her some money! Like any good sensible person she did some research before she forked out.)) A quick lookup verifies that yes, the ShooTaggers are making inroads into Europe with the same unfounded claims of efficacy for their product as they’ve used elsewhere. Clearly, the critical faculties of the world are in dire trouble. I even turned up this link (page has been redacted by ShooTag revisionists) which trumpets that the Finnish Olympic Team ‘is now using shoo!TAG products for protection against mosquitos !!!’ I fervently hope that this is an idle boast from the sales agent and that the Finnish Olympic Team is not so stupid as to endorse this silly item.

My friends over at the JREF have pointed out, though, that Europe might not be the virgin territory that the ShooTaggers perhaps expect. Yes folks, Europe has their own flavour of pet wootag and it’s called The Anibio Tic-Clip®.

Anibio appears to be a German company but handily, they do have a link to a pdf in English on their site which ‘explains’ how Tic-Clip works:

Ready-to-use tic-clip tags are carrying a specially charged layer of highly radiating, bioenergetic with a very high storage capacity. (Bioenergetic = dextropolarised electromagnetic energy). This creates a special oscillation-field around the tag and thus around the animal. Tics and fleas will not react to the animal anymore.

Whoa! Dextropolarised! Now there’s a word you don’t hear every day. You can look it up if you want – I did – but really, it’s one more instance of a new contextually-meaningless woo buzz word like ‘quantum’ or ‘magnetic’ and I won’t labour the point here. You can already tell that this ‘scientific’ explanation is just another load of baloney in the same vein as the ShooTag nonsense. And this one works without a clumsy magnetic strip! ShooTag! Your technology is so-o-o-o yesterday!

The pdf also urges the visitor to read this important information: ((We assume it’s important because the exhortation has lots of exclamation marks.))

This product was developed after many years of research together with the Germany based company Hess & Volk GmbH and has archived spectacular success in tic and flea prevention all over Europe. Many successful breeders are using it. Similar to holistic approaches you are unable to see or feel ((…or, in fact, determine any effect of…)) the Bioernergetic potential, but the positive results over the last couple of years are proving the strength of this toxin-free solution.

If you thought that the highlighted and underlined areas might prove to be a link to Messrs Hess & Volk’s ‘archive of spectacular success in tick and flea prevention’, I fear you will be bitterly disappointed. That would be altogether far too convenient. In fact, searching on Hess & Volk turns up lots of links pointing back to Anibio, but not much else. Now where oh where might we have seen that kind of behaviour before?

Elsewhere, an American distributor of Tic-Clip has some more enlightenment for us:

The mechanism of the Tic-Clip’s action is a bit abstract when compared with the traditional insect repellents, but this product is the result of many years of research and delivers results that dispel skepticism. Holistic products that work similarly with bioenergetic fields, like flower essences and homeopathic remedies, still lie outside the mainstream, but devoted users will tell you that the results can be truly amazing, even without their really understanding exactly how they work.

Hahahaha! The mechanism is a bit ‘abstract’? Judging by the rest of the paragraph, I think the phrase they’re looking for might be ‘The mechanism is a big steaming heap of claptrap’.

Still, maybe something’s being lost in interpretation here? Let’s go to the original German Anibio site with our friend the Babelfish and get it straight from the mund des pferdes.

Oooh. There’s a graph. That’s scientific. It’s supposed to be showing us how the Tic-Clip’s effectiveness works over time. With an efficacy of 2 years at a price of €24.90 (US$36.39) it’s MUCH better value than ShooTag’s measly 4 months for US$39.95! What does Babelfish tell us that the manufacturer is offering for that money:

Ready for use TIC tie-clip supporter contains an bioenergetic load, a special layer with high radiation potential and has a high storage capacity. In the surrounding field of the supporter, and thus in the environment of the animal (independent of its size and kind of skin), develops then a special oscillation field, which protects now dogs and cats against Zecken and fleas. The TIC tie-clip supporter is fastened with the attached rings to collar or table-ware (material plays thereby no role). On the time, on which a ring is drawn by the supporter, the TIC tie-clip up to 2 works years

OK… that’s making about as much sense as anything else we’ve read I guess. Once the Tic-Clip is properly fastened to the table-ware, it does seem to offer everything that ShooTag does at least. The Tic-Clip appears to be more robust too: the site has some caveats on effectiveness, but they don’t include the lengthy excuses that ShooTag provides for conditions under which their product might not work.

So the Tetherd Cow Ahead shoppers’ advice is: If you’re on the lookout for a completely useless product that does absolutely nothing in the way of keeping insect pests off your pets, there’s no contest – you get hugely better value for money by wasting your cash on Anibio Tic-Clip® than you do on Energetic Solutions Shoo!TAG™ ((I really wonder what the ShooTag people make of something like this. Do they scoff at the opposition: ‘That’s SO far-fetched! Look at the dumb claims they’re making! That will never work!’, or do they gaze on in envy: ‘How are they doing this without a magnetic stripe? How the hell are they achieving a 2 year efficacy? Can we steal their technology?’. My brain does little flip-flops when I try to imagine how these people think.))

As we have seen in numerous posts on The Cow, pseudoscience veritably thrives in all those places where complex processes have subjective outcomes. It does especially well if those outcomes promise big rewards of money, fame or health. One outcome that is primed for exploitation is vanity, and although we’ve covered quite a few areas of jiggery pokery, one that hasn’t made an appearance up till now is the multi billion dollar cosmetics industry. Since it deals with highly subjective issues of appearance, youth and beauty, you can bet your lash-lengthening mascara that we don’t have to look very far in this field before we stumble across hogwash.

A couple of nights ago on tv I saw an ad for a skincare product by Estée Lauder called ‘Advanced Night Repair – Synchronized Recovery Complex’ ((You can almost feel the copywriters hammering that one out…)) that boasted that its wonderful skin revitalizing technology was ‘inspired by DNA research’. Hahahaha! ‘Inspired’ by DNA research! It was such a piece of waffle that it even had Violet Towne, Vermilion and Viridian hooting with derision. ((It has to be said that I’ve taught them well.)) The crux here of course is that ‘inspiration’ means absolutely toss-all as a credential. I could claim that Tetherd Cow Ahead is ‘inspired’ by Shakespeare but that doesn’t mean that it’s:

•As good as Shakespeare
•Similar in content to Shakespeare or, in fact,
•That it has anything to do with Shakespeare whatsoever.

It could simply mean that I read some Shakespeare and thought: ‘That old Shakespeare was a clever geezer, wasn’t he? You know what? That’s inspired me to start up a blog!’ You could never prove one way or another that this wasn’t the case. The trick is that the makers of this product can happily tell you that they were ‘inspired’ by DNA research (which sounds like it could be impressive) while simultaneously telling you nothing at all.

With that in mind, I did a search for beauty products ‘inspired by DNA research’ and came upon a treasure trove of nonsense. The first stop was a product called PerfectSkin™. Of course the first thing I did was visit the PerfectSkin™ science page, because, as we all know, the science pages of people who are trying to sell you fantastical promises are always good value. I suggest you go to the Perfect Science Labs™ page now and take it in. There will be a quiz when you get back.

OK. Did the pictures of serious (but attractive) women in lab coats and masks convince you? No? How about the blurb:

Perfect Science Labs worked with world renowned chemist and skincare scientist Dr. Ron DiSalvo to incorporate the most recent groundbreaking discoveries in skincare, including patented ingredients to create PerfectSkin’s miracle breakthrough 3D BioRepair Complex. This revolutionary complex inspired by DNA research contains a blast of powerful vitamins, antioxidants, and a patented newly discovered exotic plant enzyme, OGG-1 (8-oxo-guanine DNA glycosylase), that kill harmful free radicals, which attack and damage your healthy skin. ((All emphases in the original))

Jeepers creepers! That sounds like it’s the answer to all of humankinds’ most pressing problems, don’t it!

It appears that when you’ve run out of words like ‘quantum’, ‘magnetic’, ‘energy’ and ‘vibration’ to describe your new dubious product, the newest, hippest, most phantasmagorical epithet you can now add is that it’s ‘3D’. Just excuse me while I fall on my corkscrew. Could there be any more meaningless a grab for credibility? Well, yes, I guess the quickly following ‘inspired by DNA research’ shows us that there can. And if you’re looking for enlightenment in the next bit where ‘OGG1 kills harmful free radicals’, well, let me save you the effort – there ain’t any.

OGG1 is an enzyme implicit in cell repair but evidence for its efficacy as a topical agent is dubious at best. It certainly doesn’t ‘kill’ free radicals. Being about as chemically simple as you can get, free radicals are not actually alive under any interpretation of the concept. ((The terms ‘free radicals’ and ‘antioxidants’ have become buzzwords. If you ask most people about those things they will almost certainly have the view that they are things that are not good for you. But if you ask them why they think that, you’ll find without any shadow of a doubt that they have inherited the notion from the advertising of cosmetic and ‘health’ related products. Try it. You’ll see how right I am!)) And anyway, there is much debate about the role of free radicals in respect to human health. The evidence that they cause the kind of aging damage that was once suspected is currently being challenged.

Elsewhere on the PerfectSkin™ site we find the ubiquitous testimonials page. As we have seen with other purveyors of pseudoscience like Shoo!TAG, testimonials are absolutely indispensable when you don’t have actual science on your side. I’d like to reproduce one of the ‘Before & After’ comparisons here for you, but intellectual property issues cause me to err on the side of not getting sued. Go there now and look at any one of the testimonials before reading on.

Without exception, every one of these ‘Before & After’ examples is deceitful.

•Before: Ambivalent expression; bad lighting; shiny face; no makeup.
•After: Happy expression; flattering lighting; professional makeup job; in some cases, digital retouching.

My personal feeling is that if someone is prepared to lie to me quite so badly that I can detect it in seconds, why would I trust anything else they have to say, especially when it invokes technical concepts that are complicated and leave acres of wiggle room?

This kind of deception is not only common in the cosmetic industry, it almost seems de rigueur. Searching further on our term ‘inspired by DNA research’ brings up all manner of doublespeak and flim flam. There is so much of it that I could probably start up a blog completely dedicated to the subject. You can venture on for yourself if you so desire. But before we finish, I’ll leave you with one more colourful example:

This is Morrocco Method Simply Pure Sea Essence Shampoo.

This synergistic blend of enlivened, charged botanicals and hand-picked herbs are mixed, blended, and bottled according to the moon cycles used by ancient farmers.

For the Morrocco Method Sea Essence Shampoo we go to the sea waters off the coast of Brittany, said to be among the cleanest waters on earth. We combine ocean water with living sea plants: algae, kelp and seaweed. Ocean water is practically identical to human blood plasma. Sea vegetables have a uniquely high level of DNA, RNA, and nucleic factors, the building blocks of life itself. As well, this shampoo is chock full of silicon which promotes healthy growth.

Bwahahahaha! What fun. Let’s deconstruct that, shall we:

•‘This synergistic blend of enlivened, charged botanicals…’

What the fuck does that even mean?

•‘…bottled according to the moon cycles used by ancient farmers.’

And that is efficacious… how?

•’…the sea waters off the coast of Brittany, said to be among the cleanest waters on earth’

‘Said’ by whom? Your mum?

•‘Ocean water is practically identical to human blood plasma.’

Well, yeah, depending on your definition of ‘practically identical’. As in ‘Tetherd Cow Ahead is practically identical to the combined works of Shakespeare.’

•’Sea vegetables have a uniquely high level of DNA, RNA, and nucleic factors, the building blocks of life itself.’

I don’t think they have a clue what they’re talking about here: ‘a uniquely high level of DNA’? What does that even mean? And anyway, by inference, WHAT, exactly?

•‘As well, this shampoo is chock full of silicon…’

If it was ‘chock full’ of silicon it would be a bottle of sand (and anyway – isn’t it already chock full of DNA?). ((I have a suggestion for the makers of Morrocco Method – why not consider homeopathy? Then the product doesn’t have to be chock full of anything. In fact, the less chock full it is, the better!))

•‘…which promotes healthy growth.’

Silicon promotes healthy growth? Why? There’s no silicon in your hair! We’re carbon-based lifeforms you idiot.

Yes folks, no matter how many flavours of silliness you want, the cosmetics industry has them all!

Meanwhile, in the Tetherd Cow Ahead laboratories…

Good morning Faithful Acowlytes! I hope you got plenty of restful sleep last night because today you’ll need to have your wits about you as we start off with a quiz. This is the kind of quiz where I show you two images and you have to spot the differences between them. I’m sure you’ve done one of those before. OK, are you ready? Here we go then:

No? Look very very carefully. Still nothing? Hahaha! I apologize dear friends – I’ve tricked you with this one because image #1 is a teapot and image #2 is ALSO a teapot! In fact the only tiny difference between them is that the first one is a Royal Doulton, and the second one is a royal dolt.

Generally I try to refrain from picking on Royalty ((Well, except for King Willy of course – but he’s such good sport.)) here on The Cow because, well, it’s a bit too much like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean, it’s not their fault, really, is it? All those centuries of inbreeding does tend to take its toll. Luckily, most Royals are safely out of harm’s way for the most part, but sadly it doesn’t stop them from opening their mouths and gabbing when they have an audience.

If you know anything about the Prince of Wales you will be aware that he’s not a stranger to elliptical thinking. He has campaigned on behalf of homeopathy, freaked out about GM technology and now, in his latest escapade, blamed Galileo and science for the ills of the modern world.

In a presentation last week to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Prince Charles places culpability for all our climate problems on ‘mechanistic thinking’ which ‘goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion’. The prince thinks that the reason for our current environmental difficulties is because the Western world is having a ‘deep, inner crisis of the soul’.

This is a banal piece of reasoning that is as antiquated as the concept of the Royal Family itself. The Prince of Wales pulls one of the classic tricks of the religiously-inclined of equating a quest for knowledge with an abrogation of moral responsibility. In other words, science equals heartless amoral exploitation; religion ((The Prince doesn’t specifically campaign for religion as such, but it’s the same kind of thinking – the mention of ‘souls’ and the faux surprise when he says that he finds it ‘baffling that so many scientists profess a faith in God yet this has little bearing on the ‘damaging’ way science is used to exploit the natural world’ all mixes in to his diffuse religious view of how things work.)) equals warm and fuzzy caring and sharing. Even a schoolkid can see the stupidity inherent in this simplistic notion.

Prince Charles’ view of science as ‘cold and mechanistic’ is one that is beloved of science detractors and shows no understanding at all of scientists or scientific pursuit. Additionally, the Prince is either willful or stupid by ignoring (in favour of its perceived ills) the extraordinary benefits so obviously brought to us by science. How about the science that gave us the cure for smallpox, Your Highness? Or the science that has allowed millions of people access to clean water and nutritious food? How about the good deeds of the scientists who figured out how to clone insulin so that diabetics can have affordable treatment? How about the wonderful achievements of science that let us talk to our friends and family wherever they may be on the planet, at any time of the day or night? Or the science that allows us to make great adventures inwards to our consciousness and outward to the cosmos?

Like many of the purveyors of woo, the Prince of Wales wants it both ways; he eschews science because it is ‘evil’, but is quite happy to enjoy the countless improvements it brings to our lives. He blames science for our creating our ‘materialistic culture’ and for the ‘damaging way it is used to exploit the world’, yet offers no practical alternatives – just notions of vague, superficial, wistful magical thinking.

He advocates a world without science and without individual material aspirations. ((For the peasants, at any rate.))He pines for a world with a folky agrarian culture where superstitious thinking rules.

It’s not surprising in the end. Royalty has always done very well in such climates.

Episode 4: Manna From Heaven.

*But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.

And the manna was as coriander seed, and the colour thereof as the colour of bdellium.

I love teh intertubes. So, I do a search for the word ‘mushroom’ in the Bible and find that fungus does not appear to come under God’s purview at all. Anywhere. God did not create mushrooms, apparently. Well, not explicitly anyway. He created the animals and the plants, but as we know, the fungus inhabits a Kingdom in its own right – if anyone should know this, it’s God – Him being omnipotent and all that. You’d think it was worth at least a mention.

Well, even if HE doesn’t care to embroider mushrooms into Biblical history, I discover that this does not prevent the many advocates of the psychedelic theories of religion from going to all kinds of lengths to write them into the Good Book, whether their appearance is justified or not. ((I remember reading The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross in high school and thinking that it sounded feasible, but I’m inclined these days to view the hypothesis as a bit of a stretch…))

One chap even puts up a compelling case for the ‘manna’ in the Bible being the Terfezia desert truffle (not to be mistaken for dessert truffle ((The dessert truffle was created by God in later times, in order that luxury hotels would have something to place on guest’s pillows. This is not mentioned in the Bible either.))), which, the legend goes, is created by lightning striking the ground.

I also got to look up bdellium, which is now surely my favourite word. But even after looking it up I’m not certain what colour it is.

The mushroom patch into which Pocket Jesus has ventured above is another manifestation of fungal weirdness that continues to manifest in our backyard. The Bleeding Tooth fungus that I mentioned in recent despatches has now turned into an unattractive brown slimy sludge and this little display has popped up close by. We have a veritable fungal festival going on here.

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The font used in The Adventures of Pocket Jesus (aram44.ttf) features genuine Aramaic characters and is used with permission of Mr. G. S. Dykes

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