Tetherd Cow Ahead

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

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

I know you just can’t wait.

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

Yes, you read that correctly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please, someone wake me up.

Violet Towne is selling her car at the moment. Imagine her surprise when, before she’d even uploaded pictures of the item to the online site, she received a text from an interested buyer. She sent her email address.

This morning, ‘Ken’ replied:

Hello,

Thanks for the swift response, I need you to understand that i am willing and ready to purchase it right away as i really appreciate the price stated in the AD, however i will like you to re-confirm the price by stating it in your return e-mail for verification, possibly have more pictures of it,and consider me as your favorite buyer as i am buying this for my Dad and due to the nature of my job and my present location as i am a marine engineer…i will not be able to come for inspection,i’m a very busy type as i work long hours everyday,i have gone through your advertisement and i am satisfied with it.

As for the payment..i can only pay via the fastest and secure way to pay online i.e (PayPal) here, as i do not have access to my bank account online,but i have it attached to my pay pal account, and this is why i insisted on using pay pal to pay.

I have a private courier agent that will come for the pick up after the payment has been made …so no shipping included and With the issue of my details,transferring the name of ownership and signing of all paperwork will be done by the courier services company agent so you don’t have to worry about that.

It will be so sweet if you can send me your PayPal email now so i can pay in right away and also include your address in your reply as i don’t really have much time on here.If you don’t have a paypal account, you can easily set up one…log on to www.paypal.com.au and sign up its very easy… i would have loved to talk to you on phone but i work mainly on the sea and our phone network is down on the sea right now due to bad stormy weather, that was why i sent you a text, i even wonder how my message delivered to your phone but for now we can only communicate through the same mailing channel.await your reply asap.

Regards,

Ken.

Ah, Ken, Ken, Ken. The first and most egregious mistake you made, old salt, was to be unoriginal. You could have been a lighthouse keeper; you could have been a sergeant in Afghanistan; you could have been an astronaut, for Pete’s sake. You could have been a contender. Instead, you copied & pasted the same cruddy old racket that a bunch of other scumbags are using, thus nailing your credentials to the mast and allowing us to easily scry the cut of your jib in mere seconds by searching ‘marine engineer scam’.

Ken, I don’t want to take the wind out of your sails, but even plopping the word ‘illiterate’ in there might have gone some small way towards making your story sound more plausible.
As in: ‘I am an illiterate marine engineer’. Or ‘I am a very busy – albeit illiterate – type, with little grasp of grammer or reasonable sentence structure, and also a broken computer keyboard’. Well, that last bit is implied, so no real need to include it word-for-word, but you get the drift.

You might also want to consider some other amendments to your yarn, if you intend to have even the slightest intention of keeping your powder dry. First, don’t ask to see ‘more’ pictures of something if you haven’t seen any in the first place. Secondly, as philanthropic as I’m sure you intend it to sound, no-one gives a flying fuck whether you’re buying the car for your Dad, your parrot-shit bedecked peg-legged uncle or your retarded brother. We all know that ruse.

Another thing that has the distinct aroma of bilgewater about it, Ken, is the claim that you can access PayPal on your storm-tossed engineering project out there on the high seas, but not your bank account. Now why, do you suppose, that could possibly be? Is it something to do, perhaps, with the same special Nigerian technology that allows a very prompt text message to get through, but not any other kind of phone contact?

In short, Ken, it would be sweet if something terrible and quite agonizing happened to you very very soon. In my mind’s eye, I picture you being swept off the deck of the HMS Scumbucket by a humungous tsunami, and flung into the cold dark depths. There, I envisage you being torn limb from limb by a giant squid, and finally shredded into fibrous strips by tiny hungry crabs.

In the meantime, try not to stab yourself in the eye with your fork.

In case it’s not clear how this swindle is meant to work, faithful Acowlytes, it’s what’s called A False Payment Scam: the ‘buyer’ has no intention of taking delivery of the car. Instead, when the sale has been agreed, Ken sends a confirmation email that he has paid the money into the victims’s PayPal account. He has also included a ‘shipping’ fee, which is required by the ‘courier company’ and which the victim should pay C.O.D. to the driver when the car is collected. Shortly afterward, the victim receives a forged (but official-looking) confirmation email from PayPal with the apparent total figure. However, it appears that Ken is wrong about the C.O.D. payment. PayPal cannot ‘release’ the funds until the courier company is paid up front… typically by a deposit into a Western Union account. Since the (clueless) victim thinks they have the money in their PayPal account, they go ahead and deposit whatever figure Ken has pulled out of his ass, straight into his Nigerian bank account. And that’s the last they’ll ever hear of Ken.

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

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

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

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

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

But wait, there’s more!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody singin’

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