Tetherd Cow Ahead

You know, I reckon that if Jesus could have looked forward in time to all the things for which he’d be responsible, he’d have stayed in the carpentry workshop and carved out a career making sideboards and nice nested table sets.

From today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

‘A large metallic ball has fallen out of the sky on a remote grassland in Namibia, prompting baffled authorities to contact NASA and the European space agency.’

The authorities in Namibia obviously are baffled easily, at least by technology. This is evidenced less by the fact that don’t know what this thing is, than that they don’t know how to use the internet. Within mere seconds of the above photograph appearing in the media the object had been identified ((It’s a hydrazine propellant tank, commonly used on satellite launch vehicles.)) by at least, oh, a thousand less-than-baffled people.

The best part of the AFP report, though, is this phrase:

‘It was made of a “metal alloy known to man” and weighed six kilograms, said police forensics director Paul Ludik.’

Is it just me, or is there a whimsical phantom ‘not’ lurking in that quoted description? To precis the whole event: a welded spherical object made by humans fell in the desert. Just how baffling is this, really, in an age where there are over three thousand satellites orbiting the earth and thousands of other flying craft ploughing through the atmosphere every day? Not very, is the considered TCA assessment.

Anyways, elsewhere in Namibia, a less-reported phenomenon occurred. This strange metal sphere, featuring a message in a language known to man (and woman, quite bizarrely) really has the experts baffled. I leave it with you to ponder its meaning.

Don’t be baffled for too long though. You’ll need all your wits about you come January 1.

Oh yes, my loyal Cowmrades. You didn’t really think I’d forget…?

Sometimes, Faithful Acowlytes, teh stoopid in the world overreaches itself and becomes just plain criminal. Today, as Exhibit 1, I give you:

Homeopaths Without Borders.

No, dear friends, this is not some kind of Tetherd Cow parody of the worthy and quite awesome Médecins Sans Frontières, although it’s so fuckin’ unbelievable that it’s hard to accept that it’s anything but a cruel prank. Yes, you understood it correctly: these are homeopaths who model themselves on Doctors Without Borders ((Although they make it VERY clear on their site that they are in no way affiliated with that organization. One speculates that you don’t put a notice like that on your front page unless someone compels you to do so…)) and travel to poor countries like Haiti to spread useless superstitious nonsense based on the brainless ‘medical’ intuitions of an 18th century German village doctor. This, to my mind, is a tragedy of vast proportions.

Volunteers Sally Tamplin, Holly Manoogian and Alyssa Wostrel traveled to Port-au-Prince on May 23 and returned home on June 3, participating in the longest, most intense undertaking in that country by HWB. Responding to requests by charitable groups in Haiti, the volunteers worked not only in the capital but also traveled to sites in the countryside. Their ten-day schedule was a whirlwind of compassionate homeopathic intervention.

Intervention? What – they were visiting sick Haitians with poor access to medical care and substituting no medical care at all? Yeah, that’s what I call intervention, alright, although I fail to see where the compassion comes in.

When I see the pictures of middle-class white women (they are mostly women, it seems) on this site smiling and hugging little black kids, it makes me furious. I know they are probably all just misguided and good-intentioned and even believe that what they are doing is helpful, but I just want to point something out here: people in places like Haiti who are in desperate need of good medical care look at these healthy, rich Americans and trust them to be bringing that same standard of health to their own country. These borderless homeopaths, however, didn’t come by the possession of their good health via superstitious nonsense. They are healthy solely because of science; science that improved their knowledge of nutrition; science that gave them a good understanding of hygiene; science that made childbirth relatively safe; science that gave them immunity against polio and measles and smallpox and tuberculosis; ((Although science is losing that battle somewhat as TB rapidly evolves to become resistant to antibiotics.)) science that allows their society to understand insect-borne diseases and keep them under control. And let’s be clear here: there is NO science in homeopathy. None. When one of these homeopaths contracts a serious infection back home in their own wealthy country, they don’t treat it with some silly sugar water potion. If they do, they die. These privileged people have become so ignorant of the powerful scientific basis upon which their standards of health are built, that it has become completely transparent to them. They apparently think they are healthy just because.

As I contemplate this situation, though, I strangely begin to find myself in agreement with one of the basic notions of homeopathy. According to homeopathic beliefs the more dilute a homeopathic remedy is, the more powerful its effects – as I’m sure you already know. I propose, then, that Homeopaths Without Borders act on this basic tenet of their practice. Let’s say one homeopath leaves Haiti- surely the positive effect of Homeopaths Without Borders on the Haitian people increases. If a few more leave, the beneficial effects become stronger still. And if we really ultra-dilute the pool and ALL homeopaths leave Haiti, then I think you’d agree that they would be doing the most good they could possibly do.

Let’s see if they can fault the logic in that argument…

You will recall that a couple of weeks back I had a personal letter from Melissa Rogers, CEO of Shoo!TAG, in which she took me to task for ‘defaming’ her product, and asking why I believed there was no scientific support for it. I clearly outlined my position to her in a manner that I thought didn’t leave much room for interpretation. After receiving her reply this morning, though, I get the distinct impression that she didn’t actually read my letter, so much as skim through it in the way that I assume she approaches scientific literature. This is the sum of what she wrote:

Although I respect the right to your opinion, we obviously do not agree.  My question is:  What would you do, if you discovered you were wrong?

Dear Ms Rogers,

Sincerely
Peter Miller

I know, Faithful Acowlytes, that when I don’t post much for a while, you’re all out there thinking ‘Oh he’s off gallivanting around again, pretending he’s got a life or something’ but no, it’s just not true! As usual, this last week or so I have been spending every moment of my spare time in the Tetherd Cow Ahead laboratories helping the boffins with our never-ending quest to invent new ways to make the world a better place. And these last few days we have made progress that I think you will agree is thoroughly mind-boggling.

My friends, let me introduce to you our brand new product: TC Energy Water:

As you are no doubt aware, water is very important to our well being, and we should all make sure we get enough of it to keep ourselves properly hydrated. Something which you might not know, though, is that the water that comes from your tap is lacking in vital energy! Yes, Cowpokes, all that bouncing around in pipes and plumbing has robbed our water of its magical life-giving properties until it is a mere trickle of its former self. To that end, the boffins and I have begun the manufacture of special glassware that, using designs that are based on music converted into spatial dimensions, will revitalize your water back to its mountain spring origins!

Just let your water sit for three minutes in the TC Energy Carafe, pictured above, and in…

Hang on a second Acowlytes – someone is waving their hand around like a mad thing in the back there. What, dinahmow? What is it? What’s that you say? NO! Someone has already done it? Tarnation! Cowmrades! The woo-meisters have pipped us at the post again!

Yes folks, let me direct your attention today to TC Energy Designs’ ‘structured water’ products, a range of glassware that will take common old water and turn it into a magic elixir that will banish all your earthly woes.

There is so much brainless nit-wittery on this site that it’s hard to pick a place to start, so let’s just commence with the home page:

The uniqueness of TC Energy Design glassware lies in its revitalising effect on water. The shape and form of the glassware generates an energising resonance pattern that restores the water within – and improves the surrounding environment – with subtle waves of harmonic resonance.

Yes, you read it right: not only do the TC Energy Design products ‘improve’ things you put in them, they ‘improve’ everything else in the room too! (They don’t appear to ‘improve’ anyone’s ability to think sensibly, unfortunately.)

This first page also features an inevitable and completely unsurprising reference to Dr Masaru Emoto and his notions of ‘unhappy water’ (which we’ve covered previously on the Cow), but we’ll come back to them in a bit. For now, let’s move onward to the TC Energy Design About Water page:

Water revitalisation is the act of shifting the energetic memory of water (whether it is purified or not) back to it’s state as found in nature. Revitalised water has been shown to have different effects on living systems than water that is not revitalised.

It hasn’t ‘been shown’ in any scientific studies that I’ve ever seen. Just like it’s ((That’s the correct way to use the apostrophe in the word, by the way.)) never been shown that water has ANY kind of ‘memory’ either. The makers of TC Energy Design glassware claim that wine tastes better out of their products as well, so the ‘energetic memory shift’ apparently restores alcoholic beverages to the way they’re found in nature too. Or something.

But, my dear Acowlytes, why are we wasting time on the introductory pages of the TC Energy Design site when there’s a link to a Science page? That’s just gotta be the goldmine, right? Let’s take a squiz:

The cascading design of 6 sequential sections, with the volume of each section corresponding to one of the first 6 numbers of the universal Fibonacci sequence, aligns with the geometry found everywhere in nature. Revitalised water shows a 6-sided crystalline structure which corresponds to its increased level of energy and life force.

That’s very technical, so I’ll just simplify it a bit:

‘Our hard working unicorns spend every day gamboling in the candy floss meadows until the pixies bring them home to the gingerbread stables…’

Once again, we see a witless attempt to forge stupid, brainless links between nonsense and science. So the Fibonacci sequence occurs in nature – I bet you thought you were sitting on the same bench as Einstein when you read that somewhere, didn’t you Ms TC ED? So what? There are a shitload of number sequences that ‘are found everywhere in nature’: how on Earth does the Fibonacci sequence bestow any particular special powers? That’s right, it doesn’t. Because you’ve found some mathematics in nature, you think there must be something magical about that, but you know what? Mathematics occurs EVERYWHERE in nature. Making an arbitrary link between the Fibonacci sequence and water is completely nonsensical. Why not link the Lorenz equations to water? Or numbers like phi or tau? Why doesn’t a spherical bottle bestow its restorative powers on water, via the magical influence of pi?

In the same way, why do you think the number 6 is particularly ‘special’? Just because a nutty old geezer like Dr Emoto says it is (he himself admits he doesn’t have any science underlying his beliefs)? If you’re going to put stuff like that on a ‘science’ page you’d better be very careful because sooner or later someone who knows this stuff is going to run you through with the sharpened end of a harmonic series.

But wait, I’ve just noticed: there are some diagrams here as well! That’s impressive, right? There are some graphs that show that red squiggly lines and blue squiggly lines can exist at different places on the same page! And there’s another graph that shows that one column is above a red line and the other is below! Neither of these are actually linked to anything and both are unreadable.

What. Is. That. Supposed. To. Prove?

Boringly, there is also MORE lame unhappy water crystal bollocks. Hey, look, I’ve got science too! It’s based on daisy petal science – did you know that the number that determines how many petals on a daisy always falls on the Fibonacci sequence?!!! ((It doesn’t really – I lied. But you see how EASY that was! And the only people who picked it up are the ones reading this footnote!))

If that doesn’t convince you to read Tetherd Cow every day, I give up!

There are also a bunch of quotes from various supposed science authorities. The first one is from ‘a Japanese laboratory’, which is an impressive endorsement I think you will agree. I wonder if it’s the laboratory at the Japanese Ministry of Health, who were so persuasive with their test results for Shoo!TAG?

The second quote from a Paul Sommer of Schleusingen ((I don’t know what that’s supposed to herald – Schleusingen is just a tiny town in Germany. The attribution is like saying ‘John Doe of West Wyalong’)) and the third from the Laboratory of E. F. Braun at Burgistein. ((Burgistein, likewise, is a tiny municipality in Bern, Switzerland. Neither Burgistein or Schleusingen have universities or similar properly accredited scientific institutions, to my knowledge.)) Let’s see what those names throw up in a search, shall we? Oh what a surprise – mostly links back to TC Energy Design sites throughout the world, or to TC Energy Design promotional literature like this [image-heavy pdf]. Not even the smallest whiff of any science, even though there is no doubt that the intention of those quotes is unmistakeably to give you the impression that science has been done. ((Of course the real indicator here is that the quotes are not actually linked to anything. REAL science gets hot-linked quick smart – I don’t think I have to tell you the reason for that…))

There is much else on the TC Energy Designs site that I could hang out to dry, but I’m sure you get the drift by now. The Science page contains one more thing on which I’ll comment, though. It’s something that seems a little bit out of place among supposed corroborative science, but is, I think, the most enlightening thing on the whole site, and is also, quite self-evidently, at the very heart of the TC ED philosophy. It is this aspiration, proclaimed in the biggest font on the page:

“A TC carafe on every table on the planet!”

Oh yes, I really bet they’d like that. At friggin’ $770.00 a pop, that would do very nicely indeed, sir. ((Do people REALLY spend that kind of money on this rubbish. I observe again that I am really in the wrong business. If only I could get rid of this damn conscience of mine.))

Anyway, I won’t go on any more. Do visit the TC Energy Design site if you have time. It will give you a really good feel for the incredible level of fruitloopery out there. For now, I’ll just leave you with the TC Energy Design disclaimer:

TC products are not connected with any kind of statements about healing nor do they confirm the exertion of influence on the course of an illness. The use of TC products are free of promises for increased well-being and requires the self-responsible action of the person applying the products.

Let me make that a little clearer for you, dear friends:

‘We’re selling you products for which we make grandiose claims for amazing effects on your well-being, but actually we don’t stand behind any of them. And anyway, if our products don’t do any of the things WE claim, it’s YOUR fault.’

This man is Michael Cohen. Mr Cohen, it seems, has come by an amazing piece of video that ‘might be amongst the best proof we have that we are indeed being visited by aliens coming to us with a message of hope.’ The footage was taken in the Brazilian jungle by British tourists and ‘handed over to US secret agents’, the Brazilian government apparently having some kind of agreement with American spooks to obligingly do that kind of thing. It is unclear who then handed it on to Mr Cohen. We know for certain that the footage is Top Secret because it has a title card that says ‘Top Secret’ on it.

I mean, how much more persuasive could it be?

‘Stop stalling Reverend!’ I hear you cry. ‘Make with the video that shows us the alien Message of Hope! Well, you need to visit the site of that esteemed Australian news voice The Telegraph to see it, because I can’t embed it. Come back here when you’re done (if you don’t need a bit of a lie down first, that is).

Was that a Message of Hope or what?! Thank Xenu that we now know we are not alo… What’s that you say? You missed the alien? Seriously? Maybe you’d better watch it again. I’ve made you a little diagram so that you know where to look:

Was it better that time? Did you see the ‘mesmerising flashing light’ as well?

Mr Cohen proclaims that ‘This is highly compelling footage that will be hard to discredit’. Or it could be plain old pareidolia. I know that sounds far fetched, but hey. Should the footage turn out to be bona fide, however, what I want to know is what the little alien is actually doing here. He doesn’t seem to be delivering any Message of Hope to me. In fact, he seems… a little preoccupied.

Here’s a better resolution closeup. That’s the ‘mesmerising light’ over on the right – it’s gotta be his spaceship, right? So he’s parked it and has wandered a little way away behind a tree, and… well… it’s a bloody LONG WAY from Zeta Reticuli!

Acowlytes! Tell me I’m wrong!