Tetherd Cow Ahead

I wanted to add one further post about the CieAura scam. I found out so many things while I was researching it, that I simply couldn’t fit them in the narrative without making it labyrinthine with detours. So this will be a kind of round up of CieAura ephemera and thoughts from me about it.

• One thing that I wanted to talk about was the large web presence of this racket. Searching the name brings up over 200,000 primary hits, and as you begin to spool through the highest ones, the first thing you notice is that very few of those hits are disparaging of the product. This might lead an undiscriminating researcher to conclude that any negativity against it – such as mine – is rare. It doesn’t take long to discover that CieAura is working the SEO like crazy – either through actively cross linking itself with itself, or getting other people (probably its reps) to do so. And make no mistake, CieAura is an internet whore. Wherever it can get its name mentioned, it does, sometimes numerous times in a paragraph. CieAura ‘comments’ are scattergunned through forums and user groups, often completely irrelevantly (trading on open and poor moderation). If you’re like me, the next thing you think to do is search ‘CieAura scam‘. You get many fewer results, and some of them are useful. The interesting thing, though, is that there is a significant proportion that look like they’re offering advice about being scammed, but turn out to be sales pitches – this demonstrates an active process of attempting to hoover up folks who might be doubtful about the product, and are sensible enough to do a search on it. It’s an eerie and creepy tactic and after I’d seen it a few times, my skin was really starting to crawl.

• When you do encounter users of CieAura on the forums, they are almost universally effusive about the product. If someone makes a comment like ‘it’s a scam, they don’t work’ you can bet there’ll be a chorus of others who dispute that. The likelihood is very high that the original comment came from someone who used the chips, and the rebuttals from people selling them.

• CieAura makes a big deal about the chips ‘not putting any drugs in your body’. This paranoid fear-mongering squares with Melissa Rogers’ and Kathy Heiney’s persistent mantra about ShooTag ‘not using any chemicals’. This is plainly an attempt to leverage prospective customers’ distrust of modern medicine as part of the sales pitch. ((A distrust that, while having a modicum of legitimacy, is blown way out of proportion by so-called CAM modalities. Yes, pharmaceutical companies are sometimes not the most honourable people in the world, but there’s a lot of pot-calling-the-kettle-black going on. Particularly when we consider the likes of CieAura, PowerBalance, Sensa Slim et al)) They really have all the angles on pushing people’s buttons.

• You can’t buy CieAura in any other way than from a sales representative. The CieAura website (and others I found) makes it seem that you can, but you just can’t. Try it if you like. You’ll always end up getting directed to a sales rep of one kind or another. At the very least this is another example of completely dishonest behaviour; why make it appear that you have a store and shopping cart on your site when you don’t? If the product is a completely legitimate one, and efficacious as it’s made out to be, why can’t I just order some, like I can do with anything else I want to buy? This speaks once again to the real mechanism in operation here: CieAura doesn’t care about selling the product as much as it does about recruiting chumps to sell it. That, there can be no doubt by now, is where the bulk of the money generation lies (see below to how relevantly this speaks to CieAura being a pyramid scheme).

• There are numerous CieAura ‘training’ videos on YouTube and elsewhere. If you’ve ever had someone attempt to ensnare you in a scheme like Amway or Herbalife, these whitebread airbrushed zombies with their lame xeroxed script will be quite familiar to you.

“Once you take care of your family, then you can help others…” says Mr Less-Charisma-Than-A-Dog-Turd. That’s right folks, make sure you screw your family first, because they’re the least likely to go to the cops. This tactic has the additional advantage that it will make you feel like you’re getting somewhere if you get a few ‘sympathy purchases’ out of the starting gate. But after you’ve worked your way through your mum & dad & siblings, and alienated what are probably the last of your friends, you’ll find out mighty quickly that the Law of Large Numbers has taken care of any other suckers that might give you the time of day. By then, Paul Rogers has already spent your money on another of his awful suits.

And this idea that you’re ‘helping’ people is loathsome. How are you helping them? By foisting off on them some stupid twinkly little stickers that do nothing that’s even vaguely rooted in reality? Or by lumbering them with a business ‘opportunity’ that they’ll chip away at for a month or two before realising that, as always, a real job requires either some experience or a level of honest toil doing something useful. There is only one way to get easy money in this world, and that’s to piss all over other people.

I really detest the way that this whole thing is vaunted as decent business. This is not business, it’s out-and-out screwage. This is what people who are assholes think business means. I’ve run several successful businesses in my time and I have never found the need to treat anyone I work with, work for, or employ, like these people do. If you’re considering opting into the CieAura marketing scheme, take it from me, the people on the top of the pyramid don’t give a flying fuck about you or whether you succeed, no matter how heavily they peddle that message. Once you’ve put down your first few hundred, they’ve got what they want. Anything else they can string you along for is a bonus. If someone tells you they’ve made money out of CieAura – and that person is not Paul Rogers, because he certainly has – then you can bet your ass that person is another CieAura rep trying to recover a few dollars of the debt she’s no doubt carrying. To reiterate from last post: whatever CieAura might present this whole deal as, it’s a pyramid scheme. Go here and read this carefully so you understand why it can never work for you.

It’s mathematically impossible for everyone to make money in a pyramid scheme. For example, if each recruit needs to find 10 more people to recoup the cost of his or her initial investment, the eighth level of the pyramid would have to recruit a billion people to make back their money. And the next level would need 10 billion, nearly twice the population of the Earth. ~How Pyramid Schemes Work

• CieAura, no doubt, would object to being called a pyramid scheme. They would probably define themselves as a Multi Level Marketing program. They do this for a very, very good reason: in 1979, the US Federal Trade Commission ruled that Amway, a huge company that runs on this kind of system, was NOT a pyramid scheme. The fine points of exactly why not, are almost impossible to fathom, really, but in any case you can go here and determine for yourself how CieAura would fare if called to account by the FTC.

Here are a few points the FTC gives (from many) for differentiating a pyramid scheme from a ‘genuine’ MLM. ((I still think MLMs are dangerous swindles too, but apparently in the US, where money is the only thing important to a lot of people, the FTC has been swayed on that point.))

• Avoid any MLM that puts much more emphasis on recruiting salespeople than selling the actual product.
• Make sure that the products being sold have real value and a competitive price.
• Avoid signing up for an MLM as part of a high-pressure motivational event.
• Bottom line: If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

Any of that sound like CieAura? You see how they’re attempting to navigate around the strict definition of a pyramid scheme by selling a ‘product’? But the value of that product is completely fabricated, so having a ‘competitive’ price is a meaningless concept. They just put on any price they can get away with, because the thing is not ‘competing’ against anything but fairy dust. It’s lies wrapped up in deceit and tied with a bow of bullshit.

And it might not hurt to keep in mind that the people at the top of that CieAura pyramid are closely related to entities like BurnLounge who have been found criminally culpable of defrauding consumers via a pyramid scheme masquerading as a Multi Level Marketing opportunity (this does not, I hasten to add, make them criminals merely by association. But it does speak to the kind of company they keep, and the kinds of companies they keep, if you get my drift).

That’s all on CieAura for now, but I have a feeling we’ve not spoken the last words about them…

I began this investigation into CieAura by saying that my main concern with this product was the science that is claimed to make it work. As I researched deeper, however, I realised that, like a lot of other people, I’d been hoodwinked by CieAura. The people behind this enterprise don’t care if their product has any basis in science. I don’t think they don’t even care what their product is. There are much larger subterfuges at work here.

For a start, it’s pretty difficult to accept that CieAura are unaware of the many levels of deception they use in the promotion of their business. Try as I might to believe that they misguidedly think that they’re being genuine about what they’re doing, there is so much obfuscation, sidestepping, misdirection and just plain fibbing on their website and in their marketing strategies, that it’s hard to cut them much slack as ‘honest folks just having a go’. The first indication of duplicity is the robust and persistent disclaimer that appears under every hyperbolic pitch of every CieAura modality:

“NOTE: CieAura products are sold for learning, self-improvement and simple relaxation. No statement contained in this writing, and no information provided by any CieAura employee or retailer, should be construed as a claim or representation that these products are intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of disease or any other medical condition. The information contained in this writing is deemed to be based on reliable and authoritative report. However, certain persons considered experts may disagree with one or more of the statements contained here. CieAura assumes no liability or risk involved in the use of the products described here. We make no warranty, expressed or implied, other than that the material conforms to applicable standard specifications.”

Wow. A simpler way of putting that might have been “We make no claim that our product actually does any of the things that we’re making you think it does”. That’s not the only disclaimer either – there are frequent secondary waivers scattered throughout the site: ((It’s likely that the CieAura promoters tell their marks that they are forced to put up these disavowals because the CieAura chips are ‘ahead of their time’ and ‘conventional medicine doesn’t understand how they work’, or somesuch. At the very least, this shows an enormous disregard for the safety of consumers, but most likely they do it in full knowledge that the product is bunk and they’re simply protecting their asses.))

These statements have not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease or illness. If you have a pre-existing condition, please check with your healthcare provider before using.

Despite the detailed legal ducking and weaving, it’s quite plain that CieAura intends you to have the impression that their holograms will have beneficial effects on medical conditions. A few little excerpts from the various product pages:

•“CieAura SinusAllergy Chips are extremely effective in dealing with sinus allergies”

•“The CieAura Chips and band help significantly reduce your appetite so it’s easier to make better food choices.”

•“CieAura PureEnergy plus balance the body… and eliminate the need to add “energy” calories to the diet.”

•“CieAura PureRelief Chips can be used to manage back discomfort caused by sprains, muscle strains, headaches & athletic soreness.” (by discomfort, they plainly mean pain)

Vague promises, to be sure, but given the contexts in which each of these statements is placed (which you can read by clicking on each of them, above), it’s pretty clear how CieAura is being promoted. And did you see the really weaselly line in the disclaimer? (I mean, it’s ALL weaselly, but this is particularly good):

…no information provided by any CieAura employee or retailer should be construed as a claim or representation that these products are intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of disease or any other medical condition.

This effectively means that anyone spruiking CieAura can say the product achieves whatever miraculous results they like and, very conveniently, CieAura can avoid taking responsibility for those claims. Liability is deftly passed onto anyone who happens to be selling the things (which you will see in just a minute is germane to the whole operation). The disclaimers, like the CieAura chips themselves, are completely void of any value.

Delving deeper into the CieAura site, there’s no shortage of other slippery efforts to bolster up the apparent bonafides of the operation. There is, for example, an impressive-sounding ‘Medical Advisory Board‘ for CieAura. Impressive unless you take a few minutes to investigate them. Of the six people featured, three are chiropractors, one is an osteopath and the other two are general practitioners. I don’t need to tell you that chiropractors and osteopaths are hardly the epitome of reliable medical advice. And I’m sorry, as much as I respect GPs, a couple of them endorsing a radical new approach to medicine that completely rewrites the way we understand the physics of the universe doesn’t hold much water for me.

Elsewhere on the web, in a YouTube video which is presumably aimed at pitching CieAura to prospective marketers, Paul Rogers claims that there is a ‘peer-reviewed study’ behind CieAura. He’s obviously heard the term ‘peer-review’, knows it’s something that a credible scientifically based product should have, and thinks it applies to this kind of crap [pdf]. It doesn’t. ((I trawled through this ‘paper’. It should be a flagship for what science is NOT. You can find an ‘explanation’ of peer review buried deep in the CieAura site, for anyone who should care enough to go looking for it. If you understand peer review, and the manner in which rigorous medicine is practised, it’s VERY hard to believe that this single, obscure, nepotistic paper is not being contrived with one single purpose: to make it LOOK like CieAura has substance. It’s simply another dishonest ploy.))

I won’t bore you with more examples of the many instances of perfidiousness to be found here. Whatever the case, it really does not matter that the CieAura chips are nothing more than shiny decals with no mechanism of known efficacy and a lack of proper substantiation. The product itself is just sleight-of-hand. Its primary purpose is not to be sold to an end user.

Remember how I encouraged you to take note of the pyramid logo on the CieAura hologram? Well that, my friends, is quite a fitting emblem for this company, for they are the very model of a pyramid scheme. ((They frequently refer to their business as ‘network marketing’ but that is nothing more than a euphemism for pyramid scheme.)) In the post before last, I mentioned Brian J, who left a comment on one of the ShooTag articles way back in June 2011. This is what he said:

I was at a presentation last night by a company named CieAura. They use the same technology as the shootag (so they say) and I was wondering what you have heard about them? They claim $80 million in sales this year and say that they will double next year.

I was thinking of become a distributor with them, but like I said, since they claim their method is the same as shootag, I was wondering what you thought?

The presentation that Brian attended wasn’t about trying to sell him CieAura chips for his personal use. It was designed to sell him on CieAura as a business opportunity that would make him some money. And indeed, in order to help convince Brian how wonderful CieAura was, they even tried out the old balance trick on him – with which he was impressed until I told him how it was done. ((If you stop and think about it, the balance trick is not in anyway demonstrating that CieAura is delivering whatever efficacy it’s promising – it’s just a marketing technique. I mean seriously, on the face of it, it just looks like a hologram seems to stop you from toppling over. What does that even mean? The extrapolation to ‘it will make you better in bed’ or ‘it will stop your allergy problem’ is a ridiculous and oblique leap of logic. But of course, they’re not using the trick to appeal to the person who would is actually the proposed end user of the chips.)) Fortunately for Brian, he was warned off this swindle before they got his cash:

To sign up for their program was about a minimum $500 purchase, so I am REALLY glad I did not do it now.

And by the way, thanks for not making me feel bad. Your response was very kind. I know I am from a smaller town in Missouri, but when you look at the evidence as you have presented it, you feel like you should have known better.

You see how that works, right? To get in on the action of the miraculous CieAura, Brian has to fork out a base fee of $500 for a fistful of worthless glittery rainbow stickers. In the manner of all good pyramid schemes, that cool 500 goes to the next guy up the ladder, who’s paying off his franchise to the next guy up the ladder and so forth. Meanwhile, Brian has to sell off his wad of holograms to break even – which he realises very quickly is almost impossible, because outside the CieAura presentation room, no sensible person is going to take the useless things, even for free. No worries Brian! All you need to do is set up your own presentation event and rope in some more suckers! Only problem is, due to the laws of exponential mathematics, you eventually run out of suckers. CieAura, however, will not let you in on that little mathematical secret – they’ll tell you that you’re just not managing your dealership effectively… and attempt to sell you more useless crap. ((Probably in the form of admittance to seminars, access to ‘special’ online motivational material and so forth – I really don’t know in the case of CieAura, but it will be something like that. People who manage these pyramid or network-marketing schemes get familiar with the exponential nature of the beast very quickly, and so they’ve come up with all manner of novel ways with which to screw the suckers they’ve already hooked.))

Because the product in this case is worth peanuts and has exactly NO efficacy, the only thing these people are really paying for is the privilege of using the CieAura name. And guess where most of the money in those $500+ advances comes to rest? Yup, that’s right, with Paul Rogers, Melissa Rogers and their cronies sitting there at the top of that pyramid (for a really excellent explanation of why a pyramid scheme is disastrous for everyone except the people at the top of the pyramid, go here).

Brian J had a lucky escape. Like most people who get involved in these scams he probably couldn’t afford to lose the $500 that CieAura was happily prepared to lift from him. And if Brian had not stumbled on Tetherd Cow, you can bet that they’d have eventually sucked a lot more out of him than $500 before he realised what was going on.

So you see why I believe the people peddling CieAura are despicable crooks. The dishonesty that stains the entire CieAura edifice speaks loudly against this being a decent and effective product. As I’ve said in previous discussions on TCA, honest people just don’t behave like these people do. There is simply no way on earth that you can set up a business like this and have no idea of what kind of racket you’re running. It makes me sincerely regret being foolish enough to occasionally feel a twinge of doubt about my negative assessment of the motives of Ms Rogers & co throughout the ShooTag saga: for most of the time I was challenging ShooTag, they were actively working the CieAura scam!

I want to finish off with a YouTube clip. You don’t need to watch it, because I’ll synopsise it for you. I only include it by way of proof, because I fear that if I merely told you about it you’d find it pretty hard to believe that anyone could actually be quite so lacking in basic decency.

It features Paul Rogers, CEO of CieAura, telling a Thanksgiving story. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it might reveal any shade of humanity in this man; it’s a tale about how he used the opportunity of a family Thanksgiving to inveigle (or more like browbeat, in fact) his closest relatives into the CieAura scheme. ((There’s a fair probability that in this case, the people who bought in might have done OK. It’s not hard to figure out why: at this early stage, they’re pretty close to the top of the pyramid.)) And certainly don’t go looking for any heart-warming epiphany here. I watched it right through – ever naive and optimistic – thinking that it might have some kind of revelatory and humble moral lesson; “..and in the end, I realised this was Thanksgiving, and the most important thing of all was that I had a loving family…”. But it’s not there. Paul Rogers is not that person. Even his close friends and family are, to him, just business opportunities. ((It’s probable that this video was made for motivational purposes and is directed at CieAura reps. This raises another possibility: that the story (like much else about CieAura) is fictitious. The alternative – that it’s true, and not only did this pathetic episode happen in Rogers’ life, but he’s exhorting other people to behave like this – is all so shabby that it makes me want to retire from the human race.))

He really needs a refresher viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Unfathomably, he seems to be completely oblivious as to how this video might seem to other people, since it’s publicly viewable on YouTube. Either that, or he doesn’t care. If you do choose to watch the clip, and you’re anything like me, you probably won’t get very far before you feel like throwing up.

Further reading:

PatchDiskBandScam has some comprehensive examination of CieAura as well as other health scams directly related to them, such as Lifewave, HarmonicFM and 8ight. There’s a great infographic showing the links between the people involved. Paul Rogers is right up there, but no mention of the CieAura Chief Science Officer. You can also see reports of a massive US Federal Trade Commission legal assault on a company called (perhaps somewhat grotesquely) BurnLounge, who were successfully prosecuted for operating a vast pyramid scheme. The previously mentioned infographic shows clearly how people involved in BurnLounge are linked to CieAura. BurnLounge was ordered to pay redress to 56,000 consumers of over 17 million dollars that it had bilked out of them, in a “scheme in which compensation for recruitment is unrelated to the sale of product to customers who are not participants”. The case was ruled in 2012. The FTC is still chasing the money.

WatchDog on RepSpace has also tracked down a great deal of CieAura material.

There’s a long thread over at Museum of Hoaxes that follows a lot of the ducking and weaving of CieAura. The numerous personnel links with other promoters of quackery such as the previously mentioned Lifewave and HarmonicFM are immediately obvious.

I found a CieAura press release that boasts that they have been granted registration by the Australian Therapeutic Drugs Administration enabling them to operate in Australia, but I have not been able to determine if that is in any way genuine, and if so if it is still current.

In the last post, we discovered – to our significant bafflement – that the magical CieAura has ShooTag‘s Melissa Rogers as its Chief Science Officer. Today we’re going to look at some of CieAura’s claims, and indeed, dwell a little on the ‘science’ that this wonderful gadget is supposed to use.

I will make it super clear here – since the ShooTag people seemed to have a lot of trouble with this concept – that the science part of this whole swindle is my major concern. If the claim of this device was that its working mechanism is magic, then I’d not be interested in trying to approach such a claim via a rational process. That’s a zero sum game. But the appointment of a ‘Science Officer’ clearly nails CieAura’s pretensions to the mast. In my book, spectacular scientific claims must offer spectacular and unassailable proof.

Before we go on, I have a confession to make – I realised this morning that I’ve actually examined CieAura in the past. In the comments on this post, Brian J visits the Cow to tell us about his experience with them. He found his way here because CieAura was even mentioned in the same context as ShooTag! But I completely forgot about it. In my defense, there are just so many of these damn scams that one tends to be very much like another and I truly forget which I’ve looked at. At that time (June 2011), CieAura was probably just getting its market penetration. Brian J’s story is an interesting one, and if you have the time, I recommend you read the discussion between him and myself. It’s very enlightening in regard to what we’ll go on to examine in this post, and the next.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. First I’ll give you a little breakdown of the product. CieAura manifests as not one, but eight different modalities. The website contends that it will help you with pain, sleep, fatigue, allergies, libido and weight loss, protect you from EMF and enhance your sporting prowess. CieAura comes in the form of holographic ‘chips’ that you attach to your skin with skin-coloured tape. This is what they look like:

The image is of a pyramid, in case you can’t see it. Pay special attention to that, because we’ll revisit the concept later.

Now I will point out here that it is frighteningly cheap to make a hologram of the kind you see here. A hologram is nothing more than an array of tiny little refraction scratches in the surface of thin plastic. There is nothing special about this process. Billions of these holograms are manufactured every year and they are made as simply as you might print a document on your home computer.

A ten second search gave me hundreds of options for getting sheets of holograms printed (mainly in China) for as little as 0.01 cents per piece (a piece usually consisting of one sheet of ten or twenty), and I bet you could even do better with a trade order. A single sheet of 10 CieAura holographic stickers will cost you 35 dollars. This is an absolutely astonishing manufacturing-to-sales profit ratio of 3500%.

The CieAura chips are supposed to be efficacious for 2-3 days. So, in the main, one packet of CieAura stickers is going to last you no more than a few weeks, and in all probability, customers are encouraged to buy multiple packs. You can see quite clearly that if these things are actually being purchased, this is a goldmine. ((Of course, the assertion that some aspect of the holograms ‘wear out’ is abject nonsense, and in this respect we see a departure from the mechanism of ShooTag, which, although it was still nonsense, at least retains faint plausibility in the notion of the product efficacy being limited over time by wear and tear. Perplexingly, elsewhere on the CieAura site we find this: “Formulas cannot be changed unless bent or cut. Data on a hologram lasts over 50 years, so shelf life of CieAura products is almost unlimited.” So what is it, exactly, that limits the efficacy of CieAura holograms to two days?)) It’s fairly difficult to get a good metric for the purchase success of CieAura. The web turns up many testimonials, but that’s vague endorsement. We can probably assume moderate sales success, which, due to the profit ratio, is no doubt a significant revenue. But that’s only a small facet of the money machine that is CieAura, as we will see in a bit.

In any case, today we’re looking at the science claims of CieAura, so we’ll leave the business aspects for the moment and have a little gander at how this wonderful product is supposed to work.

I’m not going to quote the text from the CieAura ‘Science’ page in its entirety, because, to be honest, it’s just plain gobbledegook (similar to what we saw in the ShooTag ‘science’ claims). You can go read it if you want, it’s here. To me it seems like this:

“CieAura does magical and amazing things that will make your life better. We here at CieAura don’t really understand the way the world works, and we don’t think you do either. Ancient peoples used magic and so we thought that if we took magic, and added pretendy science words to it, you might believe it’s not magic. We’d convince you it works by saying something like this: imagine something irrelevant in the real world. Now imagine your body is like that thing. CieAura magically makes that irrelevant thing relevant to your body, and fixes whatever problem you want by making magic equivalence. Oh, and by the way, Energy.”

Elsewhere on the CieAura site, we get references to lasers, quantum fields and more energy. Proper science is referred to as ‘orthodox science’, but is used to attempt to leverage some CieAura credibility despite the condescension. Perhaps the most peculiar thing of all is this:

NOTE: It is often misconstrued that frequencies and vibrations are the basis for the CieAura Chip design. To clarify: It has been determined that frequencies and/or vibrations are not the rudimentary cause of brain and body communication. Research has shown that frequencies and vibrations are an energy force that can be measured, and when absorbed by the body, appear to create certain effects. We have found that when the frequencies and vibrations are removed from the body, there remains, what is referred to as, intrinsic energies, which operate as the body’s natural communication force. These “intrinsic energies” are not measurable in the same manner as frequencies and vibrations are measurable, and because of this, we use the body’s natural forces to antidotally determine the existence of these forces. For these reasons, we consider it factually incorrect to describe the results of our technology to be driven by frequencies or vibrations.

Any further discussion on how the chips work would reveal proprietary production technologies.

So after all Melissa Rogers’ previous huffing and puffing about ‘frequencies’ in her attempted scientific explanations of ShooTag, it appears she’s gone cold on that particular concept. Or maybe ShooTag works on frequencies and CieAura works on not-frequencies. From the above explanation, it’s completely impossible to figure out how it does work, and this paragraph sounds to me like this:

“Magic, frequencies, magic, magic, bullshit, waffle, waffle, magic, bullshit and oh, we can’t tell you how it really works because secrets.”

Another berserk thing that we discover from the CieAura pages, is that the holographic magic of CieAura is happily riding along on the coattails of another dubious area of medical pseudoscience – acupuncture.

Traditional Chinese Medicine is an energy medicine. Acupuncturists dating back 3000 years also employed these energetic principles of positive and negative or yin and yang with the neutral center energy of mind being the way of the Tao… The manufacturer of CieAura Transparent Holographic Chips has discovered a way to adhesively charge intrinsic energies into holograms for the purpose of influencing the human cycle. Our Chips influence key points to create the desired effect. The natural meridians in our body get out of balance and cause blockages in the natural energy flow between the vital organs, cells and tissues of the body. The body works to connect these energy flows; however, without help, there is rarely if ever a balance in our body that keeps energy, concentration, stamina, and plus and minus (Yin and Yang) at the optimum level.

So what we have here, in essence, is a highly questionable modality of ancient folk medical treatment being influenced by an unspecified and quite unknown mechanism of physical science to return an outcome that the manufacturers – in their own words – explicitly do not guarantee (we’ll examine this situation in the next instalment). Would you spend 35 bucks on that? I’d rather go to a movie and have a choc top.

In short, there is no science here. Once again we find Melissa Rogers throwing around all kinds of sciencey sounding stuff in order to give CieAura a patina of credibility, but wholly failing to make any sense whatsoever, and certainly not putting forward any rational explanation as to why CieAura is anything but a flimsy piece of plastic film with a picture etched onto it. It is significant to note here that these kinds of claims and techniques were specifically responsible for the comprehensive banning of Power Balance bands here in Australia. The manufacturers of Power Balance, which also “used holographic technology” to “resonate with and respond to the natural energy field of the body”, admitted that the claims they made for their product were baseless, and they were compelled cease trading in Australia and to refund the purchase price of a Power Balance band to all customers who requested it.

Finally, today, we’ll take a look at a YouTube clip:

I don’t know the bona fides of the chap doing the demonstration here, but this is the hoary old ‘balance’ test, which, despite the guy’s claims of it ‘not being a trick’, is exactly that, and has been shown to be such so many times that it’s amazing that anyone still falls for it. ((It has been charitably said that the people who carry out these demonstrations may not be consciously affecting the outcome, but I have trouble believing that. Do the experiment yourself, and see if you can do it without knowing you’re doing it…)) Here’s exactly how it’s done, and how the purveyors of the million dollar Power Balance scam were toppled:

In the next post we’ll go on to take a look at CieAura’s business practices, and some amusing legal stuff. Join me, won’t you?

So anyway, the other day I just happened to think that it had been far too long a time since I visited our old friends at ShooTag, so I took a little stroll over to their site. Yeah, pretty much same ol’ same ol’. The name (and by implication, the endorsement) of Texas State University has mysteriously reappeared on their front page again, after they were explicitly directed to take it off by said university (on account of… well, no delicate way to put this: they were lying about Texus U’s involvement in the supposed scientific tests of their product), but it hardly surprises me. That’s what dishonest people do. The site itself is looking spectacularly crappy – dead links, crummy nav, appalling layout. And it looks like it’s been comprehensively shat upon by the Bad Advertising Bird. Evidently not much effort or money going into that particular enterprise these days.

I did notice that they are sporting some ‘Camouflage’ style ShooTags now, ostensibly for dogs and people who are bothered by mosquitoes when hunting.

“NEW: STAY INVISIBLE WHEN HUNTING WITH THESE NEW CAMO TAGS!” they scream in caps, and given the outrageousness of previous ShooTag claims, one might be forgiven for thinking they’re now offering some kind of Harry Potteresque invisibility mechanism for their gadgets. But I suppose we should give them the benefit of the doubt and take it that they mean ‘invisible to mosquitoes’. I’m a charitable kind of person when it comes to metaphor.

The thing that caught my attention, though, was a small, nondescript link that appears twice on the home page:

3000 years of science! OK, so that’s gonna be good. Clicking the link takes us to a very different experience indeed. CieAura®’s site is way more moneyed-up than ShooTag’s sorry presence. Images of good-looking happy smiling people by the seaside tell me that:

“CieAura has introduced a series of holographic chips that communicate with the body to help promote proper balance in several areas of interest to all human beings: deeper rest, energy, allergies, libido, relief from discomfort and weight management.”

Cool. Holographic chips that communicate with the body! Like Star Trek! Or something. Well, you can’t just make something like that up, right? You’d need some science. Hey, they have a video! Let’s have a look at that to see if there’s any enlightenment to be had. I’ll wait while you do that. You only need to watch the first forty or fifty seconds. I promise that anyone who’s been a Cow reader for a while is going to get a really big surprise around the 31 second mark. Trust me, it’s worth it.

A personage called Paul Rogers (hmm… familiar sounding surname…) tells us that CieAura has ‘introduced a line of holographic chips to the world’. Well, he’s certainly peddling a line, that’s for sure. These miraculous chips have been developed for CieAura by their chief scientist – it’s about here that I choked on my Manhattan – Melissa Rogers. Oh, how many pennies just dropped then? Paul Rogers, the link from ShooTag and the suspicious lack of product activity from them over the last few years…

Let’s have a little recap of the scientific credentials of Melissa Rogers, Chief Scientist of CieAura®, who has been designing these chips for the last sixteen years (moonlighting from her deep thought on ShooTag, one supposes):

Ms Rogers first tangled with the Cow back in 2009, where she called me ‘ignorant’ for not being ‘disaplined [sic] in physics and quantum physics’ and attempted – but failed comprehensively – to impress me with her scientific knowledge of radio frequencies, fractals and crystals (some things I actually do happen to know quite a lot about). At around that time she left a comment on another blog in reference to ‘Einstein’s famous equation, E=M¾’, completely duffing probably the most well-known physics formula in the world, and one that even third graders get right. Over the next months, she went on to assert that mobile phones use radio frequencies (they don’t), that she understands the work of physicist Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute (she doesn’t) and that she knows how to properly conduct a science experiment (not a clue).

Ms Rogers also has clear links to Professor William Nelson (aka Desiré Dubounet) who, in the late 1980s was indicted by the FDA on numerous charges of fraud, all related to medical ‘energy’ devices. Rather than face these charges Nelson illegally left the US in 1996 to hide in Hungary, where he/she currently resides, and still manufactures and sells his machines. I can’t say if Mr and Ms Rogers have any current affiliations with Nelson/Dubounet, but Melissa Rogers certainly did in 2009 – well within her supposed sixteen years’ development period for CieAura – when she spoke at Nelson’s annual QX Conference (a ‘medical energy’ seminar) in Budapest.

We can also find a bio for Melissa Rogers on the site:

Melissa uses small signal technology ((Ms Rogers has quite obviously picked up the ‘small signal technology’ buzzwords from her association with Rainer Fink who she implicates in the ShooTag experiments.)) and uniquely combines it with advanced science to develop products that help balance the body’s intrinsic energies. After successfully launching over 12 products into the retail mass market, she joined the CieAura team in July of 2012. Some of her products have won prestigious awards and have been University tested with high efficacy evaluations. Her products are designed to assist the body in balancing the energy in the body, thus helping reduce stress in the body. Melissa believes; reducing stress in the body will help reduce stress in everyday life.

“Some of her products have won prestigious awards and have been University tested with high efficacy evaluations.”

I’d love to know what those products are – ShooTag is quite obviously not one of them, since it’s never been university tested. There’s no mention of what Ms Rogers’ ‘prestigious awards’ actually were, which is kind of peculiar. Most people are very eager to show you their Oscar. I’m also quite curious about the extent of Ms Rogers’ ‘advanced science’, as she’s not demonstrated it anywhere that I’ve ever seen.

That CieAura has appointed this person as their ‘Chief Science Officer’ ((The implication it carries – that there are a bunch of other ‘science officers’ – is frightening, given the qualifications of their chief.)) speaks volumes about the kind of product that they’re selling, and we’ll examine that product in the next post.

I just know you’ll stay tuned.

Did you like that headline, dear Cowmrades? Did it make you chuckle just a little? I must say, it amused me for a brief second or two. It has very little to do with anything much except for the fact that it concerns wine, and is a ridiculous joke – much like our subject of discussion this morning: The Premium Wine Card.

Now, if you’re of similar mindset to myself, the first thing you think when you hear someone talking about a ‘Premium Wine Card’ is that it’s going to be one of those reward schemes for buying wine, amiright? You know the kind of thing – you buy a dozen bottles and because you’re a Premium Wine Card holder, you get a 13th bottle free (or something along those lines). Well, I’m not a big fan of loyalty schemes as you know, but hey, if that kind of thing floats your boat, go for it. It’s scamming by any other name, but at least it’s relatively harmless.

But oh no, the Premium Wine Card is not one of those things. The Premium Wine Card – let’s call it the PWC, since we’ll be referring to it a lot – is to wine as ShooTag is to pest control. In other words, it’s a useless gew-gaw promising miraculous results that defy any known scientific principles and is aimed solely at relieving credulous people of their cash.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: you take your PWC, and as you pour the wine, you hold the card touching the bottom of the glass. Leave the glass for thirty seconds (what that’s all about is, like everything else in this brainless enterprise, never explained) and that’s it, sports fans. The job is now done. Your five dollar bottle of plonk is now the spitting duplicate of a Domaine Jean-Louis Chave Ermitage Cuvee Cathelin.

Not that the PWC vendors would ever claim something quite so concrete, of course. Oh, no. In the kind of evasive double-speak we’ve come to expect from these kinds of swindlers, the purveyors of the PWC claim that:

•It is “A World first in technology to treat young wine and improve its taste instantly”

•“…the Premium Wine Card has a positive effect on the tannins in the wine, causing them to quickly soften as if the wine had been further aged for a number of years.”

•“…wine treated with the card has a fruitier aroma and a smoother, richer flavour with the mellower, softer finish that is typical of a premium cellared wine.”

Amazing! And exactly how is this miracle achieved? Well, I’ll tell you, Faithful Acowlytes: with frequencies. Golly those frequencies are versatile. With ShooTag we learnt how they repelled ticks and fleas, and now they’ve been rounded up to make wine taste better. Incroyable!

To be specific (well, as specific as meaningless mumbo jumbo can possibly be):

“The Premium Wine Card contains an embedded set of precise frequencies that produce a long-lasting natural resonance. The resonance can be transferred to wine through the wine glass.”

I’d like you to read that sentence once more through, because that is the sum total of explanatory information for the PWC’s method of action under the Technology heading on the PWC site’s How It Works page. I kid you not. Unlike the ShooTaggers, these people don’t even make the barest half-assed attempt at science. It’s all encapsulated solely in the words ‘frequencies’ and ‘resonance’. There’s not even a hint of what kind of mechanism in the card – if any – might be responsible for generating these frequencies or causing this resonance. I have my suspicions that there is exactly no mechanism at all, but I’m certainly not paying 75 bucks to find out.

The comprehensive (and laugh a minute) FAQ on the site has this clanger:

Q: Does It Make Every Wine Taste Better?
A: For most people yes!

Whoa there bartender! Most people? Did I get the aroma of subjectivity there for a brief second? Do you mean that this might not work for everyone…??? But it’s science, right, with all those frequencies & all? What if I’m not most people? What if I’m a smart person who doesn’t fall for nonsensical horse shit?

Oh I see! There’s a money back guarantee! I’m almost tempted to outlay my $75 in the name of science, but I have a sneaking suspicion that getting my money back might not be quite as straightforward as the website promise makes it appear.

Of course, the PWC site is replete with that obligatory signature of snake-oil vendors, the Testimonial. I’m inclined to believe that, unlike most of these scams, the testimonials are actually real. Mostly because they are, by and large, really terrible endorsements.

I didn’t think it would work but after rubbing the Premium Wine Card on my bottle, the beer tasted better. ~Paul Macaione, Cornubia

Crikey Paul. Don’t go overboard.

Oh, and I’m sure you noticed that Paul is talking about beer, here. Yes, quite astonishingly, the PWC does work on beer too. And on coffee and tea. And on fruit juice. Despite the fact that the only supposed mechanism of efficacy given anywhere on the website has to do with ‘softening tannins’ (and as far as I’m aware, there is not, and nor has there ever been, a market for aged fruit juice).

Choice magazine does have an online review of the Premium Wine Card. I’m afraid their assessment is rather more namby pamby than it should be, stopping well short of calling out the whole thing as a scam. They conclude, rather lamely in my opinion, that:

…if it can’t change the chemical properties of wine, it just might affect your brain chemistry – the placebo effect is a very powerful thing!

Which, aside from verging on being an actual endorsement of the fraud in question, perpetuates the erroneous notion of what the Placebo Effect actually is.

As we’ve seen previously on The Cow, there’s a veritable wagonload of woo in the wine-tasting business. We’ve had wine quality affected by magnets, by astrology, and even by the direction you swirl your wine in the glass. Needless to say, when this highly subjective process is subjected to any kind of rigorous testing, the miraculous effects fade away.

But in light of all this, my loyal Cowpokes, and mindful of the old if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em aphorism, I have good news for you! I’m about to save you 75 bucks with the introduction of… the Premium Cow Card.

What’s more, dear friends, you don’t even need to send off for the card. You can have it working within minutes! Simply print out a copy of the PCC on your printer and take it with you wherever you go. When used correctly, it will make your wine/beer/absinthe/steak/french-fries/haggis taste betterer than better. As you know, all TCA products are powered by our unique FeelyGood™ technology, and come with a ONE HUNDRED PERCENT MONEYBACK GUARANTEE.

“I can’t believe it! I applied the Premium Cow Card to my brain and now it’s operating at a full 20%! Seaworld has just given me an employment offer!!!” ~Hattie Bucksfizz, Marulan South.

Acowlytes! Let me introduce you to Food Babe. If you haven’t heard of her up until now, this is going to be a very special post for you. Food Babe, aka Vani Hari, is to put it quite simply, a reality-challenged, uneducated loon. Her basic schtick is to take everyday food items (anything that’s not chia or sprouts, principally) and concoct some kind of conspiracy around how they’re going to kill you.

She also gives travel tips:

The air you are breathing on an airplane is recycled from directly outside of your window. That means you are breathing everything that the airplanes gives off and is flying through. The air that is pumped in isn’t pure oxygen either, it’s mixed with nitrogen, sometimes almost at 50%. To pump a greater amount of oxygen in costs money in terms of fuel and the airlines know this! The nitrogen may affect the times and dosages of medications, make you feel bloated and cause your ankles and joints swell.

That’s right folks, airlines are trying to kill you with nitrogen. Up to 50% of it in the air they FORCE you to breathe when you fly. The fuckers!

Aside from being completely scientifically addled, that paragraph is, of course, nothing but pure unadulterated bollocks. She pulled all that information straight out of her ass – pretty much like she does with all her ‘facts’. The problem is, a HUGE number of people read this hogwash and take it as gospel.

You can read more Food Babe here, if you are a sucker for punishment. I guarantee it will make you feel more nauseous than an all-you-can-eat buffet at Outback Steakhouse.

NOTE: Not only has the main link to this article been redacted from the Food Babe site, someone is systematically moving all the cached links as well. The Google caches have been scrubbed, as has the Wayback Machine cache. In the grand tradition of historical revisionism everywhere, Food Babe is trying to make it seem like she isn’t an A-Grade idiot. Fortunately you can read the entire text of the redacted page at Skeptical Analysis.