Tetherd Cow Ahead

Oh dear. Ohdearohdearohdearohdearohdear.

Sometimes someone turns on the Stupid tap and the washer just ruptures and Stupid starts gushing out all over the shop AND YOU CAN’T STOP IT. These last few weeks have been like that, what with Melissa Rogers and her daft ShooTag™, the resurgence of Prophet Pete, and now…

The two largest supermarket chains in Britain, Tesco and Marks & Spencer, have started advising their customers to be aware on which days of the week they choose to taste wine because it will effect the taste. This breathtaking piece of utter folly is so risible that I had to check the date of the Guardian article several times as I was reading to keep reminding myself it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.

This is the skinny (although I do advise you to read the article to get a sense of the full absurdity):

Tesco and its rival Marks & Spencer, which sell about a third of all wine drunk in Britain, now invite critics to taste their ranges only at times when the biodynamic calendar suggests they will show at their best.

The calendar has been published for the last 47 years by a gardening great-grandmother called Maria Thun, who lives in rural Germany. She categorises days as “fruit”, “flower”, “leaf” or “root”, according to the moon and stars. Fruit and flower are normally best for tasting, and leaf and root worst.

To put it succinctly – two major UK retailers are consulting and recommending wine ‘horoscopes’.

Jo Aherne, winemaker for Marks & Spencer manages to make herself look like a complete twat (and the wine tasting fraternity even more filled with blarney than it already is) by claiming:

Before the tasting, I was really unconvinced, but the difference between the days was so obvious I was completely blown away.

Once again we see the that little crack of Subjectivity in the door of Reason being jimmied open by the great big club foot of Pseudoscience. Nowhere are we offered any evidence that these taste tests were blind tests, let alone the double blind trials that a scientific assessment would demand. These people are just espousing an opinion, and, worse, an opinion based on highly subjective appraisals of something that is to most people an arcane field of expertise. This is a situation busting for pseudoscientific exploitation.*

Tesco’s senior product development manager, Pierpaolo Petrassi, says of the tastings:

It may be a little step beyond what consumers can comprehend.

Oh yeah. You’re so right there Pierpaolo old chap. I’m certainly having trouble comprehending it.

Perhaps the most extraordinary part of this Guardian article, though, is slipped in almost unobtrusively:

The Guardian tested the theory this week and tasted the same wines on Tuesday evening, a leaf day, then again on Thursday evening, a fruit day. Five out of seven bottles showed a marked improvement.

[Checks date for third time. Nope, not April 1]

The Guardian, a world class newspaper, known for its usually sober news and feet-on-the-ground reporting is endorsing this piece of flimsy superstitious mumbo jumbo! Jesus H. Christ – where did I put that shifting spanner! The basement is awash and the stuff is leaking into the hallway!

As the article trails off and the loony wagon heads into the sunset, our keen correspondent throws a small bone to the wolves:

In other quarters, doubts remain. Waitrose’s† wine department has investigated the idea and cannot see a correlation. Many scientists have little time for biodynamic wine, pointing out that the movement’s guru, Rudolf Steiner, claimed to have conceived the concept after consulting telepathically with spirits beyond the realm of the material world. Among his other works are claims that the human race is as old as the Earth and descended from creatures with jelly-like bodies, and a belief that men’s passions seep into the Earth’s interior, where they trigger earthquakes and volcanoes.‡

Uh-huh. And so, Mr Booth, Guardian correspondent, you’re lending credibility to this wine horoscope idea exactly why?

So, after digesting all that, consider the following:

•Comprehensive blind taste tests conducted by the American Association of Wine Economists have revealed that, if the variables are hidden from the testers, then for the majority of people there is no correlation between the cost of a wine and its perceived enjoyment. In other words, if they don’t know what it cost, most people can’t tell what kind of ‘quality’ they’re drinking. On the other hand:

•Other blind tests show that the perceived expense of a wine, if known, positively influences perceived enjoyment. And:

•A European Commission study from 2001 determined that in excess of 50% of those interviewed considered astrology a science. A Harris Poll conducted in 2003 found that 30% of Americans thought that the position of the stars and planets affect people’s lives.

From those three pieces of data, I leave it to you to extrapolate what’s going on here. My suggestion to readers from the UK is that you should, forthwith, buy your wine from Waitrose.

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*Much like the field of high-end domestic audio. And unlike wine-tasting, that is a province I know very well. But as I read all the hi-jinks with this wine stuff, that same peculiar odour – a blend of of fish and bullshit – starts to fill the air. You find this problem anywhere that there is a substantial amount of subjectivity and a stratosphere of opinionated ‘experts’.

†Another, obviously smarter, UK chain.

‡Well, that last bit about the Elder Ones is totally true of course.

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I learnt from a very early age that it’s bad form to kick someone when they’re down. But heck, some rules are made for the breakin’. And yes, I confess, The Reverend really doesn’t like to be called ‘ignorant’ (unless it’s by someone who’s earned the right to do that by being more knowledgeable than I am, in which case I will humbly take my smackdown).

Anyway, in this particular case, the victim is kicking herself (harder than I ever could), so all I need to do is sit back and watch.

Melissa Rogers, (CEO of the woo-powered ShooTag™ you will remember), has evidently been hitting the PR circuit hard, and her daft device is getting coverage from here to Weldon Spring Heights. In doing so she’s left a trail of howlers in her wake, including the risible:

It doesn’t hurt the flea, it doesn’t hurt the pet and it doesn’t hurt the planet.

…which are, come to think of it, probably the only true words she’s spoken about ShooTag™ because it’s pretty likely it doesn’t actually do anything. Still, it’s really nice to know the fleas are OK, even if one does wonder how OK they’ll be when they run out of a food source and die horribly of hunger. But enough of insect empathy – the thing that really caused me to choke on my cheese fries was the following priceless, almost frameable quote from the comments in the Pet News section of ZooToo.com (in full, just so you know I’m not lifting it out of context):

Melissa Rogers:

I would say that any pet that is not scratching or chewing at fleas is a happy pet! Shootag only adds a frequency to the already expended energy field of the pet. Take a look at Geoffrey West’s work and the science E=M 3/4.

Unbelievable.

Ms Rogers’ comments throughout the ZooToo site are so numerous and filled with exhortations to ‘go-shootag.com-and-buy’ that they verge on spam. Pretty much every statement she makes is farcical, but that particular one takes the cake. For a start, she’s pulled Einstein’s famous mass/energy equivalence formula totally out of her ass, getting one of the most legendary equations in history (and simplest to remember, I might add) completely wrong. Even if it was right, it means absolutely nothing in this context, and one must speculate it’s the only scientific equation she (half) knows*. How she thinks it sounds even a fraction of the way to being impressive simply beggars belief.

In addition, she gushes about ‘energy fields’ – a staple of smoke-and-mirrors pseudoscience – making some kind of fatuous claim in regard to a pet’s ‘already expended energy field’ (what the crap does that mean?) and, worst of all in my book, completely misrepresents scientist Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute, who is doing some extraordinary, clever, cutting-edge biological thinking, and who would NEVER endorse a preposterous trinket like ShooTag™. This is, no doubt, from where she gets the idea of ‘fractals’ that she mentioned in her previous comment on The Cow – West, a former particle physicist, has advanced some very interesting science that deals with mathematical scaling laws in biology, particularly in metabolic behaviour as related to organism size and lifespan. With a colleague, he hypothesises that these scaling laws are related to the hydrodynamics of living systems, which in turn are delegated by networks that assume fractal structures. Rogers has probably picked up on the vibe that West is a bit of a maverick and his ideas are challenging to mainstream science.† But this does not make him a kook – he is still a scientist of some reputation, and follows proper scientific protocol.

It’s a depressing experience trudging around the ShooTag™ PR trail in the footsteps of Ms Rogers & co. Credulous tv shows looking for filler give her product a favourable airing; trade shows spruik her wares without so much as a critical blink of the eye; the press repeats the ShooTag™ promotional propaganda verbatim. No wonder these kinds of flim-flam scammers do so well – they’re selling stuff to people who have no brains to think for themselves!

And nowhere, nowhere, is there any serious, informed discussion of the outrageous claims made about ShooTag™. Ms Rogers says in several of her comments that the science behind ShooTag™ ‘will be revealed’ in due course, but I have no doubt that she and her cohorts will be long gone with their cash before that day ever comes.

Addendum:

‘Creates and invisible force field!!!’‡

As if to taunt me, this morning’s email spam contained something I’ve not seen before: an ad for a ‘pest control system’ that works on the same principles as ShooTag™ (ie, magic posing as science):

Simply plug in a single Crappex unit and it immediately turns the wiring in your home into a giant digital pest repeller creating an invisible digital force field. Chase mice, rats and roaches from your home by interfering with their nervous systems.

Here, the manufacturers are using ‘digital’ as their magic word, and asking us to believe that their ‘invisible digital force field’ is as holy-water-to-a-vampire for mice, rats and cockroaches (ie, things we consider ‘pests’) but, by inference, somehow discriminates in favour of cute little kitties and puppies. HOW??? WHY!!!???

Even hungry zombies would reject the brains of people stupid enough to buy these things.

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*It’s depressing beyond belief that no-one in the comments section of this site even takes her to task on this vapid nonsense. On the contrary, many of the contributors seem entirely prepared to take her at face value, happily digesting her ‘green’ solutions claptrap and raising a ‘you go girl!’ fist in agreement.

†The Santa Fe Institute and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, both of which West calls home, are known for their encouragement of challenging thinking.

‡Another ‘Detection of Hokum Rule of Thumb’ must surely be: ‘Watch for terrible spelling and bad copy proofing’.

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Folks! I’ve had a communication from one of the purveyors of ShooTag™ which, I think you’ll agree needs to be awarded headline status, rather than languish in the Comments on this post.

Melissa Rogers, the person credited as CEO of ShooTag™ on the About page on the ShooTag™ site, has found her way to The Cow (whilst vanity-searching her product, we must assume). Well, of course, I said things she didn’t like so she found time to mount her best and most coherent argument against my point of view.

I reprint her thoughts for you here in full.

Melissa Rogers adds:

Your response proves that you are not disaplined in physics or quantum physics. The statements that you made about frequencies being the same as a cell phone demonstrate you lack of science knowledge. There are many types of frequencies and ours are not radio frequencies. When we go from patent pending to full patent protection, then all of our sceince (all three applications) will be disclosed. Instead of making a judgement without knowledge, try it. Actually, try the people mosquito tag. If you usually get bitten by mosquitoes, you will know if you do not get mosquito bites -won’t you? If would give you more credibility to have a quantum physicist contact us and then let him explain the science to you. Otherwise it just makes you sound ignorant! Technology is changing very quickly and most people have no science background to understand how any of it works. Did you know that radios were first made with crystals? did you know that digital items are made with liquid crystals? Did you know that cell phones use fractal geometry to make a minute antenna that uses your energy field to extend? Do your homework and try the people mosquito tag. See for yourself.

Now, let’s see:

•Your response proves that you are not disaplined in physics or quantum physics.

Melissa, unlike you, I’m not pretending I am disciplined in physics or quantum physics in any formal way. I’m not the one trying to take money from people based on my ‘expertise’ and so my credentials are not the ones under scrutiny. Nevertheless, I am very well read in both physics and quantum physics, and I plainly know a great deal more about these sciences than you do. I certainly know enough to understand that your page on The Science Behind ShooTag™ is a whole lot of waffle that makes no scientific sense whatsoever.

•The statements that you made about frequencies being the same as a cell phone demonstrate you lack of science knowledge.

Whoa! Hang on there pardner! For a start, it’s your site that bandies around the the words ‘electromagnetic frequencies’ without any discrimination at all. I am completely aware of the scope of the electromagnetic spectrum and my point was that you use this catch-all description without having the vaguest idea of what it means. I don’t know whether or not your frequencies are the same as those of a cell phone because you never specify. You just claim, in the scatty manner of peddlers of pseudoscience, that your product ‘uses electromagnetic frequencies’. That’s as daft as saying it uses ‘vibrations’.

•There are many types of frequencies and ours are not radio frequencies.

Really? So you think mobile phones use radio frequencies then? Um, exactly who’s the science dummy here? So, the frequencies that your device uses – they’re ultraviolet, maybe? X-ray? Gamma ray? Perhaps they operate in the visible light spectrum? You haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about, have you?

And, may I ask, does your device have a power source? From my investigation of your site it doesn’t seem so. If this is the case, then please don’t attempt to sell me the idea that it ‘radiates frequencies’ of any kind at all. This would be flying in the face of all known physics. Unless of course it’s radioactive, and I think I’m taking a pretty safe punt that it’s not.

•When we go from patent pending to full patent protection, then all of our sceince (all three applications) will be disclosed.

Yeah, now, see, you claim your patent is pending, and if that is even the case (which I doubt), it would be because it hasn’t been awarded. We can discuss this further if you actually ever get a patent.

•If would give you more credibility to have a quantum physicist contact us and then let him explain the science to you.

Oh, I would LOVE to hear an explanation from a quantum physicist. PLEASE get one to write to me. But don’t bother if it’s Prof. William Nelson – he is NOT a quantum physicist.

•Technology is changing very quickly and most people have no science background to understand how any of it works.

Yes, I’m afraid that is entirely true. Most people have very little understanding of science. If they did, gewgaws such as ShooTag™ would never see the light of day. Melissa, what your product offers is in no way based on science. If it was, you’d be able to clearly communicate the ideas behind your device in a way that doesn’t sound completely addled to anyone with knowledge of scientific principles. You’d have conducted properly run double blind experiments, and accumulated data that confirms your results from unbiased researchers. You’d have submitted your science to peer-reviewed periodicals, and have the endorsement of real scientists instead of a lone nutcase who has a track record of ridiculous claims and refers to fictional publications (the ‘Quantum Agriculture Journal’, for example).

•Otherwise it just makes you sound ignorant!

Really? You seem strangely desperate to try and make me seem ignorant. That’s what’s called an ad hominem argument, and is usually the last resort of someone who has run out of actual facts.

•Did you know that radios were first made with crystals? did you know that digital items are made with liquid crystals?

Um, yeah, but so what? Is that supposed to impress me? Is it an example of your superior science knowledge, perhaps? What’s it got to do with anything? How does it relate to your invention?

Oh crap. Something just occurred to me – please don’t tell me that the ShooTag™ uses some kind of ‘crystals’. That would be most dismal. Or actually, do tell me that, if you like! I think that would firmly stake your credibility in this argument.

•Did you know that cell phones use fractal geometry to make a minute antenna that uses your energy field to extend?

Now, do you even have the foggiest idea what that means? Do you know, or understand any fractal geometry? What ‘energy field’ are you talking about? Extend what? How? Why?

Or is it, perhaps, that like the words ‘magnetic’ and ‘quantum’, you’re throwing in ‘fractal’ because, for you, it’s some kind of mysterious magical notion that you believe will somehow be impressive? Well, sadly, it might bluff those who know nothing about such things, but really, you’ve picked the wrong person on whom to use that kind of language. I work with fractal math. I know what it does and what it means. What you are attempting to say does not in any way sound sensible to me.

•Do your homework and try the people mosquito tag. See for yourself.

I shouldn’t need to try your product to know that it’s plausible, in the same way that I shouldn’t need to buy, oh, toaster or something to ‘see if it works’ – I know that the toaster is likely to function as its manufacturer claims because the scientific principles on which it’s based make sense.

You imply that you know more about science than I do, and yet you don’t even have the most basic understanding of scientific process. I’m not the one you need to convince. Convince people who have no vested interest in your product (that is, NOT people who’ve forked over money, or friends, or credulous tv presenters). Convince unbiased scientists, using properly conducted scientific trials. Take all the spurious anecdotal ‘evidence’ off your website and replace it with some properly endorsed rational thinking.

I reiterate what I said in my original post – if your science is genuine, and your device does what you claim, then doctors working in malaria zones all over the world will be beating your door down. That would certainly be convincing evidence.

But while you continue to invoke dubious ‘scientists’ like ‘Professor’ William Nelson, mythical gazettes like the ‘Quantum Agriculture Journal’ and spout equivocal gibberish such as that which you use in ‘The Science Behind ShooTag™’, your credibility is near zero. Your small pool of personal ‘It-worked-for-me-TOO!’ testimonials may serve to fleece gullible pet owners of their dollars, but it doesn’t constitute any kind of science.

Come back and push my face it in when you’ve solved the world’s malaria problems (which, if your device works as claimed, should be a trivial undertaking and be achievable in a scant year or so – or maybe you don’t think that’s a worthwhile use for your invention?). I promise I will make a full and humble apology in that event.

Until then, all you have to do is show me where the science is in all your claims.

WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series: Episode #5

NOTE: I have replaced the images in this post after a legal challenge from Dr Emoto’s office, on the basis of intellectual property violation. You can read about it here. I note that images of Dr Emoto and his water crystals appear widely across the internet on sites that are supportive of his ideas. I leave it to you to make a conclusion about why he objects to them on my site…

This is Dr Masaru Emoto. You might remember that some time back I had cause to mention Dr Emoto in relation to the improbable H²Om ‘vibrationally charged water’, for whom he may or may not have been some kind of spokesman.* I promised in that post that we’d examine him in more detail at a later date, so here we go.

Dr Emoto believes† that human emotions, through speech or thought, effect the behaviour of water, particularly the way water crystallizes.

To put it in the very simplest of terms (and trust me, there’s not a lot more to it than simple terms): if you think bad thoughts at water while it’s freezing it will make ugly crystals, and if you think good thoughts it will make pretty crystals. Does that sound daft? Yeah, well by any sensible yardstick, it pretty much is.

Dr Emoto has also come to the conclusion that even just the words that we use to convey certain emotions and ideas will affect water! He maintains that simply writing words on the containers used to freeze water will influence the kinds of ice crystals it makes. These are similar to some of the examples to be found on the Hado‡ website (a comprehensive archive of Masaru Emoto’s ideas):

Yes, that’s right – just the written words for the French, Japanese and English language expressions for the concept of ‘thank you’ create crystals as expressively different as those in these pictures. Remarkable! And is it just me, or does the French ice crystal look flamboyant and florid, the Japanese one precise and elegant and the English one ugly, coarse and ill-defined – classic, banal racial stereotypes. I bet ‘danke’ would turn out angular and severe, with no sense of humour.

Dr Emoto, by his own admission, is not a scientist. In his ‘experiments’ with water crystallization, he has suggested that photographers use their aesthetic discretion when choosing examples that endorse his ideas. As far as science goes, then, this is something more akin to an art excursion.

What’s wrong with Dr Emoto having a charming little eccentric idea about water caring what we think about it? Well, the problem is that Emoto’s notions have been picked up by just about every lunatic in existence who has some kind of ‘water therapy’ as their cause, and then been advanced by those people as science, either directly, or just by the omission of salient details. If you were unfortunate enough to have endured the inane ‘What the Bleep Do We Know’ you will have seen exactly how Dr Emoto’s ideas are advocated: breathless slack-jawed wonder, without a shred of critical analysis (or even just common sense) in sight. Merchandizers like H²Om, who are selling nothing more than purified water, are quick to flaunt Emoto’s convictions (if it suits them) and homeopaths from here to Asheville NC, who are now clutching at anything that remotely even looks like a straw, are hitching their implausible beliefs to Emoto’s fantastical star.

And, as eccentric and, well, Japanese, as Dr Emoto comes across, it’s hard not to like him. Reading through his website you get the idea that he’s just a nutty old geezer who’s had way more attention than he should have, for an idea that is childlike and appealing in a very undemanding way. Hado is a cute, wide-eyed, uncomplicated view of the way things work – the ‘Hello Kitty’ of science.

Sadly, credulous people with little grasp of what science is actually about find the allure of Dr Emoto’s magical thinking all too seductive, and without even casually examining his process, take seriously what should properly be viewed as a quirky amusement.

As a parting thought, you might like to read Dr Emoto’s Happiness Poem at Hado. Its innocent pining for a simple solution to everything that seems ‘wrong’ with the world (by ‘fixing our broken relationship with water…’) bespeaks a guileless mind that does not want to concern itself even slightly with the complexities of the way things actually are.

If only it was that easy.

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*It was kind of hard to tell. The makers of H²Om seemed to want to simultaneously align themselves with, and distance themselves from, Dr Emoto according to the usefulness of the context. A bet each way, it would appear.

†For a change, I really think that Dr Emoto is someone who genuinely does believe what he says, misguided though he may be. That puts him in a very obvious class of people, in my book – he’s just batty. He’s not as shifty and conniving as Jasmuheen, nor as smugly manipulative as Rael.

‡’Hado’, to rhyme with ‘shadow’ – apparently from two Japanese ideograms that mean wave and move.

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Remember Steorn, the Irish startup who claimed to have invented a machine for creating energy out of nothing? We examined their preposterous claims on The Cow almost two years ago, here, and then again, after they comprehensively failed to reveal their stunning breakthrough to the world, here.

I’ve checked in on them from time to time, but aside from the very occasional appearance with famous personages*, there’s been absolutely no action on the Steorn Free Energy front.

Until this week.

Given the deafening silence that resulted from Steorn’s attempt to convene a panel of experts to vindicate their claims, I was pretty sure that, like so many others throughout history who’ve vaunted perpetual motion machines, the company was dead and buried. Unfortunately I was mistaken. Like a zombie that’s been struck so many times with a shovel that its spinal cord is hanging out, Steorn has staggered from the Graveyard of Improbable Claims to walk among the rational once more. Actually, they’re more like vampires come to think of it – they’ve risen freshly reconstituted, with a website makeover, and a coven of new faces, to feed again on the blood of the gullible. But the unpleasant smell of decay still lingers under the paint job.

But enough of the colourful Hammer Horror metaphors. Surely Steorn wouldn’t be brazen enough to come back with the same old crap. Surely by now they’ve got something to substantiate their preposterous claims. Well let’s see…. there’s a graph…

…and a plastic doo-dah…

And they’re even selling a USB Hall Probe† (at 250 quid it’s a steal – yep, that’s right – them stealing from you). But aside from that, it’s all the same crapola. They’ve made a video that features a trio of luminaries extolling the virtues of Orbo (Steorn’s supposed free energy ‘engine’) without really saying anything more profound than ‘Gee whiz! Ah woonta believed it unless I sawr’n it with me own eyes!’. Unsurprisingly (to me at least) none of these boffins turns up on the first five pages of a ProprietarySearchEngine™ search. C’mon Steorn! If you’re going about spruiking your new Solution to the World’s Problems™, get some people with credibility to wave your flag! That is, of course, unless you can’t…

What else have we got… oh yeah! There’s an explanation of how Orbo works! Hang on now:

Orbo is based upon time variant magnetic interactions, i.e. magnetic interactions whose efficiency varies as a function of transaction timeframes.

It is this variation of energy exchanged as a function of transaction time frame that lies at the heart of Orbo technology, and its ability to contravene the principle of the conservation of energy. Why? Conservation of energy requires that the total energy exchanged using interactions are invariant in time. This principle of time invariance is enshrined in Noether’s Theorem.

Aha! [Slaps hand on forehead] So obvious! In other words, what you’re saying is:

‘Crap crap crap crapola, crappity crap, big words, confusing technical jargon, more crap and then some crap.’

It all seems so simple in retrospect! If only I had thought of using magnets to make things go round and round forever and generate electricity in the process! Oh wait… I DID! In third grade! And then one day (the next day, as I recall) I learned from my science teacher, Mr Smythe,‡ that science is not what you want to happen, but what actually happens, and I gave up my dream of becoming the Henry Ford of the Free Energy Age.

So. What’s the game with Steorn? Can they possibly be the stellar kinds of bozos that they seem? Or have they simply outsmarted everyone with a hi-tech shell game? They’re certainly getting plenty of publicity, and now they’re selling training courses, so I’m sure they’ll fleece enough idiots of their cash to keep annoying us for at least another couple of years.

But one thing Steorn ain’t EVER going to do, is make a machine that outputs more energy than is put into it. Ever. Come back in ten years and tell me I’m wrong Steorn. Twenty, then. What the heck, I’ll give you a hundred!

Now, back to my workshop. The antigravity machine is a-l-m-o-s-t finished…

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*The woman in the middle of the photo is Mary McAleese, the President of Ireland. Steorn’s CEO, Sean McCarthy, is the man with the smug grin standing to her left.

†It’s basically just a gadget for measuring magnetic field strength. Ho hum.

‡Very curiously, Mr Smythe was a Christian. It was from this point that I understood that even very intelligent people could be hoodwinked, if they weren’t brave enough.

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WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series: Episode #4

This is Danny Nalliah. Danny is some kind of flavour of Pentecostal Christian, and believes (or says he believes) that the Bible is the literal Word of God. Danny is a most irksome person at this very moment, because he also believes, and has made public his belief, that the terrible bushfires that are raging not more than 20 miles from my home are the result of divine retribution from God. Danny says God has done this because Victoria, my home state, recently decriminalized abortion.

On the website for his appropriately named ‘Catch the Fire Ministries’* Danny says that in November last year he had a dream in which he “saw fire everywhere with flames burning very high and uncontrollably”.† He interpreted the dream to mean that God had “removed his conditional protection on Australia, and in particular on the state of Victoria for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb”.

Danny Nalliah epitomizes what I despise about religion. His self-righteous posturing, and despicable ignorant proselytizing is primitive and dangerous. He has told his followers that if they pray for forgiveness, God will deliver them from this horrific tragedy, and spare further fires. Of course, Danny wins whether or not the fires stop or worsen; if they die back, then the prayers are successful, if they flare up again, then God is still pissed. This is not a new game to Nalliah – before the last Australian elections he prophesied: “I will boldly declare that Prime Minister John Howard will be re-elected in the November election (if the Body of Christ unites in prayer and action) and pass the leadership onto Peter Costello sometime after.”

Of course, he was plain wrong, but sadly, for some reason religion is rarely called to answer for blunders of such magnitude. I guess that’s what happens when you write an escape clause into everything you ‘predict’.

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*I’m certainly not linking to this reprehensible organization – they don’t deserve the honour.

†As prophetic dreams go, this is pretty standard fare – there’s no specific prediction of a bushfire (it could just as easily have been a bomb blast, an industrial accident or an incident of arson, or riffing metaphorically, any of a hundred other things), and there’s no specified time limit (so it could be in a month, or in a year, or a decade). You see how this goes – a fire of some kind, at some time, is hardly much of a prophesy. Especially in a land that has bushfires every summer, to a greater or lesser degree of damage.

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