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#463: Marcus Bachmann

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Marcus Bachmann is the guy who in 1978 married Michele Bachmann under orders derived from a vision that she, Marcus, and another college friend simultaneously experienced. According to Michele, then, this is the guy she is submissive to and obeys. Marcus runs a counseling clinic, Bachmann & Associates, which is proud to be able to cure homosexuality while publicly denying that it engages in “reparative therapy” – an easily proven lie. According to Marcus, gay people are “barbarians” and they apparently need his hateful and bigoted counseling to become proper, civilized people. The method behind their gay reversion therapy, however, is primarily religious myths and delusional nonsense.


Marcus Bachmann is very sympathetically portrayed here.


Diagnosis: Vile piece of shit who tries to compensate for his lunacy by being extra evil. 


#464: C.B. Baker

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I cannot provide much biographical info on C.B. Baker, but the fact that his(?) screeds have been picked up by whale.to ensures that he merits consideration for inclusion in our encyclopedia. And he passes the looney test with flying colors.


Baker’s premise seems to be that the US is not facing imminent invasion by the UN, but that the US has already been invaded by Soviet and UN troops: “Acting under U.N. occupation orders, U.S. military and national guard forces are now being trained to attack civilians in this country. In Alaska, contingents of Russian military OCCUPATION FORCES are reported to have already landed.” Under the subheading “electromagnetic totalitarian control over America” Baker, attempts to show that the KGB used mind-controlling techniques in the Camp David event and elsewhere; and he claims to have read this (or information implying this) in Scientific American and the Wall Street Journal. The “PSYCHOTRONICS CZAR OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER” – the one who is in day-to-day charge of this traitorous behavior is colonel John B. Alexander. “The Federal Government has acquired enough high tech psychotronic devices to zap the minds of targeted victims and if necessary even create the APPEARANCE of UFO abductions as an experimental method to conceal a program of injecting tiny computer tracking-chips into targeted subjects,” says Baker, and backs it up with all the evidence he thinks he needs (he believes this – what more do you need to establish the veracity of the claim?)


The government also use the enticing-sounding “HAMMER AND SICKLE MIND ZAPPING” (I have no idea; you better check it yourself) and the even more interestingly titled “SATANIC 666 SOVIET ZAPPING DEVICES”. You can also read Baker’s explanation of electromagnetic disease transmission here.


Diagnosis: Apparently the idea that one should wish for evidence for claims is part of the conspiracy as well. Baker, however, is probably harmless.

#465: Jim Bakker

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“Jim Bakker spelled his name with two Ks because three would be too obvious.” (Jeff Stilson)


Jim Bakker is the formerly disgraced (yes, formerly disgraced) televangelist who at one point ran the PTL club, a network of televangelists, with his wife Tammy Faye Bakker (later Messner). He was pretty successful once, even creating an amusement park in South Carolina. As opposed to most such people, Bakker even kept rightwing politics off the show, but he did ardently promote the prosperity gospel and the idea that Jesus wants you to be rich.


His success lasted until John Ankerberg and Jimmy Swaggart exposed his tendencies to commit adultery, after which his empire crumbled (Swaggart himself was caught soliciting services from a prostitute a little later), after which Jerry Falwell swindled PTL off his hands and got Bakker sent off to jail for some fishy financial transactions. Bakker then waited a few years, wrote a book “I was wrong”, and then returned to preaching, apparently relinquishing the prosperity gospel. Fuller story here.


So did he come to grips with sanity and reality, then? Not a chance.


In his most recent book, “Big Book of History”, Bakker argues that the courts and President Barack Obama “kicked God out of schools and eventually […] out of the entire nation.” The liberal war on God started, of course, with the mandatory school prayers being found unconstitutional in 1962, and America has declined since then. Liberal politics and secular society turns kids morally depraved, and “rebellious children [apparently, Bakker thinks that’s a new phenomenon] are a sign of the Last Days”). The church hasn’t done enough to stop this, and as a consequence “[a]n anti-christ spirit is masquerading in our world as a champion of human rights.” He also claims to have prophesied 9/11 (Rick Joyner agrees that Bakker foresaw it, by the way).


As most dimwits of his type Bakker has of course warned that “America is under curse”, and claimed that God let his protective hand of protection down to allow the September 11 attacks to occur in order “to get your and my attention.” Which means, of course, since he doesn’t want God to be the bad guy, that Bakker thinks 9/11 was a good thing. But religious fanatics often get away with double standards.


More recently he has tried to bolster his career as a meteorological prophet, bravely giving prophecies of earthquakes along fault lines and hurricanes and floods in New Orleans. When some of his shows was recorded during inclement weather, Bakker took the thunder that could be heard booming several times over the episodes to be proof that God was approving of the stupid shit he and his guest (Rick Joyner) was saying, such as the need to support Bakker’s ministry through donations and the importance of supporting Israel. Some might have thought that rolling thunder would suggest disapproval, but Bakker has a direct line to God that the rest of don’t.


Diagnosis: Depraved Taliban dominionist. His influence seems far less widespread than it used to be, but he’s still got some danger in him.

#466: Stephen Baldwin

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Stephen Baldwin is the youngest of the Baldwin brothers, and most famous for his appearance in The Usual Suspects, evangelical Christianity and proselytizing (especially among the enlisted), political activism (especially for his campaigns against adult bookstores) and for having a tattoo on his left shoulder of the initials “HM” for Hannah Montana.


He has also been (of course) in financial trouble, and since 2009, a website has been soliciting donations on Baldwin's behalf, stating that “because of this convictions [sic] it has caused him the loss of many jobs,” and that “he deserves hundreds of millions for his Job-like faithfulness in the face of relentless loss and persecution.” Baldwin seems not himself to be involved in that site, but heis behind the for-profit organization Antioch Ministry, which exists “to facilitate the gifts and calling of Stephen Baldwin”.


He’s not a fan of evolution, and this video may suggests something of the addled shallowness of Baldwin’s intellect. In his memoir “The Unusual Suspect” he “argues” that free will is a lie of Satan (no, he doesn’t engage with Harry Frankfurt), and campaigns against the threat of intellectualism  – we must shut off our brains, Baldwin says, and be led by what God tells our hearts. Furthermore, efforts to end global poverty and violence are just the sort of “stupid arrogance” that incur God's wrath, which we'll be feeling any day now in the coming apocalypse. In other words, it’s a long rant trying to justify his egoism and for viewing his own ignorance as a virtue. More here. This one is illuminating as well.


He is nevertheless not to be confused with Steve Baldwin, the executive director of the Council for National Policy, even though they share characteristics beyond a common name (evidence here).


Diagnosis: Prominent evangelical preachers and creationists, despite their willful lack of knowledge and understanding, at least tend to display a certain slick cleverness. It is interesting to see what happens when you take even the trappings of a working mind away and get Stephen Baldwin.


Addendum: Although generally considered the least crazy of the Baldwin brothers, Alec Baldwin has given his name to the pseudoscientific Tooth Fairy Project. Honorable mention, then.

#467: Richard Bandler

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Richard Wayne Bandler is an author and self-help guru, best known for inventing (with John Grinder) “Neuro-linguistic programming” (NLP), a collection of concepts and techniques “intended to understand and change human behavior-patterns” (closely related to “Natural Horsemanship”). He has also developed other trademarked systems such as Design Human Engineering® and Neuro Hypnotic Repatterning™. None of it has any basis in reality – it is purportedly based on transformational grammar, the basis of which Bandler’s audience doesn’t understand anyway – and NLP has aptly been termed cargo-cult science (or a mild version of Scientology) by people who know what they are talking about, insofar as it is built on a theory of mind that is demonstrably false. But all of it belongs to the kind of fluffy, popular self-help woo – a central element in the human potential movement, in fact – that remains immensely popular and ensures that Bandler stays filthy rich. “Fraud” might be the first word that comes to mind (he often refers to himself as having a doctorate, which is, uh, a controversial claim) but there is no obvious reason to believe that Bandler doesn’t actually believes he’s onto something.


Adherents of NLP attempt to apply it to psychotherapy, healing, communication, self development, teaching English, treating psoriasis, curing cancer, achieving weight loss (the obvious one), and dating (links to these claims on the NLP website can be found here, but I won’t link to them directly). The bullshit is described in perceptive detail here, and this is a pretty good summary. This might be relevant as well.


Diagnosis: Major bullshitter and bullshit promoter. The level of danger is a little hard to assess, but pushing blatant pseudo-science cannot have a good outcome in the long run.

#468: Bill Banuchi

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Reverend Bill Banuchi is the executive director of the New York chapter of the Christian Coalition and a sidekick of verified fraud Paul Cameron. Banuchi has suggested that homosexuals should be legally required to wear warning labels: “We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking takes one to two years off the average life span, yet we 'celebrate' a lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease and takes at least 20 years off the average life span according to the 2005 issue of the revered scientific journal Psychological Reports”. That’s Cameron’s report, which is dealt with here, but for Banuchi veracity isn’t exactly what matters in this case.


Something like Banuchi’s suggestion for identifying dangerous minorities has of course been tried before.


He is also a creationist, and claims that leftists – because of their faith in evolution – are trying to demolish the Constitution because, well, it’s not quite clear, but you won’t get the link here. Google it.


Diagnosis: Monster

#469: Mike Bara

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Mike Bara is an engineering consultant and another one of those frenziedly confused conspiracy theorist who gleefully defends virtually any hopelessly insane conspiracy theory he comes across, including but not limited to the idea that the moonlanding was a hoax. He is the author of “The Choice” and has coauthored “Dark Mission – The Secret History of NASA” with Richard Hoagland. The “about the book” page on his website says that “Dark Mission took nearly four years to complete and includes over 200 illustrations and NASA images, many in full color. This 550 page book includes close to 200 footnotes and scientific references supporting its shocking conclusions” – that is the complete blurb, and you cannot be but convinced by the profundity of such research. Apparently Bara has in the process also uncovered the secret nature of evidence: a function of the number of footnotes and page numbers. Add in some pictures, and it counts as proofas well. You can read an interview with Bara here.


Apparently Bara doesn’t fancy evolution either, apparently because evolutionists, as opposed to practising Christians, have been less open-minded about his UFO and moonlanding-related claims – and because his ancient astronaut claims seem to be in discordance with the Darwinian explanation of the fossil record. You can read more about his ”research” at his websites LunarAnomalies.com and DarkMission.net, but I don’t have the faintest clue why you would want to do that.


Among his alleged areas of expertise areExopolitics, Alientology, UFOLOGY, Pole Shifts, Planet Nibiru, Sumerians, the Annunaki, Star Gates, and the Mayan Calendar.


Diagnosis: Hysterically disassociated from reality, Bara is probably pretty harmless – though he comes across as pretty miffed that people who are actually able to use reason don’t really pay much heed to his claims.

#470: Keith Barr

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Another relatively small fish, Keith Barr is a faith healer (i.e. practitioner of the Judeo-Christian brand of reiki) located in Clarkston, Michigan, who practices exactly the kind of faith healing that James Randi takes up in The Faith Healers. Barr is perhaps most notable for having a substantial Youtube presence, where you can see him promote his services backed up by claims to have healed hundreds of people of ”cancer, blindness, even the effects of Agent Orange” (apparently Comcast refused to run a cable ad in which he claimed to bring sight to the blind).


”Jesus said, you have to pray and have no doubt. It requires a tremendous amount of faith,” says Barr, though in reality it probably requires exactly enough to get the effects of confirmation bias and wishful thinking going. Regression to themean probably does the rest, though the blindness thing may admittedly require something more. Fortunately, there is always the faith healer escape hatch when the healing doesn't work – you just didn’t have enough faith. Barr is briefly discussed here.


He is also a promoter of Intelligent Design Creationism: ”We should not allow the howls and protest of those fearful of a scientific study of creationism and intelligent design to stop scientific progress. They are fearful of their bias and materialistic world view being challenged,” says Barr. And he has produced a DVD titled ”Amazing Scientific Secrets of the Bible”. It might have helped if Barr had the first clue about science, but then again, perhaps not.


Diagnosis: Hardcore fundie and tireless opponent of critical thinking skills. Given his healing practice he is actually moderately dangerous even though his influence is probably not very widespread.


#471: Jonathan Bartlett

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Roseanne Barr is weapons-grade nuts, and she has therefore started a cleaning operation of her website and reputation since looking weapons-grade nuts might look bad when you’ve decided to run for president; according to herself she suffers, or has suffered, from mental health problems, and we generally wish to avoid such cases (though this one is harder to explain away).


No such easy escape for Jonathan L. Bartlett. Now, Bartlett is hardly a big fish in the creationist movement (in fact, I have trouble finding any more information, except that he hails from Oklahoma), but he has made some interesting contributions to Answers in Genesis’s house journal Answers. His “Towards a Creationary Classification of Mutations” at least contains the discovery that the terms “beneficial” and “deleterious” don’t analytically imply design. So instead Bartlett define mutations as “design-consistent” and “design-inconsistent”. Insofar as creationism is hardly a falsifiable theory in any case, guess how many actually observed mutations fall into the latter category. Bartlett does indeed develop some “criteria” for design-consistency, such as whether the “mutation […] occurs at a significantly higher rate than the average mutation rate for the organism.” Goodness knows why that would indicate design, however, and Bartlett sure doesn’t tell us (which is especially curious given the predominant creationist assertion that all mutations are “loss of information”). Be sure to also look up Ira S. Loucks’s “Fungi from the Biblical Perspective” in the same volume (the name is allegedly a pseudonym for a “high-ranked researcher at a University in Eastern US”).


In daily life Bartlett is apparently a member of the Creation Research Society, but his “research paper” seems to be his main claim to notability.


Diagnosis: Insignificant fundamentalist denialist fanatic; but although there are hords of Bartletts out there they deserve a representative in our Encyclopedia. Bartlett fills that role nicely.

#472: James Bartley

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James Bartley is an “[a]bductee who has been exposed to high levels of Spiritual Warfare” and “a student of Military History with an emphasis on Intelligence–Counterintelligence and Special Operations”. That combination has proudly earned him his own page at whale.to, and Bartley lives up to its standards.


Inspired by David Icke, Bartley is a prominent promoter of the lizard people idea: “[T]he actual rulers of this planet are Reptilians who reside in the lower fourth dimension [that should, I suppose, be time, but it probably isn’t] and who work through their reptilian-human hybrids that have attained positions of power on Earth. […] The use of Mind Controlled Sex Slaves, the International Child Prostitution business, Sexual Slavery and Torture, International Drug Trafficking with its concomitant miseries, Genocide, Human Experimentation, Chem Trail spraying ad nauseum are all spawned from the Reptilian Mind” (or Bartley’s own mind, but he doesn’t entertain that hypothesis). Furthermore “[t]he Medical System is controlled by the Draco's through the vehicle of the American Medical Association which uses Gestapo like methods to squelch any efforts at using SUCCESSFUL alternative medical treatments, especially as they apply to supposedly ‘incurable diseases’.” You see, “[t]he reptilians are paraphysical beings who can alter their vibrational density to operate within the confines of our three dimensional world both in and out of the normal visual spectrum." And Bartley has proof: “to her dying day Olympia, the mother of Alexander the Great insisted that her son was conceived during sexual intercourse between herself and what she described as a python.” Indeed; how would we dumb lovers of reason and evidence counter that one?


It appears that the greatest threat to the reptilian overlords is posed by the abductee community, i.e. Bartley. “When the reptilians have decided that an abductee has gone ‘too far’ they will exact their preferred method of retribution which is Cancer.” And as proof of how intensely the reptiles infiltrate human life “[t]he reptilian host that my friend shared an apartment with brought into my experience a woman who was literally demon possessed. I referred to her as Demon Infested Deborah.” However, Bartley’s efforts to unmask the reptilian community are counteracted by plants within the UFO/conspiracy research community itself.


At least Bartley has some sound advice for us: “I would strongly discourage anyone from meditating at or near energy ley lines, dimensional vortex areas and the like.” Rest assured, James. You may also wish to be aware of astral dreamscape manipulation, which has something to do with orgone energy. Bartley is also involved in the MILAB conspiracy promotion, and apparently he has some connection to this website (he has his own profile there, where you can see a “lecture” he gave at “Roswell 2007”). Enjoy.


Diagnosis: Keep a reasonable distance

#473: Joe Barton

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“Smokey” Joe Barton is the Republican Representative from Texas's sixth district (since 1984), Teabagger, chickenhawk, and one of the most prominent global warming deniers in Congress. Barton, head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee at the time, was one of the chief architects of Dubya's Energy Policy Act of 2005, which provided massive giveaway to Texas oil companies (as well as the “Halliburton Loophole”). Barton’s intertwinement with the oil industry is so intense that his declarations in relation to the BP oil spill (that is, his apology to BP had to be denied even by BP’s own questionably competent Tony Hayward.


Barton was also responsible for commissioning the infamous Wegman report on global warming, and although he didn’t plagiarize it himself at least he appears to have been very clear about what the report was supposed to end up saying before investigations were began.


He’s said some incredibly stupid stuff on global warming, such as here (also here), or here, or, in particular: “Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up?” That’s … not entirely coherent.


Sometimes, it seems, Barton’s absolute lack of insight or scientific understanding can be slightly off-putting to people with the faintest idea. This one is legendary, as is his arguments that CO2 is really good for us, or his claim that trying to prevent global warming is pointless: “You can't regulate God. Not even the Democratic majority in the US Congress can regulate God.”


Despite his image as a religious zealot, he isn’t particularly familiar with the Bible, preferring instead the tenets of his religion to be exactly what he wants them to be instead.


Diagnosis: Utterly deluded hyper-denialist and virtually a cartoon-version of a villain in any disagreement over civilization or decency. Extremely dangerous.

#474: Andrew Basiago

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Andrew D. Basiago presents himself as “attorney, time traveler with D.A.R.P.A.” Although it may not be the first question you’ll ask after regarding that brief self-presentation, “D.A.R.P.A.” stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. According to himself “[i]n the late 1960s and early 1970s, Andrew Basiago in the company of his late father […] was repeatedly teleported from one part of the United States to another. […] Andy was one of a group of children participating in the time-space exploration program of the US defense-technical community, named ‘Project Pegasus.’ In that capacity, Andy was the first American child to teleport and took part in trips to past and future events utilizing time travel technologies then being researched and developed by [DARPA].”


His paper “The Discovery of Life on Mars”, published in 2008 (but not in a top-tier astronomy journal, despite its potentially revolutionary nature), “was the first work to prove that Mars is an inhabited planet.” After publishing this landmark paper, Basiago founded the Mars Anomaly Research Society (MARS) (probably not to be confused with J.P. Skipper’s Mars Anomaly Research), which “continues to make breathtaking discoveries of life forms and ancient artifacts on Mars.” I don’t doubt it. According to Basiago himself: “I am leading the campaign to achieve political recognition of the fact that Mars is inhabited because we must now enact the international treaty that is required to protect the ecology and civilization of Mars from visitation, exploration, habitation, and colonization by human beings from Earth. We must remember that Mars does not belong to the people of Earth. Mars belongs to the Martians!”


Andy is also on a crusade as a lawyer and activist to have the US government 1.) Disclose its time travel capabilities for public use; 2.) Disclose the fact that the planet Mars harbors life; and 3.) That the USA has achieved “quantum access” to past and future events.


Ah yes, the quantum. What, exactly, “quantum access” would mean is left unexplained.


Basiago was a participant at, I kid you not, the “Dolphins and Teleportation Seminar 2011” (do visit that site! There is so much love on that website that it beggars belief), which included “interspatial communication, quantum merging, E.T contact, teleportation to Mars, swimming in gentle waters with dolphins, sound healing, heart opening, cell activating, soul leadership, your planetary mission, laughter and humor, divine feminine, Geomancy, higher consciousness, the transformation of the ages, sacred wisdom societies, Martian life & artifacts, creating new timelines, mysticism and physics, empathy, intuition and creativity combined with logic and wisdom; PLUS Alternative 4 – the benevolent, peaceful reality we are creating.” It is discussed here.


Diagnosis: Andrew Basiago is probably kind as a pillow, and too gentle for such a harsh reality as ours. Luckily, he appears to have no intention of developing anything that could be mistaken for a connection to said reality either. Harmless.

#475: Gary Bauer

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First of all, let us give an honorable mention to youtube comedian and Tea Party motivational speaker Bob Basso, who fancies himself a 21stCentury Thomas Paine (he has no clue, apparently, who Paine is), and who was “reportedly” summoned to the White House by President Obama to discuss the subject matter of his youtube clips (the rumour has, to put it mildly, not been verified by anyone but Basso). His main line of argument seems to be that “[t]xation without representation is tyranny,” therefore something. But to give Basso his own entry would be to exaggerate his importance, so we won’t.


There is no way around Gary Lee Bauer, however. Bauer is a politician, theocrat, former (long-time) president of the Family Research Council – which does propaganda, not research (but doesn’t really know the difference) and is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center – global warming denialist (that’s an offieial Family Research Council position, showing what kind of standards they have for ‘research’; more here), ardently pro-war chickenhawk, conspiracy theorist, former president nominee, founder of the Campaign for Working Families (dedicated to electing “pro-family, pro-life and pro-free enterprise” candidates to federal and state offices), supporter of Teen Mania Ministries, president of American Values (read: batshit insane dominionist Taliban values; it is “committed to defending life, traditional marriage, and equipping our children with conservative values”), member of the Executive Board of Christians United for Israel and the wingnut Emergency Committee for Israel, and chairman of the Forgotten American Coalition.


His political positions are thus relatively straightforward: pro-life (advocating that the Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade and claiming that legal abortions means that “God is removing His hand of protection from America”), against stem-cell research, campaigning to cut funding for Planned Parenthood, anti-euthanasia (because it contradicts the “strong Christian foundation of the Constitution”), against anything but abstinence only sex education, and supporting a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage. All the same he has ardently argued that the US should not trade with China until the country “improves its human rights record”, which is rather disingenuous – to get an idea of what kind of human rights values Bauer stands for you may savor this quote: “The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant – baptism and holy communion – must be denied citizenship” (which seems for instance to imply that circumcision should be a necessary condition for citizenship)


Or what about this?; or this?; or this quote: “Progressives and Islamists are indeed on the same side. Their common disdain for Christianity explains why left-wing judges in America find any inkling of Christianity in the public square unconstitutional, while Islamist judges in the Middle East deem it executable. Their common view that life is expendable explains the left's embrace abortion-on-demand and why the Islamists don't hesitate to deploy their own children for homicide bombings.” The fact that Bauer in fact agrees with radical Islamists on virtually every policy issue is a fact that he would never countenance (particularly because he isn’t very interested in facts to begin with).


Bauer is also a signatory of Chuck Colson’s Manhattan Declaration, which calls on evangelical, Catholic and Orthodox Christians (not mormons; they’re apparently not welcome) not to comply with rules and laws that they claim would compel participation in or blessing of abortion, same-sex marriage and other matters that go against their religious consciences. The document itself is breathtakingly historically revisionist, containing framings such as “[a]fter the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved not only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture,” and “[i]n Europe, Christians challenged the divine claims of kings and successfully fought to establish the rule of law and balance of governmental powers, which made modern democracy possible.” You don’t need to know a lot of history to recognize the ridiculousness of these claims. More here (yes, it’s huffpo – conscience-related hesitation about following the link is understandable).


Bauer is also known for claiming that AIDS victims “deserved to die”, and for claiming that if it wasn’t for the heroic efforts of Fox News, President Obama would have already turned America into a totalitarian dictatorship (though Bauer has, as we have seen, already revealed a rather significant lack of understanding of what “totalitarianism” means).


Here’s Bauer comparing the Occupy Wall street protesters to terrorists because, well, because Bauer isn’t very good at making distinctions. Here he rather bizarrely tries to argue that Jared Loughner would “fit in well with the Occupy Wall street protestors,” because he doesn’t like the protestors and dimly realizes that he kinda shouldn’t like Loughner either, and therefore they must be ideologically equivalent (there are only two possible ideological positions: Bauer’s own (God’s) and the enemy’s.)


His perhaps most bizarre stunt in recent times, however, might be his flailing attack on Sandra Fluke, as part of his fight against the Obama administration’s “contraceptive mandate.” According to Bauer, ensuring that women have access to contraceptives is furthermore an assault on the Catholic Church and on religious freedom, and makes the United States akin to Cuba and China and Obama similar to a “third world dictator”. He also denounced the left’s hyperbolic rhetoric.


His aforementioned views on gay rights are predictable enough. According to Bauer, Obama’s support for gay rights shows he isn’t "fighting for the little guy," but he has offered no further explanation.


There’s a good Gary Bauer resource here. You can also read an illuminating portrait of one of Bauer’s central supporters, Texas Taliban official Tim Horner, here.


Diagnosis: Hardcore dominionist, gleeful Liar for Jesus, and rotten to the core. Gary Bauer nevertheless manage to stay in a position of influence; extremely dangerous.

#476: Carl Baugh

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Carl Edward Baugh is a young earth creationist who is most infamous for claiming to have “discovered human alongside dinosaur footprints near the Paluxy River in Texas”. Yes, Baugh is the big promoter of the infamous (fake) Paluxy footprints, and he still believes they’re genuine.


Apart from that he is familiar as a national television host who purports to present “science” supporting creationism on the program Creation in the 21st Century (Trinity Broadcasting Network). Pure pseudoscience, of course, and Baugh’s mistakes (which are plentiful) aren’t always honest mistakes. His educational credentials are … somewhat shakyas well – even his theology degree seems to be an honorary degree from an unaccredited institution, his “Ph.D”s are perhaps even more ramshackle than Kent Hovind’s, and the institutions (if possible) perhaps even shadier.


In 1984 Baugh instigated the Creation Evidence Museum, a forerunner for Answer in Genesis’s Creation Museum in Kentucky (nicely reviewed here), in a double-wide trailer in Glen Rose near Dinosaur Valley State Park, to promote creationism (he has later updated the architecture; there is a hilarious account of a visit here). All the exhibits are junk, of course, and pride of place goes to the forgeries – the most famous being the Paluxy footprints (also here), though other forgeries have been identified as well, such as purported dinosaur claws that turned out to be crocodile teeth. Now, just to emphasize; Baugh actually really does make fake fossils and present the fakes as the real deal. As for the mantracks, when scientists attempted to investigate his claims he couldn’t even get the story about their discovery straight, and it has been reported that when Baugh bought his Moab skeleton (oh, yes – he’s got those as well) he knew that the bones had already been dated at 200–300 years. Didn’t prevent Baugh from claiming that the bones were found in Cretaceous deposits (guess Jesus looked another way when he made that claim). And then there is the Ordovicean hammer (or “London Hammer”), and this footprint.


Among an assortment of other claims, Baugh has also argued that “hexagonal water”, called “Creation water”, is capable of healing. Sort of to close the circle of lunacy, I guess.


Even archcreationist loonie Ken Ham has been critical of Baugh’s footprints, but Kenneth Copeland appears to be a fan – as is the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, an organization lobbying for getting creationism into education, which is more worrisome than Copeland’s endorsement since the organization seems to be somewhat successful.


Baugh was first and foremostly immortalized by the Daily Show in 2001. His appearance in the legendary Charlton Heston disaster “The Mysterious Origin of Man” didn’t hurt either.


Don Patton, a close associate of Baugh’s who also leads the Metroplex Institute of Origins Science (MIOS) near Dallas, deserves a brief mention as well as one of the most staggering quote-miners the world has yet seen, including an ellipsis (...) that spans 4 whole chapters of Origin of Species (no direct link to it, but you can access it from here)), and as an ardently delusional PRATT-regurgitator.


Diagnosis: Raving clodhead for which the evidence would scream "fraud", but Baugh so caught up in wishful thinking that he is unable not to believe in his own falsehoods and deliberate forgery. Moderately dangerous, since his insanely ignorant, idiotic ideas seem to be frighteningly widely distributed.

#477: John Baumgardner

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John R. Baumgardner is a geophysicist, young earth creationist, and Christian fundamentalist. So yes, he is another one of those people whom creationists rely on so heavily, since he’s got credentials (he has a PhD in geophysics from UCLA), and in fact some reputable, real science publications (not using creationism, of course).


Baumgardner’s life task is to provide scientific proof of the Deluge myth, a goal he has entertained ever since he, according to himself, turned to Christianity in his twenties.


He is famous for creating a computer program (“Terra”) to model the flood, and is a central member of RATE (and IDEA). His main schtick is the “runaway subduction model” of the flood, which relies essentially on magic: The pre-flood ocean floor sunk into the underlying mantle, which then bubbled up massive amounts of magma; virtually the entire existing ocean floor on the entire planet was formed this way in a very short period of time. Which means that 2 billion km3worth of lava flows, at 1200 degrees C, were released below the oceans at once. The amount of heat and energy released this way (about 1028 j) would of course boil off the oceans (so much for the flood) and perhaps even the atmosphere. But, of course, Baumgardner does what creationists do in such cases: a miracle happened. It is actually rather interesting (and occasionally close to endearing) that creationists attempt to give their views this extra science-sounding ornaments; at the very foundation of the theory there is the miracle of Jesus. One would think that it would be easier and more elegant to just posit these miracles directly, without the additional scientific bells and whistles. Unless the point is deception, of course.


Baumgardner also worked with Ron Wyatt on one of Wyatt’s attempts to find the Ark, though to Baumgardner’s credit he did not accept Wyatt’s claims that the rock formations they found were actual remnants of the Ark. It is not obviously to his credit that he accepts global warming: “Yes, global temperatures are rising […], but […] it’s because Earth has been warming slowly but surely ever since Noah's Flood 5,000 years ago,” according to WorldNetDaily, who apparently thought Baumgardner’s delusional ravings were worth writing up in an article.


Canadian creationist David Buckna is apparently a fan, and his JAQing off, without a shred of concern that his points get thoroughly debunked, constitute an almost wonderful version of the Gish gallop. To underline the insanity of flood geology, the garbled unhingedness of the rants of Kelly Hollowell are illustrative as well.


Diagnosis: A sad case of a probably intelligent person who failed to distinguish science from its cargo cult incarnation. Baumgardner is happily continuing a long tradition of medieval theosophistry when applying his background to provide heavyweight answers to deep questions such as calculating the numbers of animals that could be on the Ark or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. 


#478: Robert Beale

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We’ve mentioned Robert Beale before. He’s the father of Theodore Beale, better known as Vox Day, and a thorough crank in his own way. Once a successful business man (and Minnesota campaign manager for Pat Robertson’s Presidential campaign and director of WorldNetDaily), he ended up in a tax dispute, which he solved by reading tax protestor literature and attending seminars run by Irwin Schiff. That went the way it had to go for someone with a background in extremist paranoia and denialism like Beale’s, of course. Beale is currently serving an 11 year prison sentence (Schiff is serving his own 13 year sentence, by the way).


Beale’s behavior with respect to the trial was exactly what you’d expect from these people. He decided to represent himself, went into hiding, and directed his fans and supporters to “take out” the judge (according to Beale “God wants me to destroy the judge. That judge is evil. He wants me to get rid of her”). Beale then led/participated in an extra-judicial “Common Law Court” (titled “a superior court for the People, original jurisdiction under Almighty Yahweh exclusive jurisdiction in and for confederation-government United States of America”) which convened a “grand jury”, issued writs, subpoenas, summonses and arrest warrants for the judge and various law enforcement officials. One of his fans, Frederick Bond, presented a subpoena at the local Sheriff's Office listing the judge’s home address, demanding that she appear for a hearing before the “court.” In the real court, as opposed to his own circle of clowns, Beale claimed that he answered only to “the Lord Jesus Christ” and refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court, which is generally not considered a clever defense strategy (he also tried the if you live outside the District of Columbia and U.S. Islands, you are a non-resident alien, according to the Constitution, which is not really a winning strategy either). Full story here. (Some of his friends had to take some time in jail as well for obstructing justice).


Diagnosis: Not without influence, though his crankery is more overt (but not less intelligent) than his son’s.

#479: Mike Beard (with Joe Read)

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Mike Beard is a member of Minnesota House of Representatives who does not think we have to worry about natural resources since “God is not capricious. He's given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything.” It may be worth pointing out that the God of the old Testament was not obviously not capricious, and the claim appears to commit Beard to famine-denialism. He was, of course, primarily concerned with environmentalism, and admitted – with pride – that he had learned his climate science from “conservative blog sites”.


He has also provided this bizarre call for optimism about the future: “How did Hiroshima and Nagasaki work out? We destroyed that, but here we are, 60 years later and they are tremendously effective and livable cities. Yes, it was pretty horrible. But, can we recover? Of course we can.”


Beard is apparently cut from the same cloth as Montana state senator Joe Read, who wanted to legislate laws of nature by putting climatedenial into the state laws with the justification that “the legislature finds: (a) global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana.” This, apparently, is how science works in the wingnut mind.


Diagnosis: How do these people get elected? It is not just that Beard is a fundamentalist and has the fundamentalist’s aptitude for reason and truth, he is quite obviously borderline cognitively impaired as well.

#480: Tom Bearden

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Thomas E. Bearden is a legend in Tesla circles and the Free Energy pseudoscience community, including its (inevitably, given their revisionary views on the laws of physics) conspiracy theories, and he is – truth to be told – one of the most intensely unhinged crackpots to have walked the face of the earth.


Bearden is a “physicist” with no formal training, though he claims to have received a doctorate for “life experience and for life accomplishment.” That doctorate is from Trinity College and University, a British institution with no building, campus, faculty, or president, and is run from a post office box in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.


Bearden is well known as an inventor, and was the guy behind the “Motionless electromagnetic generator”, a device that claims over-unity operation, which would violate the first law of thermodynamics (the purported mechanism is based on the theory of electromagnetic fields, which Bearden evidently does not understand). Allegedly, the device could eventually sustain its operation in addition to powering a load without application of external electrical power, by extraction of vacuum energy from the immediate environment. No prototype has (unsurprisingly) been produced, even though Bearden predicted it would roll off the production lines in 2002. He has also invented a cure for all major diseases, but this is kept hidden from the public by the strenuous efforts of corporations and governments.


As for the conspiracies, Bearden has written extensively on a number of free energy technologies which he claims have been available for some time but are actively suppressed by government or private interests, including “the Japanese”, J.P. Morgan, and “a nuclear power plant consortium”. This one seems pertinent. Judging from his website, Bearden is also into HIV denalism, magical woo healing devices, and post-Soviet KGB collaborations with the Japanese government to shoot down American planes and manipulate weather and so on.


His most important discovery, apparently, is a hole in the theory of relativity: the viewpointchange represented by a shift of a reference-frame has realphysical implications, Bearden thinks: by simply switching reference frames to one in which there is more energy, we can getenergy (it is, of course, dressed up in fancier-sounding gobbledygook). So free energy is abundantly available: just shift perspectives. The idea is critically evaluated here.


Guess whether Bearden is fond of the Galileo gambit.


Bearden’s fanbase is enormous, including (as a small sample) Richard Hoagland, Xavier Borg (to be covered), Jeane Manning, Sara Summers & Vic Taylor, and one Billy Morgan. Indeed, you won’t walk the strange abysses of pseudoscience long before you encounter Bearden’s name.


Diagnosis: Possibly the ultimate crackpot, the every-element-of-critical-thinking-shortcomings and Dunning-Kruger rolled into one, the kind who – as opposed to creationists – actually test their ideas and exclaims “it works” when it fails miserably. Bearden has plenty influence among a particular group of people, but is probably relatively harmless even so.

#481: Jim Beers

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Mario Beauregard is one of the foremost combatants in the war on science (after the delusional Michael Egnor), in the particular field of neuroscience; Beauregard is a defender of non-materialistic neuroscience because he has a religious dog in the fight, and promptly fails to understand what rejecting substance dualism entails or not. But Beauregard is Canadian, and hence excluded from our Encyclopedia.


Jim Beers, on the other hand, is a retired U.S Fish and Wildlife special agent, and a true dingbat. He’s critical of his former employer, opining that the Fish and Wildlife Service has failed in their mission because they’ve become all about saving wildlife rather than exploiting it. And why, pray, has this happened? “Once they started hiring women and minorities, the service went from managing the land and wildlife to saving all the animals and habitats.” Ah, yes.


He has also claimed that the Endangered Species Act is illegal and unconstitutional. Basically, it seems, he’s enraged that he cannot shoot whatever he wants whenever he wants, and it is the fault of women and minorities (and the reason he cannot possibly be wrong about his assumptions concerning sustainable management is that some of the people disagreeing with him are black. And women). He’s coveredhere.


So his general morale seems to be: if your dog gets killed by a wolf, blame the women and the blacks.

Diagnosis: Abhorrently critically-thinking-challenged crank. Hopefully he belongs to a disappearing breed, but one suspects that his species is tougher than one may have hoped. 

#482: Paul Begley

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Here’s theologian Paul Begley reading from the Book of Revelation and providing evidence that the end times are near. It isn’t his first rant on the matter; Begley has a relatively substantial youtube presence, and each one is a slightly more unhinged attempt at shoehorning non-existence evidence into service for an incoherent hypothesis, than the previous. This one, for instance. (In fact, you’ll find plenty here). At least he takes a not particularly convincing stab at explaining why Harold Camping’s prophecies was wrong, followed by an observation that the comet Elenin is coming, so the end must be very near – we’re talking a few years, maybe three. But no specific date can be given, for that would make Begley look like a fool, just like Harold Camping.


In his daily life Paul Begley is a preacher at the Community Gospel Baptist Church in Knox, Indiana. According to his website “Paul recently expanded the ministry by tapping into the media of the Internet. This tool has allowed him to reach out internationally with the message of

salvation and the Bible Prophecy. Salvations have increased exponentially and it is intriguing to anticipate what the next move of God will be.” (I don’t think he knows what “exponentially” means).


Diagnosis: Superloon. His following is probably limited, but from the comments on his youtube videos it looks as if some people are actually listening to the rubbish that falls out of his mouth.

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