#976: Diana Napolis

March 28, 2014, 9:34 am

A.k.a. Karen “Curio” Jones (Napolis’s Internet pseudonym)

Diana Napolis is an ex-therapist who believes there is a vast Satanic conspiracy attempting to cover up widespread ritual abuse. She is by far most famous for her online – let’s call it – “criticisms” of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, and for apparently being sentenced to probation and mental health counseling for stalking Hollywood celebrities, including Jennifer Love Hewitt and Steven Spielberg. Napolis claimed that Hewitt and Spielberg were part of a satanic cult that was using psychotronic weaponry in which to control her mind – apparently Spielberg was responsible for implanting a microchip (a “soul catcher”) into her brain. In Napolis’s own words: “there were attempts by some to impact the bioenergetic fields around the human body and interior to the body and that the utter destruction of these fields results, ultimately, in complete technological possession. […], but various cult organizations have other agendas which include unique abuses personal to their own religious persuasion such as destroying the Chakra system and the actual astral body of the target.” But Napolis was unable to provide the required documentation for the courts. She subsequently made it onto popeater’s list of 10 worst celebrity stalkers of all times. Her website is here, but I don’t necessarily recommend going there (the Diana Napolis Watch webpage is here).

Now, the story is pretty much just a sad one (part of the early stuff is recounted here), and one could easily argue that Napolis shouldn’t really be included in our Encyclopedia. The reason she is, however, is primarily because of her absolutely batshit groupies on the Internet. Defense of Napolis is a mainstay at many of the fringe pits of the Internet, and includes at least the following:

“Investigative journalist” James F. Marino seems to believe Napolis’s own claims of being a “mind control victim and [herself a] target of organized stalking.” But then Marino is not obviously that good at distinguishing fact from his own muddled paranoid fantasies. When Napolis accounted for the alleged assaults being waged against her, as well as the NSA’s perceived ability to use its directed energy weapons to disrupt the natural energy meridians in the body (“the 7 chakras”), Marino sagely concluded that “those who perpetrate the use of this technology are now attempting to disrupt the spiritual realm within the bodies of their targets,” which is not the correct conclusion to draw.

Another defender is Ellen P. Lacter, who runs the website endritualabuse.org, devoted to fighting the ritual Satanic abuse and mind control that, in Lacter’s mind rather than reality, is apparently running rampant. Then there is Elana Freeland, of Subrosaamerica.com, who apparently thinks the Napolis story is proof of how the Conspiracy stalks and tortures dissenters – her source is, of course, Napolis herself, and the trustworthiness of the source appears to be that Napolis’s dissenters can obviously not be trusted since Napolis doesn’t trust them.

Diagnosis: Primarily a sad case, of course, but it would apparently be wrong to judge her “harmless”. The most fascinating element, however unsurprising, is the assertions of delusion and paranoia her case has evinced from the Internet.

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#977: Andrew Napolitano

March 29, 2014, 7:18 am

≫ Next: #978: Issam Nemeh

≪ Previous: #976: Diana Napolis

Sorry, we have to include him. Andrew Napolitano is a former Judge of the New Jersey Superior Court and current libertarian pundit on Fox Business Network. The reason one might be reluctant to include him, is that he often says intelligent stuff (especially on civil liberties). Unfortunately, he is also a conspiracy theorist and anti-Fed crank, gold standard idiot and 9/11 truther. Then there are things such as his comparison between Syria’s use of chemical weapons and “president Clinton’s murder of the Branch Davidians.” Or his attempt to claim that the Contraception Mandate forces everyone to pay for euthanasia.

Diagnosis: It’s a bit sad. Napolitano once had the power to be a voice of reason at Fox. But he failed. This is failure.

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#978: Issam Nemeh

March 29, 2014, 7:22 am

≫ Next: #979: Jerry Newcombe

≪ Previous: #977: Andrew Napolitano

Issam Nemeh, MD, is a general practitioner (and Catholic) in the Cleveland area who also practices faith healing – in this case in the form of using heated acupuncture-type needles, the passing of hands, and prayer. Indeed, Nemeh has managed to garner for himself quite a reputation as a faith healer the last two years of so. Of course, the scientific evidence against faith healing as an efficacious form of healing is overwhelming. But Nemeh states that “[e]ven skeptics agree that faith and prayer can improve one’s mental state, which can in turn promote physical health,” for which the evidence is, at best, moot, and that “[s]ome also suggest that people who report being cured by faith healers are probably experiencing a placebo effect, a powerful phenomenon in which symptoms improve on the mere belief that a remedy is at hand.” But of course. When everything else fails, appeal to the placebo effect and potential patients’ perception of the effect as some kind of magic. The placebo effect, however, doesn’t quite work the way Nemeh has to assume that it works for it to justify his woo. The explanation for positive testimonials is rather along the lines of this.

Nemeh’s current success is of course partially due to being promoted by what is perhaps the currently most influential promoter of quackery and fraud in the US today, dr. Oz. And Oz promotes Nemeh as if Nemeh was some kind of contemporary Jesus, with testimonials from a paralyzed patient who claims that he’s noticed some movement in his feet since Dr. Nemeh started treating him, a woman who implied that she had her vision restored, and a woman who claims that her multiple sclerosis is gone. Nemeh’s (and Oz’s) investigations into his practices follow the golden scientific rules of cherry-picking, selective thinking and post hoc reasoning.

He is succinctly discussed here.

Diagnosis: He should be ashamed of himself. But he sure isn’t. Extremely dangerous.

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#979: Jerry Newcombe

March 30, 2014, 7:01 am

≫ Next: #980: Joe Newman

≪ Previous: #978: Issam Nemeh

Jerry Newcombe is Senior Producer and co-host of Truth in Action Ministries, formerly Coral Ridge Ministries. That’s the late D. James Kennedy’s group, and Newcombe is in most ways a natural heir of Kennedy’s (he has a more prominent media profile than Executive Vice President Frank Johnson or even Kennedy’s own daughter, the remorselessly fanatic Jennifer Kennedy Cassidy). Newcombe does, for instance, possess the intellectual abilities and zealotry of his unlamented mentor.

Newcombe was the producer of Kennedy’s “documentary” Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, which asserted that Adolf Hitler grounded his genocidal actions on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution even though Hitler demonstrably rejected evolution and there is no non-crazy way of connecting the Theory of evolution to social Darwinism. The blurb stated that “the program features 14 scholars, scientists and authors who outline the grim consequences of Darwin's theory of evolution and show how his theory fueled Hitler's ovens.” According to CRM spokesman John Aman “Darwinism is a philosophy, it’s a worldview, and one of the key things in it is that evolution advances by death, so death is a good thing. Hitler thought he was doing civilization a favor by eliminating lives that were not worth living. We, of course, think that is an egregious moral tragedy and a consequence of the worldview that was initiated by Darwin and popularized by his followers.” The 14 “scholars” featured in the film include Ann Coulter, Ken Ham and Lee Strobel, and a certain shortage of people with actual expertise in any remotely related field, except for Francis Collins, whose contributions were cherry-picked and mangled beyond recognition. Newcombe’s utterly delusional response to being (mildly) taken to task for the screed is discussed here. In the response he discusses for instance the significance of the battle to contemporary issues “Right now we’re in a fight, in a battle over the judiciary. Even in the Supreme Court itself, you have a conflict between those who believe and accept unguided evolution versus those who believe in God,” which is one of the most bizarre statements ever made but part of Newcombe’s perception of liberals making a concentrated effort to “unmoor” America from its Christian roots, as described e.g. in his book The Book that Made America: How the Bible Formed Our Nation (recommended by Ann Coulter).

But does he have any evidence against evolution, apart from the fact that he doesn’t like what he perceives to be the consequences of adopting the theory? Well, no. He does quotethe book of Genesis, lies about a quote by Colin Patterson, and refers to the Piltdown Man, incomprehensibly (but predictably) taking it as evidence against evolution. Also, logging into a computer and entering a password makes it clear to Newcombe "how impossible evolution is". So, no. Not that he cares.

Part of the battle Newcombe is referring to, and over which he conjectures the religious affiliations of the Supreme Court judges (since if they don’t support Newcombe’s positions, they must be anti-Christian social Darwinists), is the matter of prayer in public schools, an issue about which Newcombe brilliantly uses lies and made-up pseudohistory (as e.g. described in the book George Washington’s Sacred Fire, coauthored with Peter Lillback and “promoted by Glenn Beck”) to argue that the absence of mandatory prayers in public schools = Nazi Germany. For that’s just the kind of person Newcombe is. He also blithely asserted thatmandatory school prayers would have prevented the 2012 Ohio school shootings, because that’s the way things hang together in Newcombe’s deranged mind (when describing the case he actually comes close to identifying the motivation: bullying. But no, it’s the absence of Jesus). Since Jesus is the only road to the good, everyone who isn’t good are automatically anti-Jesus, so the school shootings are caused by the absence of Jesus – by definition, not evidence. In fact, in relation to the Aurora shootings, Newcombe expanded upon his position: School shootings are caused by the fact that Americans don’t fear hell or God anymore, so liberal churches, the media, and the ACLU are to blame as well. Or in other words, according to Newcombe the road to good isn’t Jesus, but terror. But how nice! To really underline the humanity of his ideology, Newcombe emphasized in particular that the victims who weren’t Christian enough for Newcombe are currently burning in Hell.

Maybe Newcombe has a more reasonable view on equality issues? Well, as a matter of fact, Truth in Action ministries has linked the Day of Silence to … Adolf Hitler. Are we perceiving a pattern here? Indeed, they also compared the Day of Silence to the iceberg that sunk Titanic, a metaphor it is somewhat hard to make actual sense of (it is still the major premise of his argument for criminalizing homosexuality and warnings against “sexual paganization”). When the issue of gay members in the Boy Scouts were under discussion in 2013, Newcombe showed barely more originality and claimed that if the Boy Scouts were “succumb to the tentacles of political correctness” and end the national ban on gay membership then they will join society’s “mad dash toward Gomorrah”.

In Newcombe’s mind homosexuality and child molestation are also closely connected, since – as he says – “three out of four gays were molested as children” (making sure that he is not outlooned by Jeff Myers and Ryan Dobson’s equally made-up 60% figure). Evidence? Why, Newcombe has conviction, which apparently allows him pull whatever numbers he can out of thin air (no, the numbers do not bear the faintest semblance to reality). Truth in Action Ministries considersGlee, however, to be an evil alongside 9/11 and … yes, you guessed it, Hitler. (The 2014 Grammys were hardly better). Interestingly, Newcombe has himself defended genocide, when the victims are sinners in the eyes of God.

In the documentary Truth that Transforms, Newcombe targets the IRS rules that tie tax exemption status for religious organizations to absence of political involvement. No, he doesn’t provide the reasons for the claim. Instead, he argues that the rules are exactly like – care to guess? – Nazi Germany.

He has also lamented the existence of media depictions of Muslims that don’t portray them as terrorists and part of a stealth jihad agenda. Since a ccuracy is a sin when it fails to serve his agenda.

Diagnosis: As morally and intellectually bankrupt as a human being can become. He nevertheless carries some influence, and must be considered dangerous.

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#980: Joe Newman

March 31, 2014, 8:47 am

≫ Next: #981: Robert C. Newman

≪ Previous: #979: Jerry Newcombe

Joseph Newman is an inventor, originally from Mississippi, who has for many years been trying to sell a high-voltage motor (powered by a large number of batteries connected in series) as a free energy device; that is, as a device that produces more energy than it uses. He has called the device an “electromagnetomic motor”, and written extensively about it (along with presenting an alternative physics – or perhaps a misunderstanding of basic physics – that “explains” how it works) in a self-published book titled The Energy Machine of Joseph Newman. Among his more notable pieces of alleged evidence is that, according to himself, he and his device were predicted by Nostradamus.

Although Newman’s device were featured (back in the 80s) in e.g. Discover magazine, his results have never quite made it through peer review. Of course, this is partially because any test of his device apart from his own rigged tests, such as one by the National Bureau of Standards, have failed to replicate his results (duh!). At least he (and fellow free-energy enthusiast Dennis Lee) received extensive coverage in Bob Park’s book Voodoo Science.

Diagnosis: Harmless crackpot.

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#981: Robert C. Newman

March 31, 2014, 8:51 am

≫ Next: #982: Don Nicoloff

≪ Previous: #980: Joe Newman

Robert C. Newman has a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Cornell and is currently Professor of New Testament and Director of the Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute at the Biblical Theological Seminary of Hatfield. He is a longtime contributor to the Intelligent Design literature (e.g. to the Dembski-edited anthology Mere Creation: Science, Faith & Intelligent Design), and is a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s intellectually bankrupt petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.

According to Newman, there are organisms that possess incredible complexity, but which also seem to be clearly malevolent. These, Newman thinks, are the work of “malevolent spirit beings,” or perhaps the work of “non-spiritual intelligences (extra-terrestrials).” Insofar as they are the work of malevolent spirit beings, this is evidence for the controversial hypothesis that “the fall of Satan is much earlier than that of Adam, and creation is already not so good by the time Adam comes along.” Accordingly, “[t]hese are things that theologians, scientists and philosophers need to think about,” but I think he means theologians – philosophers and scientists usually have better things to do.

Unfortunately the program does not yield easily testable predictions, so it may not in the end count as a genuine research program – though it is probably the best we’ll get from the Intelligent Design crowd. Newman’s findings are described in his paper ”“Rumors of Angels: Using ID to Detect Malevolent Spiritual Agents.”

He is probably not the same guy as Robert Newman of the California Christian Coalition, who has said – in response to efforts to combat bullying based on sexual orientation – that bullying is “part of the maturational process,” and that he does not “think that bullying is a real issue in schools.”

Diagnosis: No, Newman. That’s not how things work. But at least he is unlikely to win many new converts for his pseudoscience.

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#982: Don Nicoloff

April 1, 2014, 10:26 am

≫ Next: #983: Sheldan Nidle

≪ Previous: #981: Robert C. Newman

Don Nicoloff is a radio talkshow host (“Evident Footprints”) who has developed “his metaphysical gifts through the discipline of mastering previous physical and mental limitations.” Although Evident Footprints covers pretty much any crazy conspiracy theory and any form of woo imaginable, Nicoloff is first and foremostly a birther. In fact, Nicoloff was one of the first to take up the Obama birth certificate issue, and has subsequently taken the birther conspiracies to interesting levels. Not only is Barack Obama “really” Barry Soetoro, but also Barry Rockefeller and hence member of the Rockefeller family – one of the families that apparently reallyrun things in the US. And senator John McCain is a fraud as well (he is really one John McCann, II). So was George Bush sr. (really George H. Scherff, Jr.) and Dwight Eisenhower.

So who was George Scherff, jr.? Well, Nicoloff has procured a “family photo” from 1938 with (according to Nicoloff) Martin Bormann and Joseph Mengele. So the Bush family (a.k.a. Scherff) was really high-ranking Nazis. Scherff sr. was, for good measure, the assistant of Nicola Tesla as well, a position he used to steal Tesla’s revolutionary technologies and give them to the Nazis. The John McCain story, with its conspiracies and Nazi connections, is told here, and the thorny and long-winded story of Obama is told in several parts here.

In order to justify his claims, Nicoloff produces a rather tortured reinvention of pretty much all of 20^th century history. “What we are taught about history in American schools is not history, but a fairy tale,” says Nicoloff. “Better yet, it is propaganda designed to hoodwink an unsuspecting society about its true heritage and the treasonous acts and sabotage that were conceived in order to bring about a New World Order.” He even redefines “research” to support his conclusions (and for good measure, uses the dangers of water fluoridation as an example). The main justification for hisway of telling the story is that a secret, powerful organization out to control the world would use deception. Therefore Nicoloff is right.

Nicoloff has made several radio interviews with Ken Adachi, where they discuss birther stuff, Planet X, Elenin, HAARP, reptilian overlords and “how gifted people are dispatching the main demons from the planets this very moment” (“[t]he lower astral is having a huge make over right now”).

Diagnosis: It is rather interesting that Nicoloff’s rants managed to get more or less mainstreamed in certain segments of the population, but there you have it.

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#983: Sheldan Nidle

April 2, 2014, 8:53 am

≫ Next: #984: Richard Niemtzow

≪ Previous: #982: Don Nicoloff

Sheldan Nidle is the founder of the Planetary Activation Organization, which is for all intents and purposes a UFO religion. Nidle himself claims to be capable of telepathic communication and thus to be in contact with extraterrestrials. Apparently the extraterrestrials relate important information to Nidle, such as the informtation that initially made him (somewhat) famous, namely that the world would end on December 17, 1996, with the arrival of 16 million spaceships and a host of angels along with “the Photon Belt.” He assured us that we would have “16 years of light 24 hours a day” after the Photon Belt “hits [our] pineal glands,” something that would “activate all 12 strands of [our] DNA.” When this did not occur, Nidle claimed the angels had transferred humanity into a holographic projection in order to give it a second chance – though he also removed all reference to it from his website. At least he became the proud recipient of a Pigasus award for his prediction.

Nidle founded the Planetary Activation Organization (PAO) in 1997 to prepare the world for the arrival of 10,000 alien ambassadors later that year. The PAO also predicted that benevolent extraterrestrials would help transform the earth into a terrestrial paradise by the end of the year 2012, though we are still … well, no, we aren’t really waiting.

One of the most delectable details of Nidle’s crazy is his ventures into economy woo. According to Nidle, the Annunaki are currently focusing on the establishing of a new financial and monetary system for the entire planet, including new global governance, to herald their return. “The first item on this agenda is to liberate you from any type of slavery, and there are many forms that presently burden you. The most overt form of slavery is your legal and financial systems, so these will be the first ones to be remedied. Restoring your innate sovereignty is predominant in our actions. Beginning with the material aspects, there will be full debt forgiveness, universal prosperity, an end to illegal taxation, and a formal government declaration of a new form of governance. Only then are you to be restored completely to your natural, Creator-given rights.” Apparently the powers that be are in a conspiracy to keep all of us in economic hardship (and reduce the population) so that we don’t realize that there are many realities that can help you get what you want because our conceptual scheme only allows us to see one of those many realities until you have evolved a higher consciousness. The Annunaki, however, are about to introduce new currencies that have vastly greater buying power than our current currencies (no, Nidle seems oblivious to the shortcomings of such schemes), though the short excerpt is of course unable to capture the glorious, megalomaniac, fanatically religious delusions that are Nidle’s ways of viewing the world. The efforts will also make the Earth’s biosphere magical, and the magic will generate Love.

Nidle has recently weighed in on the missing Malaysian flight 370 and confirmed that it “is in a higher dimension”.

Diagnosis: Completely beyond the reaches of coherence, meaning, and reason, Nidle apparently continues to attract followers of his version of senseless gibberish. More or less like Time Cube, though with a bit more charisma - or whatever you choose to call it.

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#984: Richard Niemtzow

April 3, 2014, 8:47 am

≫ Next: #985: James I. Nienhuis

≪ Previous: #983: Sheldan Nidle

Richard Niemtzow is a radiation oncologist and Air Force physician (and former affiliate of The Mutual UFO Network and alien contactee) and an ardent promoter of woo in the military, most famously “auricular acupuncture,” or, as it’s sometimes called, “battlefield acupuncture,” (yep) which is, insidiously enough, offered for post-traumatic stress disorder. But Niemtzow (and his colleague Stephen Burns) goes further than acupuncture – he also promotes healing touch and reiki, “energy medicine” based on medieval vitalism. “Healing touch (also called therapeutic touch or Reiki) is an energy-based, non-invasive treatment that restores and balances the human energy field to help decrease pain and promote healing,” says Niemtzow and his allies, and have conducted unblinded pseudostudies to justify it (along with something called “chakra spread”, which includes instructions to “focus on the love that God has for this person while slowly spreading both hands outward as far as possible three times”; “pull access energy off the legs and feet by placing your hand over each leg and moving slowly downward”; and “visualize energy being pulled up from the earth through your spine and spreading throughout your body.”) If the above-mentioned nonsense “study” is not enough to convince you, Niemtzow has another one, which is really just a collection of anecdotes – in short, when faced with a need for more studies, Niemtzow and his ilk do less rigorous ones, which is the only way he can get the studies to show what he wants them to show. He has nevertheless apparently been somewhat successful at evangelizing for his diverse brand of quasi-religious bullshit.

You can see navy captain Elwood Hopkins defend woo in the military here, giving you an object lesson in how not to do critical thinking and assessment.

There’s a good article on the nefariousness of Niemtzow’s practices here.

Diagnosis: Madman and crackpot, and apparently one of the most influential such at present. Unintentionally evil, and wielding enough influence to be able to cause some actual harm to real people.

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#985: James I. Nienhuis

April 3, 2014, 9:19 am

≫ Next: #986: David Noebel

≪ Previous: #984: Richard Niemtzow

James I. Nienhuis is a young-earth creationist blogger (Dancing from Genesis), who not only takes the Bible entirely literally, but also assumes a literal interpretation of Plato’s description of Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias (reinterpreted, of course, to avoid any potential conflict with the Bible). Thus are the results of failing to understand how truth and evidence works.

Nienhuis does admit the existence of the last Ice Age, but claims that it ended circa 1500 BCE. Somehow that observation also disproves global warming (most of the claims are covered in his book Ice Age Civilizations, which is, needless to say, not particularly fact based). He has also tried to show that every god outside of the Judeo-Christian mythology is a descendant of Noah, and his discussions of politics borrow the talking points straight from the WND. (Admittedly, this entry is more or less a paraphrase of this).

Diagnosis: While not a particularly unusual type of denialist – and not, in the grand scheme of things particularly significant – Nienhuis is a rather mindnumbing example of how someone can be fractally wrong on absolutely every single issue as a result of combining fundamentalist religion with ignorance.

For a similar phenomenon, you can try to search up Greg Nikolettos’s youtube videos, though Nikolettos doesn’t really deserve a separate entry.

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#986: David Noebel

April 5, 2014, 7:10 am

≫ Next: #987: John Nolte

≪ Previous: #985: James I. Nienhuis

David A. Noebel is the founder of Summit Ministries, and former leader of the Christian Crusade. He made his real breakthrough in the 1960s and 1970s when trying to start a moral panic over rock and folk music. Though he has subsequently assumed a lower profile than, say, Jerry Falwell, Noebel is still one of the most influential and ragingly insane figures on the religious right (the people at Rapture Ready, for instance, are devoted fans).

Noebel’s anti-pop efforts are immortalized in his books Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles (1965), which contains exactly the arguments you’d suspect it to contain from the title, Rhythm, Riots, and Revolution(1966), and the audiobook The Marxist Minstrels (1974), which, once again, asserted the Beatles as well as several popular folk musicians were deliberately using musical styles intended to induce hypnotism in the listener, dumb them down, and then implant subversive communist thoughts in their minds (obviously, for someone like Noebel, communism and Satan are two sides of the same coin). Noebel also claimed that at least one major company making children’s educational records was controlled by Communist organizations and that their records contained hypnotic induction techniques while having children sing along with lyrics like “I’m a little puppet.”

His list of books is extensive, and in addition to the ones mentioned includes his 1977 book The Homosexual Revolution(dedicated to Anita Bryant), which was the publications that led people like Falwell to take up the issue (indeed, some have blamed Noebel for starting the culture wars), as well as Mind Siege: The Battle forTruth in the New Millenium with Tim LaHaye, which concerned the subversive threat against civilization posed by secular humanism. Alleged secular humanist plots included the Trilateral Commission and the National Council of Churches, and the whole book is crammed with conspiracy stuff that would make even Jeff Rense hesitate (review here). The targets included the ACLU (Noebel is a staunch opponent of civil rights and the Constitution), the National Organization of Women, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Association of Biology Teachers, the major television networks and foundationsm, the Democratic Party, the United Nations, UNESCO, Harvard, Yale, and “two thousand other colleges and universities!” Because those institutions try to educate people with facts, truth and evidence rather than Noebel’s own cherished notion of Jesus.

Also worth mentioning are the 1986 anti-gay book AIDS: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, co-authored with absolute madman Wayne C. Lutton and anti-gay Family Research Institute head Paul Cameron, Clergy in the Classroom: The Religion of Secular Humanism from 1995 (with J. F. Baldwin and Kevin J. Bywater), the video Countering Culture: Arming Yourself to Confront Non-Biblical Worldviews (with Chuck Edwards), and Understanding the Times: The Religious Worldviews of Our Day and the Search for Truth (1991), a textbook “interpreting” current intellectual movements, including biblical Christianity, secular humanism, Marxism-Leninism, the New Age Movement, Islam, and postmodernism. It is apparently still widely used among Christian schools, churches and colleges.

His anti-gay efforts are not limited to books. For the WND (surprise) he has written columns blaming the Obama administration and supporters of gay rights for the child abuse scandal at Penn State University, which according to Noebel signified “the demise of moral relativism at the hands of liberalism’s most cherished activity – homosexuality,” despite the, well, the facts. Writes Noebel: “Obama and his radical homosexual mafia plan to sodomize the world and make such perversion seem as wholesome as apple pie and vanilla ice cream,” displaying all the love of Jesus and showing how the “Democrat party espouses a shameless morality in the direct line of Rehoboam, king of Judah, who ‘did evil in the eyes of the LORD.’” Through the nefarious efforts of the “homosexual mafia,” says Noebel, “prayer, the Bible, the 10 Commandments and God may well be illegal, but sodomy is not. Has America fallen for the devil’s spin or no?” (Oh, the cherished fundie myths and distortions, rattled of quicker than you can say “persecution complex”).

His attempts to combat against communism aren’t over either, as shown by his 2010 book “You Can Still Trust the Communists ... to Be Communists (Socialists and Progressives too)” (with Fred Schwarz), where he argues that the US is now a communist country since it espouses virtually all the tenets of the Communist Manifesto (being a communist country apparently means being noticeably different from the Jesus-like situation in Manchester anno 1848?) He also laments the absence of tireless fighters such as Joe McCarthy, whom in Noebel’s eyes “was a hero”.

Diagnosis: An extremist’s extremist, whose rabid bigotry, denialism, paranoia and lack of understanding of reality make him always on the verge of lapsing into the grammatically incoherent. He is nevertheless extremely powerful, and must be considered one of the most dangerous people alive today.

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#987: John Nolte

April 6, 2014, 9:05 am

≫ Next: #988: Richard Noone

≪ Previous: #986: David Noebel

John Nolte is a Breitbart news editor and a crazy wingnut conspiracy theorist. Oh, there is little beyond the ordinary about Nolte – we really don’t need to go on at length about him, since you can pretty much figure him out on your own – but that just shows that the fanatically crazy has been mainstreamed, not that Nolte is anything but a gibbering lunatic. A typical example: When Obama, on a visit to Belfast, said “If towns remain divided – if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs – if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation,” that should be interpreted as a standard, platitudinous, vague and innocuous statement everyone with which we can all agree, right? Well, run it through the wingnut mind of John Nolte, and you get a quite different interpretation; Nolte saw a “chilling” attack on religious education, and according to Nolte, Obama’s speech showed that “leftists like Obama loathe parochial schools because they put children outside of the reach of government,” and drop them into “an environment void of Bibles and trans-fat but loaded with condoms and victimhood.” And the clincher? “Obama singles out Catholic and Protestant schools, and not Islamic schools.” Yes, it is the kind of persecution complex and paranoia that should really merit professional help, but I suspect that Nolte’s standard fan base will nod in agreement instead.

Indeed, a really illuminating illustration of the mindset of people like John Nolte can be gained from his review of the documentary The Tillman Story(before it was finished). First, he complained that the “leftist media” was going to laud the documentary uncritically: “Will they be skeptical? Will they fact check? Will they even bother to pretend there might be another side to the story? These are rhetorical questions.” Of course the leftist media wouldn’t be skeptical in their praise, Nolte concluded. Therefore – without any reference to its contents – since the leftist media is going to love it, it must be a leftist propaganda movie that omits and distorts the facts. A better example of intellectual implosion through projection you’ll be hard pressed to find.

Nor is Nolte very favorably inclined toward gay marriage. More importantly, he has called out the supporters of marriage equality for their dirty rhetorical tactics. For instance, some have called the Family Research Council “anti-gay”, something Nolte vehemently denies, claiming instead that “it’s anti-Christian” (in addition to being ugly rhetoric) to call them anti-gay. Of course, the fact FRC leaders routinely call gay people pedophiles, support laws that criminalize homosexuality or even designate it as a capital punishment in other countries, objected to the Supreme Court’s overturning of such laws in the US, and explicitly call for recriminalization of homosexuality, is … just a difference in opinion. Gay people are the haters, together with the “anti-Christian leftists in Hollywood, the mainstream media, and GLAAD.”

Of course, Nolte is a climate change denialist, but that comes with the job description. His reasoning in general show so little aptitude for evidence, reason or truth that one wouldn’t really be surprised if he were a flat-earther as well. He has, for instance, called “global warming believers” today’s “climate deniers” since they apparently don’t think cold temperatures in winter refute global warming and because they don’t lend proper weight to the recovery of Arctic sea ice.

Diagnosis: Just a sample, but it gives you a reasonable indication of what kind of guy we’re dealing with here.

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#988: Richard Noone

April 7, 2014, 9:48 am

≫ Next: #989: Gary North

≪ Previous: #987: John Nolte

Richard W. Noone is a batshit crazy pseudoscientist, and one of the most famous proponents of Charles Hapgood’s crust displacement theory, the idea that formed the basis for the real-life documentary movie 2012. The general idea is, justified through truly painful torture and dismembering of modern physics, mathematics and geology (primarily by the methods of ignorance and blatant denial), that the Earth’s crust sometimes shift suddenly in relation to the rotational axis, causing massive changes to the crust. And as with all true crankery, the hypothesis predicts an immanent cataclysmic event. In his book 5/5/2000, ICE: The Ultimate Disaster Noone predicted that this cataclysmic shift would happen in, well, May 2000 (also here). It didn’t, so later fans had to move the date to 2012, and well …. At least Noone got to be the inspiration for Steven Myers’ absolutely brilliantly unhinged Pharaoh’s Pump Foundation. In fact, Noone’s book became something of a cult classic, though it is hard to find updated or detailed information on its author.

Another defender of Hapgood’s idea, William Hutton (a pseudonym) of the website Hutton Commentaries, wrote Coming Earth Changes: Causes and Consequences of the Approaching Pole Shift in 1996, where he predicted the cataclysm would happen before the end of 2001. Since Hutton is a true crank, he wasn’t stopped by his failures, and co-authored Earth’s Catastrophic Past and Future: A Scientific Analysis of Information Channeled by Edgar Cayce in 2004 (with Jonathan Eagle), where he just claimed it would happen “soon”.

Diagnosis: Absurd crankery. It should be just a source of amusement, but a few too many people take this bullshit seriously.

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#989: Gary North

April 8, 2014, 7:31 am

≫ Next: #990: Christiane Northrup

≪ Previous: #988: Richard Noone

A.k.a. Scary Gary

Gary Kilgore North is a Dominionist Calvinist writer, one of the leaders of the Christian Reconstructionist movement (son-in-law of R.J. Rushdoony, for instance), and one of the most explicit Talibanists in the US at present. What distinguishes North from most other central reconstructionist thinkers, such as David Barton, Kirk Cameron or Gary DeMar, is that North actually agrees with minimally sane people that the Constitution does not justify theocracy and is not a continuation of the Bible. North’s response, though, is that the Constitution should be rejected in favor of a new theocratic form of government based on the Old Testament (the Constitution, according to North, was a scam). After all, this is the only proper response to the current decline of America, as described in his book Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism. To quote from the book: “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, just as they were in ancient Israel.” Yep, those good old days when everything was better.

His political vision is laid out in the “Sinai Strategy”. As most Taliban dominionists, North ignores the New Testament and its teachings of mercy and forgiveness, and instead focuses on various forms of corporal punishment, such as stoning: “Why stoning?” asks North (rhetorically). “There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost … executions are community projects – not with spectators who watch a professional executioner do ‘his duty,’ but rather with actual participants … That modern Christians never consider the possibility of the reintroduction of stoning for capital crimes indicates how thoroughly humanistic concepts of punishment have influenced the thinking of Christians.” Yep, that’s Gary North for you (he might actually be correct about the last point, but that’s sort of a different matter).

What sort of crimes would merit such punishments? Well, blasphemy for sure: “The question eventually must be raised: Is it a criminal offense to take the name of the Lord in vain? When people curse their parents, it unquestionably is a capital crime (Ex. 21:17). The son or daughter is under the lawful jurisdiction of the family. The integrity of the family must be maintained by the threat of death. Clearly, cursing God (blasphemy) is a comparable crime, and is therefore a capital crime.” See how unfortunate we are, we who have let the ideals of humanism send us straight into barbarism?

So, in conclusion, when it comes to dealing with religious liberty (from his article “The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right”): “we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.” North’s views on education are also presented in homeschooling activist Colin Gunn’s documentary “IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America.”

North is also famous – and got his nickname – from his promotion of Y2K hysteria during the late 1990s (the story, including North’s response to the rather obvious failure of his doomsday predictions, is here; also here).

North is also a prominent member within the paleo-libertarian movement, having written for The Freeman (and currently for Lew Rockwell’s site); he was also a research assistant for Ron Paul in the 70s. Much of his writings are, accordingly, attempts to synthesize theocracy with Austrian school economics (or “the reiki of economy”), as he tried in Inheritance and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Deuteronomy or Treasure and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Luke. He has also co-written the book Fighting Chance (promoting Duck and Cover silliness) with Arthur B. Robinson, who is otherwise known for initiating the Oregon Petition.

There is a webpage devoted to Gary North’s bullshit here. One of his recent books, Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t (with Gary DeMar) is reviewed here.

Diagnosis: One of the vilest, craziest people alive, Gary North still manages to retain quite a bit of influence, despite wearing his Taliban-envy on his sleeves.

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#990: Christiane Northrup

April 9, 2014, 8:39 am

≫ Next: #991: John de Nugent

≪ Previous: #989: Gary North

Christiane Northrup is an MD (OB/Gyn) who has risen to rather frightening levels of fame through her promotion of woo and denialism in the cause of women’s health. She is, as expected, a regular guest on Oprah (where she has advocated the use of Qi Gong to direct qi to the vagina, apparently to cure all manner of female ills and promote fantastic orgasms in the process), and writes columns for the Huffington Post, two items that amply serves to illustrate what kind of person this is. She has also published a long row of best-selling books.

What she offers to her patients include virtually the whole gamut of holistic medicine. Northrup promotes the medical use of chakras, astrology, angels, mysticism, feng shui, Tarot cards, and of course female intuition. No, seriously – Northrup is the kind of doctor who gives you a diagnosis after a round of Tarot solitaire has shown that the pain in your chest is really an indication of unfulfilled spiritual needs, misaligned stars and a strained relationship to your guardian angels.

Among her most recent books, The wisdom of menopause has managed to become frighteningly popular in a certain segment of the population. In the book you can read all about your seven emotional centers, chakras, and have it backed up by “evidence” such as: “My divorce culminated during what is astrologically known as my Chiron return … simultaneously I had been under the influence of an astrological configuration know as a yod … the purpose of this was to move me out of my old life …” Wisdom galore, in other words. And it is to a large extent downwards from there (though she does, in fairness, provide some serious advice as well): you will find the whole range from aspartame conspiracies to nonsense claims to the effect that scientific studies have confirmed that our “emotional style” influences our risk of breast cancer and our ability to recover from it. “All illness is a hologram,” says Northrup (which, due to the blatant lack of meaning, doesn’t even qualify as a hypothesis), and to understand it you have to listen to the message your body is sending you – if you were honest about your feelings, you might not have developed cancer.

As for her astrology, she has spelled out her beliefs in her newsletter “Health Wisdom for Women”. Astrology, according to Northrup, “is truly a science,” though she gives no indication that she is able to distinguish science from wishful thinking. “If you’re skeptical, think about how the moon influences your menstrual cycle,” which it most certainly doesn’t. The fact that the claim is false doesn’t stop her, though: “the moon influences your menstrual cycle and the flow of emotions and fluids in both your body and the oceans. This has been very well documented,” blithely unaware that the moon’s gravitational force on her is less than that of any tiny object in her immediate environment (the “ well documented” inflection is not further elaborated upon). According to Northrup, “people born at exactly the same time and place lead remarkably similar lives and even die at the same time from similar causes, despite having completely dissimilar DNA. They are known as astral or spiritual twins.” Of course, there is no statistics that even remotely suggest anything but the complete opposite of her claim. Truth and accountability have never been known to stop a delusional crackpot from venting her incoherent theories, however.

Northrup is of course also a “vaccine skeptic”. As she puts it: “Getting your child or yourself immunized is a culturally agreed-upon ritual, designed to shore up your first chakra,” but you should apparently not be overly concerned if you choose not to participate in this social construction. Then she, an MD, goes on to quote various antivaxxers with no medical background, concluding that since vaccines don’t always provide 100% perfect protection, they aren’t needed. The real reason people get sick is not because they are unvaccinated … but because of their chakras.

Perhaps her most insidious strategy in her fight against reality-based health measures might be her promotion of thermography for breast cancer, and at that point you don’t get away with ignorance anymore. Ignorance at this level is evil. Period. Her claims are assessed here. Close to that one in terms of vileness is her attempt to dispute the connection between HPV and cervical cancer, which is as uncontroversial as scientific facts come.

A discussion of a few of her claims can be found here.

Diagnosis: A serious danger to public health. Through the misleading veil of formal training, Northrup has a knack for getting away with all the breathtaking ignorance, religious fundamentalism, wishful thinking, distortions, and confabulatory woo she wants – and people do, indeed, listen. An utterly corrupt, horrible human being.

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#991: John de Nugent

April 10, 2014, 9:19 am

≫ Next: #992: Marc Nuttle

≪ Previous: #990: Christiane Northrup

John de Nugent is a white supremacist and hardcore anti-semite engaged in a whole range of whacko theories about history, science and pretty much any field of research imaginable – often to prop up his bigotry, but mostly because he is absolutely lunatic. As for the former, a good example is his response to the discovery that we all carry some Neanderthal DNA; according to de Nugent Semitic peoples have the most Neanderthal DNA, and this is empirically verifiable by looking at their slanted foreheads (archived here). Also, if Nugent deems you to look like a Neanderthal, it apparently means that you are a Jew, and therefore evil. Those are the ways of John de Nugent.

Thus, we get the whole gamut from secret societies, government conspiracies and the New World Order, to UFO rantings. The Jews are behind it all, and the rest of us are unwitting accomplices to their nefarious schemes: “why do you lefties favor muzzie immigration, which in its medieval and misogynistic attitudes contradicts everything you stand for? Hmmmmm? I know why – the Jews who are manipulating you want to use these aggressive, dark-gene hordes to thereby destroy the white indigenous peoples. and their genes.”

At least his own website is a dead giveaway. The color schemes and general design are typical of Internet kooks in general, and the contents consist of endless stream-of-consciousness rants propped up with youtube clicks and apparently unrelated illustration. Next to his section “white safety zones,” we get “reincarnation evidence,” and then “racist Israel seeks to genocide whites in a global holocaust” and “the Norman conquest gives England to Jews.” Much of his writings are devoted to the Solutrean hypothesis, for which he has plenty of evidence – two documentaries on Discovery Channel have featured the idea …

Diagnosis: An easy one, really. John de Nugent is a white supremacist and conspiracy nut, and peppers it all with woo and pseudo-history. Not unusual for his kind, but deep fringe lunacy nonetheless.

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#992: Marc Nuttle

April 10, 2014, 9:26 am

≫ Next: #993: Raymond Obomsawin

≪ Previous: #991: John de Nugent

Marc Nuttle is a Republican adviser and economist and Chairman of The Oak Initiative, a far-right organization dedicated to promoting the Seven Mountains ideology, and whose president is none other than Rick Joyner. The group claims in its mission statement that “The Oak Institute is being developed to raise up effective leaders for all of the dominant areas of influence in the culture, including: government, business, education, arts and entertainment, family services, media, and the church,” otherwise known as the Seven Mountains of society that Dominionists think should be controlled by fundamentalist Christians.

Nuttle is in fact a pretty central figure in the religious right wing of the Republican party and been legal counsel and political counsel for numerous United States House of Representative campaigns (from Ronald Reagan to Pat Robertson to James Inhofe), and has popped up in numerous positions of power around the country (Here, for instance, is Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin appointing him to serve on the board of the Oklahoma Health Care Authority to ensure that everything is being done to prevent abortions from taking place in the state). In the 2012 elections he advised evangelicals, who had concerns about Romney’s suitability given his religion (not policy issues, of course), that they should nevertheless vote Romney since Mormons believe the US Constitution is Biblical Truth. That’s what goes for compelling reasoning about politics in those circles.

Diagnosis: Not the most vociferous madman out there, but a solidly crazy piece of dingbattery nonetheless.

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#993: Raymond Obomsawin

April 11, 2014, 8:55 am

≫ Next: #994: Julie Obradovic

≪ Previous: #992: Marc Nuttle

Though Joseph Chikelue Obi bills himself as the “world’s top expert in nutritional immunomodulation”, and we have some duty to mention him, he is Dublin-based and as such strictly speaking disqualified for an actual entry.

Raymond Obomsawin is largely cut from the same kind of cloth. Obomsawin is a particularly dubiously honest anti-vaccine activist, most famous for his set of graphs for the Vaccine Liberation website purportedly showing that vaccines haven’t helped cure anything since the death rates of several vaccine-preventable diseases, including whooping cough, diptheria, measles, and polio were falling before the vaccines for each disease were introduced (curiously avoiding smallpox, presumably because even he was unable to mangle the data sufficiently for that one). The graphs are so staggeringly dishonestly put together that it is difficult to view it as an honest mistake. The graphs made a significant impact in the denialist community, of course, which – since these people are denialists and not interested in evidence – has continued to use the graphs despite the fact that their flaws and misleadingness were quickly and easily pointed out. Obomsawin himself responded to the glaring faults of his graphs that he had had problems doing the graph correctly in Excel and that he would correct the graphs. He hasn’t.So much for intellectual honesty.

Obomsawin likes to present himself as a scientist – he is a PhD who “has produced academically and/or professionally over eighty-five (85) articles, reports, policy documents, presentations, and publications.” But a search reveals only a single published commentary, and he was, as of 2010, “engaged with government funding as Senior Researcher relative to establishing a Public Sector Policy on Traditional Medicine in Canada,” which means that he is pushing for support of woo, and not doing science or affiliated with any real research institution at all (and yes, though he seems to be working in Canada, Obomsawin is American).

Apart from his anti-vaccine efforts, Obomsawin seems to have been toying with HIV-denialism and support for Royal Rife. He is also apparently a defender of “brave maverick” Andrew Wakefield, which is another good indicator for how well Obomsawin understands intellectual honesty (the support is mutual, by the way).

Diagnosis: Intellectual dishonesty turned into a rather easily deconstructible art form. A bad person, but a frighteningly influential one.

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#994: Julie Obradovic

April 12, 2014, 8:44 am

≫ Next: #995: Cathy O'Brien

≪ Previous: #993: Raymond Obomsawin

Julie Obradovic is Contributing Editor to the antivaxx pit Age of Autism. Of course, she doesn’t like to be called“anti-vaccine” – according to Obradovic, she is a “vaccine safety” advocate, and she even denies that there is such a thing as an anti-vaccine movement. Apparently, it is all a ploy by the pharma shills, and critics of her “vaccine safety” concerns have “sold out to the pharmaceutical industry.” Of course, Obradovic has made it pretty clear that no amount of evidence will make her change her beliefs about vaccines, and that nothing will make her believe that vaccines are safe. Obradovic is, in other words, hardcore anti-vaccine (brilliantly shown here) who belives that the government and science are in a conspiracy against her (and I challenge you to find more breathtaking examples of strawman reasoning than Obradovic’s claims in that link).

She probably doesn’t like to be called “anti-science” either (though that’s precisely what she is), but when she made some efforts to evaluate the science of the issue for Age of Autism, the rather evident problem would be that her only technique for judging the merits of a study is whether or not it agrees with her already firmly set opinions – she wouldn’t be able to distinguish good science from junk science if her life depended on it. To Obradovic, of course, it is the scientists who don’t get it. Scientists overlook “[t]he dramatic rise in incidence [of autism]; the parallel increase in vaccinations given at the same time […]; the timing of the onset of symptoms; the anecdotal evidence of parents; […],” and complains that “[s]cience is rooted in observation, and yet, every observation here listed is casually tossed aside as a cosmic lining up of the stars. There is nothing scientific about calling all of this coincidence and explaining it away with unproven excuses.” In other words, the correlation (which is itself deeply disputable) entails causation, in Obradovic’s assessment, and the fact that science has refuted the existence of a causal link can’t shake her convictions.

Instead of science, Obradovic supports some (dangerous) woo to treat autism in children, such as Kerri Rivera’s bleach enemas (seriously).

Diagnosis: Denialism is fueled by the Dunning-Kruger lowest quartile, and Obradovic is a splendid example. She is pretty much the archetype of what you get when you pair ignorance with conviction.

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#995: Cathy O'Brien

April 13, 2014, 7:50 am

≫ Next: #996: Joan Ocean

≪ Previous: #994: Julie Obradovic

Cathleen Ann O’Brien is an alleged victim of Project MKULTRA, a CIA program to research drugs for intelligence purposes) and survivor of the mythical CIA mind control programs Project Monarch. She has written two books about that, Trance Formation of America(1995) and Access Denied: For Reasons of National Security (2004) (with Mark Phillips), which have actually received a degree of popularity.

The memories she thinks she possesses were retrieved through the use of hypnosis, which would make her story approximately slightly less reliable than if she had came up with it in a dream. Apparently the hypnosis also brought forth memories of child abuse (of her and her daughter) by international pedophile rings, drug barons and Satanists – all part of a sex slave aspect to her “trauma based mind control programming.” Satanic ritual abuse is, according to O’Brien, widely “used in the military which, for example, has the occult Temple of Set, which is supposedly more intellectually based, which is used to traumatize people. That leaves them widely suggestible for mind control programming. It’s a very deliberate method, and it has proliferated heavily on our military bases.” Her list of perpetrators includes a variety of American, Canadian, Mexican and Saudi Arabian government officials, as well as notable country stars. Her stories can of course not be corroborated, there is no credible evidence, and they are full of inconsistencies (as pointed out here) but that sort of goes without mentioning and probably doesn’t matter all that much to her fans.

Mark Phillips, her husband, was allegedly the one who rescued her from her abuse by the military. Educateyourself.org, Ken Adachi’s site, offers you “the true story” of Mark Phillips here (originally written by one Ray Bilger for David Icke’s site). Things suggest that Phillips might have been the original crazy in the relationship. James Bartley, appropriately enough, believes that Phillips may be something of a double agent who is still under the control of Project Monarch. It’s not entirely clear why that should be the case, for there is not much evidence or reason flying around in these debates.

O’Brien does of course have a substantial presence at whale.to.

Diagnosis: No one doubts that O’Brien is a victim of sorts. After all, she seems to honestly believe her elaborate fantasies – and there seems to be plenty enough people who take them seriously to make her just a tiny bit of a threat to civilization. Good job, Cathy.

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