Encyclopedia of American Loons

Age of Autism is an antivaccine cesspool if there ever was one, and Gayle DeLong is zealous. DeLong is among those who refuse to let go of that most cherished and thoroughly refuted piece of nonsense, that vaccines are causally linked to autism. Originally, the idea was that mercury in vaccines was the culprit. The fact that thimerosal is safe, has been removed from all childhood vaccines since the conspiracy was first launched, and was never in the MMR vaccine anyways is not going to deter DeLong, for “although mercury has been removed from many vaccines, the remaining mercury as well as other culprits such as aluminum and live viruses may link vaccines to autism.” Heck, she has even published a study suggesting such a link in a low-tier journal. DeLong is not a scientist but a faculty member in the Department of Economics and Finance in the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College/City University of New York. Nor does she know much about science, and the study design of the study in question suggests complete incompetence – or perhaps an attempt to avoid a rigorous design out of a suspicion that a good study design would fail to give her the results she wanted (details here and here). That the referees for the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health failed to notice is good evidence that the journal is one you should not put a lot of trust in. One Margaret Dunkle nevertheless took the bait and used DeLong’s article as part of a hysterically idiotic antivaxx article for the Baltimore Sun.

Apparently DeLong also managed to get a commentary in some journal called Accountability in Researchentitled “Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Safety Research”. Oh, yes, there is a conspiracy, no less. Doctors who fail to find an association between vaccines and autism are ~~scientists at research institution who know their stuff~~ in the pocket of ~~science~~Big Pharma – as opposed to Andrew Wakefield and concerned parents who torture data into arguing for such a link based on no understanding of the science whatsoever. She cannot cite a single instance of distortion of the data in the science she rejects, of course, but she blithely asserts that FDA is in on the game. The evidence is apparently that they deny a vaccine-autism connection, and since she thinks there is one there must be a cover-up. What other possible explanation could there be?

The important point, of course, is that it doesn’t matter what science or evidence says – DeLong and her merry band of antivaccinationists don’t need to try to engage with any of that, since all those scientists are tainted by conflicts of interests and collusions with BigPharma. Their theory is thus unfalsifiable. Therefore they must be correct.

DeLong does, however, have two daughters with autism; both “have benefited greatly from supplements, diet, chelation, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.” Right. She is also a former member of SafeMind’s research committee and has participated in various antivaxx rallies.

In 2014, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which is, to emphasize, something we don’t wish on anyone. We still need to mention that she, rather tastelessly, referred to her condition as “autism-induced breast cancer”. You see, she blames it on having to deal with her autistic kids (and hence, ultimately, on vaccines). “There is virtually no cancer in my family, I eat organically, I exercise, I’m a good weight.” So, caring for children with autism is the only remaining possibility. Yes, even yours truly is left somewhat speechless both by the inference and the premises. But the core idea is actually pretty typical of pseudoscience: As long as you stay healthy and have the right attitude, you avoid cancer; so if you get cancer … well, never mind that the association between stress and cancer is at best “weak”. She also used the diagnosis to launch a pseudoscientific tirade against chemotherapy.

Diagnosis: A truly horrible person, unfortunately. We’re sure she means well, but it really doesn’t matter much when your premises are so detached from reality as DeLong’s pseudoscientific nonsense in fact is.

A.k.a. Rev. Bee

We’ve talked about MUFON before. Barbara Delozier is the State Section Director Northwest of MUFON. I suppose it tells you a bit about MUFON that Delozier is also a Dolphyn Wisdom of the Ancient, Metaphysical Minister, and responsible for something called the My Psychic Friends network. She actually calls herself “Dr. Barbara Delozier, Msc.D., Minister and Psychic Counselor”. It should be unnecessary to say that her education is not from an institution worth taking more seriously than your average spam mail, but at least her areas of expertise are “[p]ositivity life coach, expert dream interpretation, psychic/sensitive, advisor, Ufology, ordained metaphysical minister” (it’s not “grammar”), and her “career focus” is “paranormal sensitive, psychic counselor, metaphysician, Ufologist, minister, speaker, author”. And as a “Metaphysician” (no, she means “New age stream of consciousness fluff”, not metaphysics) she can help you ascend the ladder on which the “physical aspect of our lives is merely the bottom rung […] by delving into the heretofore ‘unknown’ of the psyche, the ethereal, interdimensional reality in which we ‘also’ operate as Soul. Whether it be understanding the mystery of your dreams, asking the ‘big’ question about God, or merely attempting to reach out and touch your Higher Self” (goodness knows what the quotation marks are for). And apparently her “weekly Positive Affirmations are highly prized bits of wisdom from her Inner Guides that come through to the physical to help you.” How? Well, at least you should start by “strik[ing] the words ‘I can’t’ and ‘I don’t know how’ from your vocabulary [no, those aren’t words, but whatever].” Well, realizing that Delozier will systematically refuse to admit that “I don’t know how” actually explains quite a bit of her behavior, doesn’t it? What do you do when you don’t have a clue? Make it up and fill in the gaps with whatever you fancy. Delozier is probably a stellar example of what can happen when you follow that rule and your mind is otherwise unfettered by the limits imposed by reality.

You can also join her “Miss Peg [apparently Peggi “Don’t allow your human intelligence to overrule your spiritual needs” Torbert] and Astoria [Brown]” for “Trinity Psychics Quantum Metaphysics and Psychic Chat” on Blog Talk Radio every Saturday night. She is also “a gifted paranormal sensitive who explores and photographs energy beings, interdimensional beings and extraterrestrial travelers.” Like “quantum”, “energy” and “dimension” are apparently words that can mean whatever she wants them to mean at any time (and usually means nothing whatsoever).

Delozier runs several webpages, and we found the webpage “Dolphinpsychic” (with one Michelle Caporale) to be perhaps particularly interesting. It features testimonies of Delozier’s powers by … one “Psychic Norbert”. She is also involved with the “Empower U Metaphysical Academy”, which is apparently a (poorly designed) webpage where you can download “home study courses and attunements blessed crystals for healing”. As for their crystal healing course, “[i]t is now possible to give a powerful crystal healing, without crystals. Through attunement you will gain access to the energy of specific crystals and be able to channel it by intention. These ethereal crystals are much stronger than those found within the Earth. You can place them on the body, just by pointing at a certain area and thinking the stone’s name. The stone will disappear when the energy is no longer needed.” I have to admit that it was almost tempting to flesh out $12 for that course package. Same thing with the “Full Spectrum Course”: “Tachyon is the source of all frequencies. Full Sprectum Healing IS all frequencies. This makes FSH much more direct and targeted than Tachyon.” Try to falsify thatclaim with a well-designed test, you darn skeptics.

Diagnosis: Woo! WOOOO-O-O-O! And there is not a thing Delozier cannot do after she learned how to transcend coherence and sense and any sort of grounding in reality. Probably pretty harmless.

Dan Delzell is pastor of Wellspring Lutheran Church in Papillion, Nebraska, and a regular contributor to The Christian Post, which he uses to share his delusional bigotry and lunatic fundie ravings (this one is typical) with the rest of us. Delzell is an uncompromising anti-gay activist, and, as so many others anti-gay activists, imagines his ways to moronic reasons for why sexual “immorality” in general, and homosexuality in particular, should be combatted. For instance, according to Delzell “the strong correlation between overspending and sexual immorality is beyond dispute”. It’s also incorrect, of course, but that’s not really what makes it indisputable to Delzell. Instead, he justifies the existence not only of a correlation but a causal relationship by invoking the Biblical parable of the prodigal son: “The prodigal son had it good at home. But he wanted more, and he wanted it immediately. His lust for money was fueled by his lust for sensual pleasure, and ‘vice’ versa.” So there you go. And given the quality of the reasoning, I conjecture that there is plenty little those of us who disagree can say to convince those who actually accept that argument.

Following the NAACP’s endorsement of marriage equality, Delzell was one of many who reacted negatively, pointing out that “homosexual acts become like a drug for those who give into this dangerous temptation” and that MLK probably didn’t dream of “little black boys and little white boys” marrying each other, and therefore that Obama is subverting what MLK fought for and is thus anti-Christian.

To get a better grasp of how Delzell views the world, this one is illuminating. Here he laments how Christianity has faded from public discourse (huh) and points out that true Christians should fight to get it back there, where it belongs. You see, according to Delzell you’re either influenced by Jesus or Satan – there’s no third option – so the fact that there are people in the US concerned with other things than (his interpretation of) the Bible is proof that Satan is becoming the dominant force over the majority of the population. And “Satan hates marriage between a man and a woman” … So there you have it: Either you support marriage equality, civil rights and the Constitution, in which case you’re a Muslim atheist, or you’re with Jesus.

Take science, for instance. According to Delzell, the world is currently the battlefield of two “kings”, “King Science” and “King Jesus”, and that’s why many people just accept science and denies the evidence for God (of which he mentions nothing). He doesn’t say it explicitly, but you all know who “King Science” is, don’t you? Apparently, Obama has been ensnared by the dark side: “[I]t is ironic, and yes even tragic, that President Obama would choose to light the White House with a rainbow after the recent Supreme Court decision. It was his loud and proud way of celebrating the sin of same-sex marriage. Obviously, the president doesn’t seem to believe that the Old Testament stories of Noah’s Ark and Sodom and Gomorrah were actual events in history.”

Yes, Satan is everywhere. In a 2013 column Delzell was scared by a British magician who performed a levitation trick, whom Delzell thinks was actually levitating, with the help of demons: “Personally, I think it was legit. I believe this was a paranormal event and an authentic example of levitation. But it’s not like this sort of thing is completely unheard of today.” Kids today! Witchcraft and Harry Potter and rock’n-roll are a very dangerous combo.

Diagnosis: Yes, to Delzell the world really is simple, and everything really is black and white. Either you’re a commie, liberal, Muslim atheist, science-worshipping, gay loving anti-Christian – it’s all Satan’s work – or you’re with Jesus. The choice is yours, and it’s a package deal.

James DeMeo is the director of the Orgone Biophysical Research Lab. Yes, orgone, the imaginary, vitalistic “life positive” (think the Force) energy ultracrackpot Wilhelm Reich claimed to have discovered in the 30s and which would promptly herald the New Age and a Cure for All Diseases and so on and so forth. And then you know that what kind of “research” they are doing at the “lab”.

Of course, the name may sound legit to people who are scientifically illiterate, and one of DeMeo’s main moments in the sun occurred when he appeared on scientifically anti-literate senator James Inhofe’s list of scientists who allegedly dispute global warming. Well, DeMeo does in fact, as opposed to many of the entries on Inhofe’s list, deny the mainstream explanation of global warming. Instead, DeMeo claims that ~~prana~~ orgone energy is the cause.

So, orgone energy is the real explanation for global warming: “However, cloudbusting [oh, yes – it can drive away aliens, too] is definitely not ‘magic’, but a combination of both natural science and empirical art [don’t know, but suspect it means, precisely, magic], requiring the practitioner to know much about modern science, climate and technical matters. They must also have the capacity to feel the atmospheric orgone energy via organ sensations, and to see the expressive language of the living which appears across the whole of Nature, if one knows what to look for, and has the eyes to see [yes, in order to verify the existence of orgone energy, you have to believe it is there; how convenient]. It helps us to understand previously inexplicable things such as the relationship between desert-spreading and the subsequent appearance of droughts and heatwaves, both of which fuel the misunderstood ‘global warming’ and ‘El Nino’ effects, which in fact are regional in nature, and always connected with outbreaks of expanding Saharasian desert atmospheres.”

DeMeo is also a signatory to this list of HIV/AIDS “rethinkers”.

He is also the author (with one Steve Taylor) of the long pseudoscientific rant The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era. The main claim of that book is that “[i]t is not natural for human beings to kill each other, for men to oppress women, for individuals to accumulate massive wealth and power, or to abuse nature,” but that human nature changed after a period of intense aridification 5900 years ago (so it is natural, then … oh, never mind). Contrary to what they claim there is of course scant scientific basis for their New Ageish, lengthy fallacious appeal to nature, and knowing DeMeo’s background may be helpful in understanding how he and Taylor deals with scientific data. DeMeo nevertheless has few qualms about claiming that his Saharasia (a follow-up of the book, it seems) “is the largest and most in-depth scholarly study on human behavior and social violence around the world which has ever been undertaken.” Wilhelm Reich himself was a Freudian Marxist who believed that the lack of good orgasms was what kept the working classes from realizing their political potential, and DeMeo’s story of violence contains some ~~disconcerting~~ fascinating observations about the connection between “sex-repression” and warfare.

Diagnosis: Zealous pseudoscientist and crackpot. At present, he has clearly joined the striking-webdesign-with-odd-color-and-font-combinations group of crackpots and will hardly exert influence on anyone not already lost to reason, sanity and reality – but that group evidently also includes certain US senators, so we can’t completely write DeMeo off as completely harmless.

David Deming is a geologist, geophysicist and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma. He is also a staunch wingnut and adjunct faculty member at two wingnut think tanks, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs and the National Center for Policy Analysis. He is probably most famous for his anti-environmentalism, partially based on the idea that “sustainability” is a misleading concept – technology will save us anyways, so it’s nothing to worry about (he is nevertheless opposed to investing in renewable forms of energy instead of oil and natural gas).

Of course, to run these kinds of arguments, Deming needs the convenience of global warming denialism. And indeed; according to Deming global warming is “media hysteria … generated by journalists who don’t understand the provisional and uncertain nature of scientific knowledge.” There is, according to Deming, “not one person on Earth who has ever been killed or harmed by global warming.” Besides, global warming is driven by natural forces and we can’t really know what’s driving it. And it isn’t even happening. At least not since 1998: “the mean planetary temperature hasn’t increased significantly for nearly nine years [2007].” (And “the last two years of global cooling have nearly erased 30 years of temperature increases. To the extent that global warming ever existed, it is now officially over.”) Pick whichever is most convenient. At least he impressed senator James Inhofe, who included him on his list of 650 scientists who supposedly dispute the global warming consensus

But there sure is a conspiracy! “A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said ‘We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period,’” after Deming had managed to gain acceptance in the club by pretending to be one of them. Of course, he offered no evidence, name or elucidation of “major” (context here). Seems a bit like all those unnamed physicists and biologists Kent Hovind ends up sitting beside on planes and who confidentially admit to him that cosmology and biology is really bunk.

Deming is also a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism, though he does accept evolution and has claimed that Intelligent Design cannot be formulated as a scientific hypothesis and is scientifically useless. Political alignment and expedience seems to be the best explanation in this case, as it frankly seems to be for most of the views he has been caught defending.

He’s also into MRA stuff, backing up his arguments by pseudo-biology. Go figure.

Diagnosis: A good example of what happens when otherwise intelligent people start viewing reality as supervening on political expedience. Zealous denialist, and dangerous.

Billy DeMoss is a California-based chiropractor who seems to have an unconditional love for all things pseudoscience and free of evidence, from cleansing to antivaccine conspiracies. He is, in particular, a big fan of Andrew Wakefield, going so far as to calling Wakefield his “mentor”. For that, DeMoss argues, he is targeted by Big Pharma. They are desperate to hide the truth and deliberately poisoning us (oral contraceptives, for instance, is a conspiracy to give women breast cancer), and they are out to get him, and … oh, well – let’s just let him tell us in his own words:

“… do you always believe the official story spoon fed to you by the ‘big brother’ controlled media?...I was just thinking still to this day that no one has ever shown US a video of a Boeing hitting the Pentagon?...especially with all the surveillance around the area and people's video prowess... and I am sure a terrorist could definitely fly a jet with such precision as to not even scrape the ground at 500mph...and of course the plane evaporated on contact...Oh yes I am sure a Boeing could fit in that huge hole and what happened to building 7?...one of 3 steel framed buildings that collapsed(were actually demoed) from fire when not one steel frame building has EVER collapsed in history...so go ahead and believe that EBOLA is coming to the US just like H1N1,SARS,BERD FLU caused massive epidemics that we prevented by yet another moronic vaccine...believe the CDC that vaccines DON’T cause Autism and that vaccines REALLY make you healthier...keep chanting the mantra ‘vacines DON’T cause Autism,vaccines DON’T cause Autim,vaccines DON;T cause Autism...believe in Sandy Hoax and so many other stories that are sold as REAL news to create FEAR and sell an AGENDA for the NWO...keep vaccinating yourselves,use that fluoride for you dental health,eat GMO fake food,watch lots of TV,do as your doctor says and take your dope and NEVER change your lifestyle because ALL your problems are genetic...keep it up the agenda is working very well at dumbing you dumber!!!”

Diagnosis: Let’s get up for Billy DeMoss, shall we? Thank you for playing.

Brain Gym® is a set of movement activities – “crawling, drawing, tracing symbols in the air, yawning, and drinking water” – that, according to their website, will help children, adults, and seniors to: “[l]earn ANYTHING faster and more easily, [p]erform better at sports, [b]e more focused and organized, [s]tart and finish projects with ease, [o]vercome learning challenges, [and r]each new levels of excellence.” It does so because it “[b]uilds, enhances or restores natural neural pathways in the body and brain to assist natural learning,” and features excercises that are e.g. supposed to improve blood circulation in certain parts of the brain (in particular, rocking your head back and forth will get more blood to your frontal lobes “for greater comprehension and rational thinking”). For instance, the exercise “hook-ups” is supposed to “shift electrical energy from the survival centers in the hindbrain to the reasoning centers in the midbrain and neocortex, thus activating hemispheric integration … the tongue pressing into the roof of the mouth stimulates the limbic system for emotional processing in concert with more refined reasoning in the frontal lobes.” That’s the kind of stuff the word “technobabble” was invented to describe.

Brain Gym was developed in the 1980s by Paul and Gail Dennison, who called it “educational kinesiology” (or “Edu-K”), and it is pseudoscientific drivel. In fact, Brain Gym is a version of applied kinesiology, a familiar branch of rank woo, and may perhaps be described as a type of “alternative chiropractics”. The practitioners have, predictably enough, rejected the conclusions of double-blind randomized tests of their work because the tests consistently show AK does not work since that conflicts with what they have convinced themselves is correct based on no evidence or anecdotal results that may easily be explained by well-known phenomena such as ideomotor responses).

That said, Brain Gym has an international market and remains pretty popular – even in the US it continues to be a (justified) source of fear for elementary school kids because it is loved by many of their teachers. And the Educational Kinesiology Foundation (Ventura, California) does cite a lot of research, most of it “academic papers” published in Brain Gym’s own journal that you, too, can read if you pay for them. Several of the papers appear to concern work with learning-disabled students and nebulous suggestions of positive results in students with ADD. The abstracts give little detail about methods or results, however, and it is pretty telling that the only publicly available studies show no effect whatsoever. One of their own studies did, admittedly, hypothesize“that Brain Gym movements can eliminate or greatly ameliorate the symptoms of hyperactivity, learning disabilities, Attention Deficit Disorder, emotional handicaps and even Fetal Alcohol Syndrome,” another that it improved hearing. It doesn’t.

As much other pseudoscience Brain Gym relies on giving the false appearance of being based on sound neuroscience. It is, however, firmly based on refuted ideas about the brain (see here for details), such as motor patterning and perceptual-motor training as an academic intervention.

There is a good overview here (we used that one extensively for this entry).

Diagnosis: Pure bullshit, and the Dennisons remain influential. Their activities are hardly harmful (though I wager there are plenty of kids in school systems around the US who are inclined to disagree), but it still feels pretty iffy when people use bullshit like this to make money.

Once upon a time, John Derbyshire actually wrote some intelligent stuff on Intelligent Design and some good articles on Expelled (though he did even back then write a lot of absurd bullshit as well). Currently, he has been demoted to writing garbage for Internet sites like VDARE and Takimag, including defenses of “racial realism”, slavery and the pseudoscience of psychometrics, after his racist crap became too much even for National Review. And that’s really all we can be bothered to say about John Derbyshire.

Diagnosis: Shit.

Woo tends to come dressed up in pseudoscience and technobabble and it is, honestly, perfectly easy to see how e.g. naturopathy can fool even ordinarily reasonable people with no particular expertise in health-related stuff. But if you fall for reiki, then your critical thinking skills are certainly not state-of-the-art. You are not a reasonable person, and very likely taken in with by a certain kind of racist pseudo-orientalism so popular with certain middleclass groups.

We have, of course, covered reiki before. We have even covered pet reiki before; but the idea is so abysmally ridiculous that we’ll mention it again. Phylameana Lila Desy has written about pet reiki in her article “What if My Dog Prefers Petting Over Reiki?”, where she takes up the perennial question of the perceived conflict between the fact that reiki usually involves waving your hands over the ~~victim~~patient without touching whereas your dog may not fully understand why you’re doing that and prefer that you did something else, like petting. Her answer is (pretty much) that you can do whatever you want since the grand, connecting universal spirits can do whatever it wants anyways.

Desy is “certified in Usui Shiki Ryoho Reiki and the Science of Intuition [oooh, science] from the Holos Institutes of Health. She is an energy medicine practitioner, clairvoyant, intuitive counselor, flower essence consultant, and owner of Spiral Visions [think about that name for a second]. Her lifework includes writing, web-publishing, and healing work. Author of The Everything Guide to Reiki, (January 2012). Phylameana’s writing resume includes contributed content published in a variety of healing texts including: The Meditation Sourcebook, Living Well with Autoimmune Disease, and Sacred Stones. Her Chakracises were referenced in an article published in Body and Soul Magazine”. Yes, but she has also written about e.g. ear candling (no, really) – in “Ear Candling: Why Would You Want to Candle Your Ears?” (you wouldn’t of course, but Desy strains herself to argue by appeal to gibberish to a different conclusion) – and Medicine Wheels; the latter is an “introspection tool” you can use to contact your totem – add in some crystals as well to make sure you get some extra energy, and if you put on some feathers you can almost call yourself a “true native American”. In fact, the top feature on Desy’s website concerns the Law of Attraction, no less, and she covers, with little sense of coherence, evidence or attention to detail virtually any kind of New Age woo between that one and crop circles (she refers to Ellie Crystal!), including crystal gems (“Whether or not you realize it, within each gemstone and crystal is housed healing properties. Ever wonder why you are attracted to a particular stone and not another? Nature finds a way to get the stones that carry the healing and spiritual properties that are most needed to us” and they do so (roughly) by vibrating at the frequencies of your life force).

But let’s return to reiki. Desy decidedly has her own spin on reiki. On About.com’s Holistic Healing page Desy’s article “Projecting Reiki Energies into Past and Future” ~~argues~~ asserts that “Reiki energies can be transmitted into the future as well as into the past.” How, you may wonder, do you send it into the past? “Sending Reiki backwards in time is also beneficial. Simply use your intent to send to a specific past event that was troublesome. Or, focus the energies on healing your inner child at the exact moment she was injured years previously. An easy way to do this is to hold an old photo between your palms while conducting absentia Reiki. Choose a photo that was taken of you as a child around the period of time you are wanting to heal. (Tip: Place the photo inside an envelope to protect your photo from sweaty palms).” I … well, at least I appreciate the tip; I do think I would have thought of that part myself, but I really have no idea how people who take Desy seriously may be thinking. “Targeting Reiki energies to be sent to the original hurt is also helpful in ~~protecting John Connor~~ healing any reactive influences that resulted from that time. For example, whenever offering healing to a hurtful event in the past you are also clearing away carried-over traumas felt present day.” Some reiki practitioners, such as James Deacon, are wary of time-travelling reiki to the past, however, since it may have unintended consequences.

It is a bit sobering to know that they are currently offering reiki at academic medical centers like the Cleveland Clinic, the University of Arizona Cancer Center, and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Diagnosis: Yes, it is hard not to point and laugh at the sheer gibberish and fluffy nonsense of it all, but the truth is that people like Desy (if not Desy herself) have gained an uncanny level of traction and influence. Which is really, truly scary.

Yeah, there are members of the anti-vaccine movement that really should know better. Richard Carlton Deth is a professor of pharmacology at Northeastern University and has published scientific studies on the role of D4 dopamine receptors in psychiatric disorders. He is also on the scientific advisory board of the National Autism Association, and one of the few among autism’s false prophets with relevant research credentials (that he stands virtually alone against more or less complete consensus doesn’t deter them, since for people with poor critical thinking skills being a lone, maverick doctor is often taken as a reason to think he is right even though it really is evidence for the exact opposite). In particular, Deth has hypothesized that certain children are more at risk than others for autism because they lack the normal ability to excrete neurotoxic metals, in particular thimerosal, which is not present in childhood vaccines. (In particular, he made a bit of a reputation for himself with a paper (of questionable merit funded by SafeMinds, no less.) The evidence is, shall we say, not compelling. Nonetheless, Deth “would like to make a virtual wager that within the next 18-24 months scientific evidence will make the thimerosal-autism link a near certainty. If you are willing, I’ll let you name the stakes.” That was in March 2006. Deth has, before or since, produced little by way of published evidence to back up his hypothesis (one study is demolished here).

And what does Deth himself say about the mountain of evidence that falsifies his hypothesis? “Most vaccine safety studies have been epidemological in nature. […] Epidemiological studies are intrinsically unable to uncover causal mechanisms, even if an association was found.” Of course, the fact that no association is found either means that the search for a causal mechanism is, you know, moot. Deth does not dwell on that point. Instead, he suggests that to establish causal mechanisms you have to look to studies on “individual autistic subjects” (you almost suspects he knows better and is lying through his teeth), which have “revealed the central role of oxidative stress and inflammation” that can be linked to vaccines. They have not.

Given his background Deth has been given the opportunity to testify before Congress, and was an “expert witness” for the complainants in the Autism Omnibus proceedings (the courts were not impressed with his research; apparently they found that [Deth’s research] was “unpublished, unduplicated, or mentioned for the first time during the Theory 2 general causation hearing, was poorly performed and scientifically implausible. Based on in vitro effects of mercury on ‘neuronal cells,’ he claimed that mercury had the same effects on human brain cells.”) He also appeared in the antivaccine propaganda film The Greater Good and has been spotted at the quackery conference AutismOne.

He is also – but of course – an advocate of alternative “treatments” for autism, in particular in the form of special diets and supplements; without drawing any very firm conclusions he has voiced his curiosity over why these treatments, on a cellular level, anecdotally appear to work. He has also, rather predictably, given in to the temptation to present himself as being oppressed by ~~reality~~ the powers that be in medical research: For instance, his research tends to get rejected from the top medical journals – why do you think that would be?

Diagnosis: Yup; at one point he may have had a genuinely scientific hypothesis, but at present it has devolved into pure pseudoscience. But unlike most of the people ranting about their results in weird color combinations and unusual font choices, Deth actually has legitimate credentials and some research background. That doesn’t make his own “research” on the vaccine-autism link more solid, but does provide a sheen of legitimacy to anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists who have little else.

Charles Detwiler does have a Ph.D. in Genetics from Cornell, but he surely doesn’t like the science. He is currently professor of biology at Liberty University (it would take some effort to undermine your own credentials more thoroughly than that), and as you’d expect from a proponent of creationism he is not particularly concerned with doing research, but very concerned about Intelligent Design’s position in public schools. He is also a signatory (but of course) to the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism and the author of Life by Design(with Kimberly Mitchell and Norman Reichenbach), a brief “introduction to biology” for non-major undergraduate students with a biblical perspective (with the goal, of course, to snatch them before science and reason does).

Diagnosis: Rabid fundamentalist who hates science but tries publicly to pretend that he likes it, as part of a ploy to lure kids to accept his own version of the Bible and reject science without knowing that this is what they do.

Wingnut think tanks attract the craziest shit. The American Policy Center (APC), for instance, has got themselves Tom DeWeese, a global warming denialist bent on turning Dunning-Kruger into an art form, for president. According to DeWeese global warming is a hoax because trees give off carbon dioxide (oh, yes – read that again). Furthermore, “[t]he fact is some scientists [who shall apparently remain unnamed] have done some studies saying we’ve got a carbon dioxide shortage right now”. To nail his conclusion, DeWeese also claimed that environmentalism was the work of communist leaders bent on destroying the freedoms of the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and … oh, well – let’s just quote him:

“The bottom line is, CO2 is not a poison to human beings, CO2 is not affecting the atmosphere, there is absolutely no evidence, I can say this with absolute confidence, there is no evidence of man-made global warming causing problems. We are actually going through a cooling period right now, which is going to increase over the next few years, it’s cyclical, it happens. I used to have a weatherman in my hometown who started the weather by saying ‘whether it’s cold or whether it’s hot, we’ll always have weather, whether or not’ and that’s exactly what this is. Every time we have a dry season or we have strong hurricanes or we have a really hot summer or a mild winter, these idiots start this drumbeat again, ‘global warming, see here’s what it is.’ They tried to say that this year is the warmest on record, it’s not. They will just keep coming up with his stuff, it’s just craziness …”

I suppose the last sentence, read strictly in isolation, might be onto something.

The APC is also behind the Annual Freedom21 National Conference, where rightwing lunatics (such as Chuck Baldwin, Jerome Corsi and Phyllis Schlafly) gather to blow up the conspiracy behind the evil idea of sustainable development, especially as promoted by the UN and its nefarious Agenda 21, which is set on turning Americans into slaves for the anti-family, Satanic communists of the New World Order (indeed, Tom DeWeese is more or less responsible for mainstreaming Agenda 21 conspiracies on the far right). A telling detail that illustrates how these people view the world, science and politics: DeWeese disinvited Bob Barr from the conference in 2008 since Barr had talked to Al Gore about global warming. You can’t talk to Al Gore and be all friendly with the enemy: “This is not some nice little debate,” said DeWeese: “This is war.”

Diagnosis: In fact, it’s not just craziness. Hatred also seems to play a part.

Oh, the state governments! David Henry Dewhurst was the 41st Lieutenant Governor of Texas from 2003 to 2015, and a 2012 candidate for the US Senate (beaten by Ted Cruz). To most people he is possibly best known for his extensive (and successful) redistricting efforts and voter ID laws, as well as for his commitment to free speech as long as it is restricted to speech he wants to hear (anything else should be restricted in accordance with the moral feelings of those who agree with Dewhurst). Like so many wingnuts Dewhurst is also a Benghazi conspiracy theorists who backs up his “concerns” with baldfaced lies.

As befits any wingnut candidate for public office in Texas, Dewhurst is a creationist, and he has argued that public schools need to teach creationism: “I believe that in fairness we need to expose students to both sides of this,” said Dewhurst diplomatically, and by “sides” he did, for some reason, not mean Hinduist creation stories: “That’s why I’ve supported including in our textbooks the discussion of the biblical account of life and creation.” Now, Dewhurst lost to state senator Dan Patrick in 2014, but Patrick is also a creationist, and part of his campaign consisted of trying to one-up Dewhurst by displaying an even more fervent commitment to creationism, by arguing that schools should teach that creationism is not only a viable alternative theory but superior to evolution.

Diagnosis: Complete crap. Hopefully neutralized; not that it seems to matter.

We’ve covered the wingnut loons of Concerned Women forAmerica in several posts before, but we suppose Mario Diaz, their attorney and apparently legal counsel, deserves a separate entry. Like most concerned women for America, Diaz is obsessed with sex; that is other people’s sex lives, and in particular zeh gays. And as so many wingnut opponents of gay marriage he uses some really silly arguments to try to support a position he arrived at through bigotry and hate.

So, for instance, when reacting to Virginia marriage equality advocates’ victory in federal court, Diaz tried to argue that gay rights gains “are costing us our freedoms,” though he didn’t explain precisely what freedoms he lost when Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage was struck down. He did, however, express his dismay over a pro-marriage equality petition to the appeals court, insisting that conservative groups would never ask people to sign a petition to a court since they have “respect for our Constitution and the rule of law.” No, seriously; he said that.

Undaunted, Diaz has argued that gay rights advocates seek to “silence” (i.e. criticize) opponents and that marriage equality “will mean the destruction of freedom and liberty” (i.e. he doesn’t get his will, nor does he get to force others to conform to what he feels that they should conform to). Gay marriage also means “the persecution of Christians” and “the criminalization of Christianity,” since when Diaz has an interest in a matter he is utterly unable to draw even the most elementary and obvious distinctions. Of course, he does what he does solely out of selfless concern for gay people themselves: gay marriage will make it harder to them to “escape their sinful lifestyle”. His attempts to ~~argue~~ convince himself that public opinion does not favor gay marriage are only pitiful, however. That he seems to believe that the Supreme Court should pay heed to public opinion in any case is more troubling for a person with a legal background.

Though he is mostly concerned by homosexuality, Diaz has also voiced some concerns about anti-discrimination measures in general – such efforts “are an attack on God Himself” (because disagreeing with Diaz is obviously disagreeing with God himself). He has for instance argued that people who try to raise issues related to racism are themselves racists for fomenting “bitterness, malcontent and rancor” in minority communities.

Diagnosis: The usual, though we still find it bizarrely fascinating to observe the extent to which people motivated by sheer hatred will lose all sense of reason, accountability and the ability to draw even the most obvious distinctions.

a.k.a. Frederick Dimond (original name)

The Most Holy Family Monastery is a traditionalist Catholic sedevacantist organization that, due to their pamphlet “101 Heresies of Anti-Pope John Paul II” (condemning for instance the Vatican’s promotion of Natural Family Planning), was declared “a dissident organization that challenges the papal authority” by The Catholic League. It was also designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, though not for the entirely same reasons.

Consisting of a small barrel of monks led by Michael Dimond (his brother Peter is a prominent member as well – in fact, Michael and Peter may be the only members), the group was founded by the late Joseph Natale, a prophet who “knew, and knew absolutely, that [Vatican II] was part of a Communist conspiracy to destroy the Church. The bishops at the council wanted to democratize Catholicism, they wanted an egalitarian theology, and most of them were secret communists and Masons. They knew exactly what they were doing.” Moreover, John Paul I “was murdered by his own. The Communist infiltrators in the Vatican and the College of Cardinals, working together with the Masons,” and, for good measure, “[f]ive years [from 1994] is about all the time the world has left.”

The SPLC categorization was justified on the grounds of integrism, the supporters of which “routinely pillory Jews as ‘the perpetual enemy of Christ’ and […] are incensed by the liberalizing reforms of the 1962–65 Second Vatican Council, which condemned hatred for the Jews and rejected the accusation that Jews are collectively responsible for deicide in the form of the crucifixion of Christ.”

Their website reads like a poe (“study: contraception can shrink a woman’s brain” to “Is the world about to end” to “thousands of earthworms rain from sky over Norway, baffling meteorologists” (I have no idea where they get their “news”) to “Antipope Francis to host major summit on ‘Climate Change’” (yeah, throw in some climate change denialism as well while you’re at it) to “test confirms millions of girls given vaccine laced with sterilization hormone” to Mark Biltz’s blood moon insanity. And they themselves are so persecuted it almost hurts: by the gays, the Jews, the protestants, tattoo parlors (oh, yess) and people who dare to disagree with them in public. There’s a bit of politics there as well: Did you know that the TV series “Law and Order” is nefarious and subversive pro-vaccine (!) propaganda? Or that cash is “banned in Louisiana at garage sales, flea markets, etc.”? And then there is the expected stuff: UFOs (they’re Satanic conspiracies to deceive mankind), exorcisms, “abortion, rock music and freemasonry exposed”, holocaust denialism, 9/11 conspiracies, creationism and weird attacks on Superman (no, really – he’s “Satan’s replacement” for Jesus Christ). They have funny fonts and color combinations as well. Go figure.

Some further highlights:

- Aborted babies go to Hell because they are unbaptized.

- Having homosexual thoughts is a mortal sin, and “homosexuality is the result of demonic takeover” (apparently everyone really knows this but some still deny this obvious fact because of liberal bias).

- Contraception is a mortal sin, as is natural family planning (“safe periods”)

- The Jews are collectively responsible for the death of Jesus ... and the Holocaust was of course a hoax.

- Elvis, The Rolling Stones, Madonna and others are possessed by demons and listening to their music allows demons to put you in a “zombie-like trance.”

There is also some sympathy toward geocentrism on display.

Here’s and example of a letter from a fan (Matt Wykoff). Possible favorite passage (there are plenty to choose from): “Libertarianism (and the constitution) are simply tyrannical failures and instruments that lead to false flag attacks and government-run pedophilia through their Manual (and Visual) Body-Cavity Searches of Juvenile Hall youth.” Take that … Ron Paul?

Diagnosis: Though the website could serve a useful purpose as flypaper for people who need help, Dimond himself seems mostly to need a hug and some reaffirmation (though I would be careful about getting to close to him if you don’t know what you’re doing). Probably relatively harmless, though noticeably less fanatic groups in other parts of the world have gone off to do horrible things.

One has to give it to the pseudoscientists: The attempts of “integrative” (yes, those are dick quotes) medicine practitioners to infiltrate otherwise respectable medical institutions and academia have been frighteningly successful, partially of course due to the resources made available by misguided and/or delusional wealthy donors and the erosion of standards in medical practice by leaving important decisions to administrators.

One bad example Thomas Jefferson University, a private health sciences university in Philadelphia, and Jefferson University Hospitals. They actually have an Integrative Pediatrics Program at Jefferson (indeed, it appears to be part of the the Myrna Brind Center Of Integrative Medicine), the director of which is one Dr. Christina DiNicola. DiNicola used to be a real pediatrician, but then she did an additional two-year integrative medicine fellowship under the direction of Andrew Weil. At present you probably shouldn’t trust her even on basic advice on how to interact with kids.

A good picture of DiNicola can probably be gleaned from her blogpost (for the JUH Blog) “Is Integrative Medicine Right for Your Kids? 5 Myths Debunked” (discussed here), which really rather confirms how unscientific, pseudoscientific and anti-scientific integrative medicine is. One of the first thing you’ll notice is the extent to which DiNicola has to emphasize, at every turn, how her servicees “are different from and not a replacement for good primary care pediatric services.” A sample of the “myths”:

- “Myth #1: All of the integrative therapies on the market are unproven.” DiNicola’s response? She’ll help guide you through the available options. Of course, the vast majority of alternative therapies are unproven – by definition. DiNicola doesn’t discuss that.

- “Myth #2: If my pediatrician doesn’t mention or recommend integrative medicine, then I shouldn’t consider it.” Oh, but you see, the reason real pediatricians don’t mention it may be because they’re afraid of being ridiculed. (Yes, there is a conspiracy lurking in the background – the hallmark of all pseudoscience.) Or because they may be “unaware” of the research – or because they know that actualresearch indicates no benefit for the treatments, but DiNicola doesn’t consider that option.

- “Myth #5: Integrative medicine only benefits certain diseases and conditions.” According to DiNicola, however, it can be used for anything. Well, I suppose I have to agree that alternative medicine is equally effective across the board, but for somewhat different reasons.

Of course, DiNicola is careful about avoiding making too specific claims, mentioning only yoga and acupuncture explicitly. Indeed, the whole website for the Integrative Pediatrics program is pretty vague about what they do and even more nebulous about why they think it is effective (funny that). Instead, one gets some idiotic tropes like “[s]ome people believe external forces (energies) from objects or other sources directly affect a person’s health. An example of external energy therapy is electromagnetic therapy.” Indeed, some people believe that.

The Myrna Brind Center Of Integrative Medicine is a different matter, describing clinical trials of high dose intravenous vitamin C in pancreatic cancer, acupuncture, bioidentical hormones, and even an integrative mental health program.

Diagnosis: Yes, the dark side is tempting, and many give in. DiNicola has completed her journey, and there seems to be, currently, little good left in her.

Robert DiSilvestro has a PhD in biochemistry and is a Professor of Nutrition at Ohio State University. He is also a hardcore creationist affiliated with the Christian Leadership Ministries, where he for instance publishes materials (containing all the standard creationist canards) to help students challenge their biology teacher (no, he doesn’t do research, he helps students to Jesus). The materials are, of course, fundamentally dishonest and misguided, but they are probably helpful for people who wish to snow their teachers, and hey: If you lie for Jesus, it doesn’t count.

And yes, it’s predictable stuff: the Miller-Urey experiment (the familiar creationist distortion), Appeals to the Bible, fine-tuning, macroevolution has never been observed, Darwin was wrong on the fossil record, misunderstanding punctuated equilibrium, and Haeckel’s embryos were wrong … yes, Haeckel’s embryo, no less (he admits that Haeckel presented them “a while back.” Indeed). And apparently this guy fancies himself to have any kind of intellectual integrity. Yes, the intellectual dishonesty is pretty staggering, and no: a scientist – he has publications in unrelated fields – who pushes Haeckel’s embryos as an argument against evolution is not an honest person!

DiSilvestro is of course a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s list A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism, and has been in the game for a while. He witnessed for the side of anti-scientific dishonesty at the Kansas Evolution Hearings, and was also one of the central characters in the Bryan Leonard affair. His attempts to defend Behe’s Darwin’s Black Boxdid not impressanyone remotely knowledgeable about the field.

Diagnosis: Straightforward, old-fashioned liar for Jesus. The kind of guy the expression was invented to describe.

Ryan Dobson is the spawn of James Dobson, and generally cut from the same cloth. And that is pretty much all the information you need (they host a radio program together, Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk). Dobson jr. hopes that when abortion is re-criminalized the government will force people who lived near Planned Parenthood clinics to walk through them just as Germans during the post-war occupation had to go through concentration camps (and apparently believes all and any conspiracy theories ever forwarded in chain emails about Planned Parenthood). Like his father he also believes that Obama is a dictator, and that Obama may accordingly deny healthcare to conservatives like his father, since in Ryan Dobson’s mind the Affordable Health Care Act entails that all healthcare-related decisions are ultimately Obama’s to make at his personal discretion: “You can’t trust them. Clearly they are targeting people.” The evidence for the latter claim seems to be his assumption that Obama can deny healthcare to his father. So it goes. And that’s not the only wingnut conspiracy theory Dobson jr. has promoted. When it comes to homosexuals, Dobson believes that most of them were abused as children and that homosexuality is like alcoholism; therefore gay marriage is morally wrong.

Diagnosis: Quite simply another James Dobson, though possibly without the charm, clout and political impact.

An admittedly pretty old picture

Gil Dodgen is a software engineer, classical pianist and exasperating creationist who writes for the creationist tripe-pit Uncommon Descent, mostly about scientific topics he really doesn’t know anything about (including topics one would expect him to know something about), predictably failing to be even remotely aware that he doesn’t know anything about them – a familiar cognitive shortcoming. He is also a member of Dembski’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab, which is a website and not a lab. He provides a brilliantly apt summary of his efforts (and those of his fellow bloggers) here.

A large part of his rants about evolution seems to be written under the assumption that evolution is random (“tornado in a junkyard”), which it isn’t, but Dodgen seems rather uninterested in actually trying to understand how it is supposed to work since strawman caricatures are much easier to overturn. Another fine example of his argumentative powers can be found here. Dodgen has, like many of his fellows, for years predicted the imminent demise of Darwinism, which is just about the only (reasonably precise) prediction the ID folks have come up with. It has also been falsified. To which the ID folks usually respond they way they usually do to empirical data.

Diagnosis: Well, the Dunning-Kruger effect hardly comes any denser than this. Completely exasperating.

Richard Michael Dolan is a ufologist and television personality. Initially he had some success with his deranged conspiracy rants in book form, such as UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-up 1941-1973 (with a preface none other than Jacques Vallée, one of the most delusional crackpots to walk the face of the Earth). The basic idea, as you’d expect, is that UFOs are ubiquitous but systematically covered up by the US government because, well, that’s what governments do. Sequels include National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973-1991, which doesn’t really seem to have exposed anything converts in various conspiracy communities weren’t already convinced of, and (with Bryce Zabel) A.D. After Disclosure: The People’s Guide to Life After Contact. As for the quality of his works, I’ll quote UFO enthusiast GhostofMaynard: “My take on Mr. Dolan is that he uses a vast number of sources, and from that perspective his work is quite good. However, Dolan doesn’t do a good job at verifying the veracity of sources.” I am not sure GhostofMaynard ranks his parameters of assessment appropriately. (Dolan’s work includes e.g. “deathbed testimonies” from anonymous “CIA officials”. Right.)

Dolan may be most familiar from 2006 Sci-Fi Channel television show Sci Fi Investigates, where he was part of a team that looked into various paranormal and unusual events with as much credulousness as possible, including Roswell. He also appeared in Sci-Fi Channel’s UFO Invasion at Rendlesham. Currently he teaches the Introduction to Ufology class at the International Metaphysical University as part of its ufology program. Yup, such a thing really exists, and it is probably magnificent.

Diagnosis: As a deranged conspiracy theorist Dolan has had some success, probably because he – unlike most – tends to meet the minimal criteria for grammatical coherence and intelligibility. There is a very, very long distance from that achievement to being worth taking seriously.

#1531: Gayle DeLong

#1532: Barbara Delozier

#1533: Dan Delzell

#1534: James DeMeo

#1535: David Deming

#1536: Billy DeMoss

#1537: Paul & Gail Dennison

#1538: John Derbyshire

#1539: Phylameana Lila Desy

#1540: Richard Deth

#1541: Charles Detwiler

#1542: Tom DeWeese

#1543: David Dewhurst

#1544: Mario Diaz

#1545: Michael Dimond

#1546: Christina DiNicola

#1547: Robert DiSilvestro

#1548: Ryan Dobson

#1549: Gil Dodgen

#1550: Richard Dolan