Sunday, June 15, 2014

#1081: Melissa Mowrer Rogers & Kathy Heiney

Heiney (left) and Rogers proudly
displaying their trinket

Melissa Mowrer Rogers and Kathy Heiney are the sisters behind the Texas-based Energetic Solutions Ltd, a company that started out developing homeopathic creams for stress reduction but is now most famous for producing the Shoo!Tag (discussed in some detail here). The Shoo!Tag is a tag to be worn by you or your pet to ward of insects and pests – according to the inventors it “represents a paradigm shift in the pest management industry.” How do they work? It draws upon “[n]ature’s energetic principles in combination with physics, quantum physics and advanced computer software technology” to utilize “the power of the bio-energetic field which surrounds all living things to create a frequency barrier which repels targeted pests for up to four months.” In other words, they don’t. Instead “Shoo!TAG™’s magnetic strip is encoded with beneficial frequencies and resonances and an electromagnetic charge bearing a polarized energy signature, which when introduced into the bio-energetic field of the wearer produces results.” It is hard to describe the profundity of the bullshittery exhibited by these claims. What you get, in short, is a credit card with the words “tick” or “flea” encoded in the magnetic strip, which is then supposed to scare away the named bug. Of course, there is not the faintest evidence that the tags actually repel insects, and skeptics have pointed out that it is unclear whether bugs can read binary digits off magnetic strips at distances larger than the distances at which humans can read binary digits off magnetic strips. So instead the producers provide several escape hatch arguments for why you don’t see the results you may have expected when using the tags.

Rogers and Heiney have their backgrounds in the “quantum biofeedback [sic] industry” and have extensive ties to none other than William Nelson.

While the product sounds merely stupid it may not be entirely harmless: There are reports that the company manufacturing Shoo!Tags has shipped tags to Africa and Haiti to help humans combat malaria, which is not funny anymore.

Diagnosis: Amazing gibberish, but we’ll give them credit for creativity. I suppose some readers may be inclined to suspect that Rogers and Heiney may not completely believe all their claims themselves, but I tend to like to think that you cannot completely fake this level of bullshit.

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