#1882: Dennis Lee (II)

Almost certainly not the same person as last entry’s Dennis Lee, this entry’s Dennis Lee is senior pastor of Living Waters Fellowship in Mesquite. Interestingly, “Living Waters” is also the name of Ray Comfort’s publishing company. This may or may not be a coincidence; we sort of suspect it’s not. In any case, Lee’s article “Discovering truth verses tolerance” (discussed here) gives you a fair idea about what he’s up to. It opens thusly: “I really don’t think there’s a single person that doesn’t think truth verses tolerance is an important topic for our day. That’s because it’s our society’s redefinition of tolerance that allows topics like abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and evolution to become so accepted while Christianity has become so hated and practically outlawed.” And that is really enough from Dennis Lee (II).

Diagnosis: Fundie loon with a well-developed persecution complex. He’s not alone, and although Lee’s own influence is probably rather limited, this kind of delusional nonsense deserves to be covered extensively in places like this Encyclopedia.

#1881: Dennis Lee (I)

A legend in pseudoscience circles, Dennis Lee is the head of Better World Technologies and United Community Services of America, a company that markets pretty much every piece of ridiculous nonsense technology or “technology” you can imagine, from healing devices that use zero-point energy to an over-unity motor. For the most part, Lee is seeking investors for his devices (examples of revival meetings where Lee promotes his products to potential “investors” are described here), which are supposed to provide us with infinite free electricity. Like the over-unity motor, the devices in question violate the laws of physics (details can be found here if you are interested), and although he’s been in the business a long time, Lee has never managed to demonstrate that any of them work – indeed, his energy products are for the most part “not quite ready”, but you are nevertheless offered to buy a franchise for somewhere between $30,000 and $100,000 and begin selling free energy devices yourself (note that in becoming a dealer, you waive your rights to legal recourse – Lee does, however, offer commissions to bring in new dealers and makes considerable effort to discourage dealers from communicating with one another). There’s a list of his excuses Lee has given for why he hasn’t shown that any of his devices work here.

As pseudoscientists and promoters of voodoo science are wont to do, Lee claims that Corporate America is doing everything in their power to suppress him – apparently the entire government and American industry is part of some huge international multi-generational conspiracy to suppress the truth he only can offer. Lee has also been indicted for fraud at least twice, and pleaded guilty to two felony counts of consumer fraud in California in 1990 in connection with the sale of an “energy-saving heat pump kit,” but those incidents presumably just show how afraid mainstream corporations are of competition – apparently Lee subsequently claimed to have invented the world’s most efficient heat pump, but that conspirators sabotaged his efforts, stole his company, and incarcerated him. So it goes.

According to Lee, all his instructions are dictated to him directly from God, and he has indeed created a following that, to the undiscerning eye, looks remarkably like a cult fuelled by religious fervor and paranoia (an interesting insider story about what it was like to work with Lee can be found here; this one is pretty telling, too). A nice illustration of Lee’s operations is Lee’s and his followers’ dismissal of critics, such as Eric Krieg (whose criticism of Lee is archived here): Lee’s wife called Krieg “CIA sponsored”, without a shred of evidence, and Lee’s followers have apparently been told that they are not allowed to even look at Krieg’s website.

Diagnosis: Pseudoscientific crackpot. We’ll just assume he’s a loon for present purposes. There are, of course, other interpretations of his behavior and his claims, but “pseudoscientific crackpot” would probably apply in any case.

#1880: Bill Ledbetter

Bill Ledbetter is the pastor of Fairview Baptist Church in Oklahoma, wingnut, creationist and proponent of David Barton-style pseudohistory and Christian Nation nonsense. As such, he has for instance been invited to serve as the weekly chaplain for the Oklahoma legislature, and his 15-minute sermon there sums up his lunacy pretty well (discussion here and here and here; follow the links if you for some reason want to hear the original – it is gloriously insane): Ledbetter started off by claiming that “America is the only nation in history that’s been under one governing document her whole history,” which is false (the Articles of Confederation, anyone? Not that Ledbetter cares overly for accuracy or fact). Then he distorted the infamous Lutz study of references made by the Founding Fathers and passed on a fake Patrick Henry quote about the nation being founded on Christianity as evidence that the Constitution is based on the Bible (Henry, of course, was firmly opposed to the Constitution) and to argue against the separation of church and state (and in favor of mandatory prayers in public schools, which Ledbetter apparently believes is mandated by the Constitution), before rounding it all off with some creationist talking points and claiming that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on New Orleans for sin; also, 9/11 was God’s punishment for not instituting a theocracy: “We must have people in office or put people in office that will make law that corresponds with the word of god and the will of god. not political correctness. Not tolerance – it always brews intolerance.”

Here is his take on evolution: “If you throw God out, then you have to come up with some idea that you’re going to teach your kids about where they came from. And you have to teach that in school. And now all across our nations, kids are taught that they are advanced mutations of a baboon. They are taught that they came from a monkey. Let me tell you something. Evolution is not science – and I know that’s not politically correct … But what it is is an indoctrination to teach a godless worldview.” The problem with his opinion isn’t that it is politically incorrect. And apparently teaching evolution is also unconstitutional, since the Constitution tells us that the Bible should be the guideline for public school curricula: “It [evolution] defies our founding documents – our forefathers talked about the creator in the Declaration of Independence – read it!” Uh-huh. That the Origin of Species was published in 1856 is a problem but far from the main problem with that assertion.

That kind of guy.

Diagnosis: That kind of guy, indeed.

#1879: John Lear

The Internet has provided fantastic opportunities for the totally unhinged to provide color and joy in the form of the most deranged but fantastic, meth-dream-style conspiracy theories, and elaborate pastel metaphysical schemes that rival late-Medieval, neo-platonic theology in ornamentation and elaboration (though not in rigor, mind).

People like John Lear. Lear is associated with something called the Pegasus Research Consortium, and has apparently become something of a person of note in the so-called “dark side” community; he used to be a pilot, and once flew an aircraft for a CIA-linked company, which makes him virtually an insider to the world of conspiracies as his readers see things (and they certainly see things). Here are nebulous shadow governments controlling the world and the international drug trade, manufacturing AIDS and various other population-control schemes, and stalking their critics with black helicopters, all (possibly) for the purpose of turning Earth (and other planets) into slave labor camps. And their plans will be realized with the help of evil extraterrestrials (the “grays”, mostly – according to Lear, they seem to be little more than robots) with whom the governments have been colluding.

Much of the Pegasus Research Consortium’s webpage The Living Moon (which helpfully reveals immediately by its design what kind of website it is) is devoted to various anomalies, in particular lunar anomalies. Lear claims, based on blobsquatches and pareidolia, that there are trees and plants on the moon, as well as secret government bases – “seeing” what Lear sees in the images requires … a bit of imagination (to put things diplomatically); Lear himself seems to have a very well-trained eye for these things. Bob Lazar (hi Bob!) seems to be a contributor to the site, too.

They do other “anomalies” as well, including cryptozoology and out-of-place artifacts like the magnificent Wedge of Aiud, which is ostensibly a piece of some extraterrestrial or future (time-travelled) technology beyond our wildest dreams reportedly found in the vicinity of some mastodon bones in Romania in 1974. In reality, the Wedge of Aiud is, based on shape and construction material and metallurgical tests, consistent with being a tooth from a modern-day excavator bucket. But people willing to consider the former hypothesis tend to have priors that allow them to neglect the second hypothesis in favor of “the fact that the shape and characteristic of this object are [they aren’t] strikingly similar with the landing gear of a drone or special [sic] robot” of kinds that still only exist in fantasies and imaginations formed to fit the look of the “artifact”.

They also provide “esoteric wisdom”, in the section of the site called “the cosmic wisdom of the ancients”, which provides resources on everything and anything from “faerie secrets” (no, really – they have articles on how to spot and interact withfaeries; Lear sees them aplenty in blobs in photographs) to “holy graal [sic] secrets” (yes, it’s the holy grail bloodline, familiar from cutting-edge documentaries like the Da Vinci Code or Preacher – it runs through the Knights Templars to modern-day, Illuminati-controlled shadow governments), remote viewing (here is “Remote viewing Tibetan monks see Extra Terrestrial powers saving the World from destroying itself in 2012”), levitation (yes!), numerology, pyramid woo, astral projection and alchemy (most of the alchemy articles were written before 1600; such wisdom ages like fine wine). Claims the site: “Mainstream Academia has often in the past brushed this off as occult nonsense, witchcraft and pure fabrication, but recent policy has changed. Many modern Universities are studying Sacred Geometry, The Secrets of the Pyramid and other Ancient Arts.” We don’t think John Lear has been affiliated with academia in a while, if ever.

There is an interview with John Lear by Art Bell here.

Diagnosis: Probably harmless. Indeed, it is a bit unclear to us precisely what Lear actually believes about the stuff he is covering, but he doesn’t seem to care about its trustworthiness either, and that’s good enough for us.

#1878: Caroline Leaf

Oh, good grief!

Caroline Leaf is a religious fundamentalist who combines religious extremism with incoherent altmed pseudoscience, woo and fluffy new age word salads – it’s not just religious woo, but religious quantum woo. According to Leaf, “There is growing evidence that biological systems operate at the level of quantum physics. When applied to neuroscience, the Quantum Zeno Effect indicates that the brain becomes what you focus on [yeah: read that again]. Focus is directed attention and is a function of the mind. Thus, quantum physics supports the notion of mind over matter.” Calling this attempt at technobabble “not even wrong” would be an insult to incoherent nonsense. Leaf has managed to gain a relatively impressively sized audience, though, and is a staple on predatory shows targeted at the gullible and/or desperate, like Kenneth and Gloria Copeland’s Believer’s Voice of Victory and her own Dr. Leaf Show.

Leaf is the kind of person who says that thoughts can change your DNA. Indeed, according to Leaf, “… whatever reaction we have changes the DNA and the DNA then expresses and it builds either that which is what our bodies are wired for, so whether you’re Born Again or not, your body’s wired for love because that’s the design that God has made, and if we make a wrong choice, we build that.” Well, no, that’s not remotely how this works. But according to Leaf, not only does it work that way, but your current thoughts, by altering your DNA, are “affecting the future generations as well because the thoughts from your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather … and your mother has come through the sperm and the ova. So whatever thoughts we have as we go through life that we build into our heads basically passes through the sperm and the ova to the next four generations.” Just think about it, but keep in mind that Leaf probably assumes that you won’t; yes, your thoughts are “affecting the cells. It actually gets captured inside. Exactly … 75–100 trillion cells in our body are impacted by every single thought that we think. So it’s captured as a physical thing, it’s passed through the generations.” And yes, she is, indeed, alluding to epigenetics, which she doesn’t remotely understand but neither does her audience (so perhaps she might understand it,* which doesn’t really make any of this any better): “… we’re not bound by the sins of our fathers, We call that epigenetics. It’s actually called the science of epigenetics. Epi – over and above the genes – the fact that our mind controls genetic expression” (something that does sound suspiciously like it contradicts a rather central tenet of mainstream Christianity; better not think too hard about it – there’s no danger that Leaf ever did.) And for the grand finale, Leaf is going to tell us what thoughts are made of: “… we are speaking from physical thoughts made of proteins and all kinds of chemical structures inside of our brain that look like trees.”

Apparently Leaf has a degree in topics related to neuroscience; one imagines some interesting exchanges between her and her advisors. (Her website tells us that “The main coordinating center of the nervous system is the brain, which is located in the skull.” At least she got that part right – it’s more or less the only part she got right – and we can sort of imagine the aforementioned advisors breathing a sigh of relief.)

Leaf is the author of Switch On Your Brain and Think and Eat Yourself Smart, which you can safely pass over. Also, “[s]ince 1981, she has researched the science of thought as it relates to thinking, learning, renewing the mind, gifting, and potential,” which is an awfully strange way of putting it if you have been involved in, you know, actual scientific research on the brain or on psychology.

According to Leaf’s website (random capitalization abounds), “75% to 95% of the illnesses that plague us today are a direct result of our thought life,” and if you wonder where she got those numbers you are probably not in the target audience for her website (she does have testimonials, though). Also, “[m]edical research increasingly points to the fact that thinking and consciously controlling your thought life is one of the best ways, if not the best way of detoxing your brain.” No, she doesn’t provide any references here either, for rather obvious reasons (“detoxing your brain” means removing “toxic thoughts and emotions”.) But it is indeed a fine example of “deepity”. We’ll grant her that, and wonder in dread what her books read like.

Her website has a “scientific FAQs” section (which must really be seen to be believed) and a “Scriptural FAQs” section, which are more or less interchangeable and have nothing to do with science (“Man is a triune being consisting of a spirit, soul and body. The mind is synonymous to the soul. The mind operates in the spirit and, by extension, in the spiritual realm” – that’s the Science section). The “Scientific FAQs” section does, however, push anti-GMO conspiracies and complementarianism (“Mankind is created in the image of God – both male and female. The male and the female are different from, and yet complementary to, one another. God’s image is reflected in both men and women” – yes, that’s also from the Science section), and contains a substantial section on how speaking in tongues is good for your mental health as well as the general health benefits of prayer and worship (“Interestingly a number of scientific studies indicate that we are wired for God, that is, our brains have been designed to commune with God,” says Leaf, and cites this one; the part after “that is” is what we might call her “interpretation” of the research discussed in said article). There is a very tentative critique of some of her claims here.

Diagnosis: If you fall for this idiocy, you are really, really stupid. There’s really no way around it. No, seriously: this is among the dumbest New Age fluff we’ve yet encountered, and we’ve encountered a fair amount.

*She doesn’t. Here’s what her website says: “The mind thinks and produces thoughts. Thinking epigenetically affects DNA and gene expression. Thinking therefore lies within the sphere of epigenetics.” That’s … not a classically valid inference, and words fail to describe the premises. She does cite Dawson Church, but we are not sure even a loon like Church would endorse Leaf’s argument.