#1613: James Fitzgerald

Oh, yeah: The end. It’s near again. It’s been a while since we’ve seen one of these in the wild. Perhaps it’s because they are these days rather hired by certain types of wingnut media, such as the WND, to talk about blood moons or sell survivalist gear. James Fitzgerald got one of WND’s trademark advertisments-disguised-as-opinion-columns after having written a book, The 9/11 Prophecy, which claims that 9/11 was the beginning of the last days. His argument is primarily that “Jesus specifically taught that his followers would be able to recognize this period once it began,” and he is currently recognizing it and is a follower of Jesus. Yes, the argument has some shortcomings, as does his interpretation of Bible verses, but you know. Thanks for playing, James.

Diagnosis: Tinfoil hat idiot. Probably harmless to anyone but those who love and care about him.

#1612: Clayton Fiscus

Clayton Fiscus has been a member of the Montana House of Representatives, serving the 46th District, since 2013, and has already managed to put his stamp on a group already characterized by rank insanity. Already before he got in he drafted a bill that would “[r]equire public schools to teach intelligent design along with evolution,” apparently oblivious to the legal problems that would engender. It died pretty quickly, and one almost pities Fiscus’s attempts to defend his pseudoscience and denialism against the experts during the committee hearing. Here and here are some support letters.

But did he learn anything? Not much at least. In 2015 he was at it again, this time with an academic freedom bill constructed according to the recommendations of the Discovery Institute, that would would encourage high school teachers to present evolutionary biology as a disputed theory and protect those who teach creationism in the classroom, all to “emphasize critical thinking,” as he called it. It died as well, but we don’t for a moment think he’s given up.

Diagnosis: Another inhofely dim bulb in a state legislature. While his efforts on behalf of pseudoscience have failed thus, he is in a position of some power (there’s lots of crazies in the Montana legislature, after all), which is a cause for concern.

#1611: Lee Finkle et al.

John L. Fielder, author of the Handbook of Nature Cure Volume One: Nature Cure vs. Medical Science, the first chapter of which is “That Fallacious Germ Theory”, is Australian. Lee Finkle, however, hails from Wisconsin, but doesn’t seem to have had any contact with anywhere in reality for a long time. Finkle is a spokesperson for the Pleiadians. The Pleiadians are from the star system called the Pleiades. Whereas “[t]he Lyrans from Lyra are our common ancestors.” Finkle knows this because they told her. They also told her the history of their race and of Earth, which sounds a bit like a mishmash of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica; apparently the Pleiadians discovered the Earth (which, by the way, is 626 billion years old) around 225,000 B.C. and mixed with the people here, who were apparently already of alien descent, and – with the permission of The Galactic Federation, no less – started to create civilizations. They left in about 10 AD, but left behind Jesus, whose lineage were part Pleiadian and who “was a very evolved soul”. For good measure, Finkle has also predicted that “as Earth enters the Photon Band by year 2000, the Pleiadians are going to help bring all humans on Earth into the light.” We are not sure whether 2000 left her disappointed or whether she finally received the help she craved.

Apparently Finkle is associated with Alienworlds, whatever that is, but we encountered her (and rants about the same stuff by one Billy Meier) at something called the Burlington UFO Center. Their webpage is here, and it’s pretty amazing. We couldn’t resist clicking on “Turn Your Television Set into a UFO Detector. Click Here for Instructions,” which took us to an even more amazing page featuring one Mary Sutherland, who, among very many other things, claims to have found Atlantis in Kentucky and promises you an “Invisible Man caught on camera, crossing the road” – an invisible green man, in fact (being both invisible and green (and catchable on camera) is pretty amazing in itself) – that Mary encountered in the form of a Thunderbird after having been telepathically told by Native Americans to do a spiral dance. But the BUC site itself really contains an almost endless supply of good information. Did you know that “the movie PREDATOR was based off a real encounter”? Or that cattle mutilations “serve a purpose for the aliens,” namely that they “have a genetic disorder in that their digestive system is atrophied and non-functional” and that they use the tissue they “extract” from cattle instead? Neither did we. Nor, for that matter, do the people at Burlington UFO center, but that is a different matter.

Diagnosis: It really is an amazing website, and will definitely make you both a little happy and a little sad at the same time. Oh, and Lee Finkle probably needs some attention, too.

#1610: John Ferrer, Lori McKeeman et al.

Ok, so these are not exactly leaders of the anti-science movements, but they are worth a mention nonetheless, as representatives of what is probably a rather large number of teachers, administrators and suchlike who make their own local efforts to save souls from science, truth and reason and deliver them to fervent religious fundamentalism. John Ferrer and Lori McKeeman are two among a group of people (the rest are unnamed or named only by pseudonym) who spent 10 days in Seattle at the Discovery Institute’s summer seminar learning about intelligent design in 2013.

Of course, according to the Discovery Institute intelligent design is science, not religion, but funnily enough that doesn’t seem to have registered with the participants (and was certainly not a motivation for attending). Ferrer, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy of religion “sees himself as an evangelist for the redemption of universities,” and believes Christians (i.e. Taliban-fundie Christians) need to work hard be the best students in the classroom to enter top-notch grad programs and places of influence in politics, business, and academia. And once they are professors or college presidents, they have the power to change what is taught to the country’s future leaders. Not unlike the seven mountains ideology, in fact. So for Ferrer, intelligent design has everything to do with the political advancement of fundamentalist religion.

Lori McKeeman, on the other hand, is a, uh, “science” teacher at The Potter’s School, an online fundamentalist school targeted at homeschoolers and missionary and military families. According to herself, she coaches students through experiments such extracting DNA from peas and fruit, and then uses science to demonstrate the accuracy of the Bible; for instance hyssop, a cleansing agent mentioned in the Bible, does in fact contain thymol, which is an antiseptic actually used in mouthwash. Impressive.

Diagnosis: Yes, these kind of people are actually in a position of power of children in the US. And, true to the tenets of the intelligent design creationist movement, they are determined to win the battle over science by outreach and politics and avoiding doing any science whatsoever.

#1609: Rebecca Ferguson

The Chalkboard Campaign: We Need to Talk is a video that in 2012 went viral in the anti-vaccine horde and was generally treated there as if it provided solid evidence that vaccines are unsafe. Of course, it did no such thing, and was instead just a predictable collection of pseudoscience and misinformation. It’s creator, Rebecca Ferguson, is a board member of VaxTruth.org and a mother who claims to have “recovered” her daughter Caroline using all manner of “biomedical” pseudoscience. The video is not her first attempt. She has previously made videos about her daughters consisting of very straightforward examples of confusing correlation and causation: Blaming vaccines for her daughter’s autism, and for every sign of improvement, such as developing language and so on, simply assuming that none of these developments would have happened without the antivirals, gluten-free diet, chelation therapy, hyperbaric oxygen chambers and homeopathic remedies her poor daughter was subjected to at the time.

As for the Chalkboard Campaign, Ferguson appears to have accepted the myth of an autism epidemic, and the video is guided by the question: “What is causing all the neurological disorders?” To answer that, Ferguson claims that “we dug deep into the science,” but she evidently avoided science like the plague for the purposes of creating the video, relying instead on rants by infamous cranks like Russell Blaylock, Ginger Taylor and Andreas Moritz, who thinks that cancer is the “wisdom” of the body and that chemotherapy doesn’t work – there is, shall we say, a dearth of peer-reviewed, published literature among her sources. Then there are some standard tricks, like providing a scary-sounding (to the chemically illiterate) list of vaccine ingredients. All of it leads up to an impressive string of ridiculous, pseudoscientific conclusions. So Ferguson claims that vaccines decrease immune reactivity to viruses and increase immune reactivity to allergens (apparently that one comes from Moritz), and that “even the smallest amounts of heavy metals and toxins in vaccines” can “bypass all natural defenses” because they’re injected directly into the body (a common misunderstanding among antivaxx activists), which can apparently lead to something she calls “gut-brain encephalopathy.” Real doctors won’t tell you this, of course, since they are just “pharma shills”; no, for the truth you need to locate the Internet blogs of crazy conspiracy theorists like Andreas Moritz. And then she claims that “there has never been a single study of the current vaccine schedule,” which, of course, is tested every time a new childhood vaccine is introduced: She ignores that fact, of course, since they aren’t the kind of study the antivaxxers want; they putatively want epidemiological studies looking at vaccinated vs. unvaccinated populations. Which exist. But you know: Those studies don’t prove what Ferguson already “knows” is true, and therefore don’t count.

Diagnosis: Apparently she’s talking primarily to the already converted – her claims are presumably sufficiently stupid and superficial to prevent any widespread impact – but attitudes and delusions like Ferguson’s are still frightening and likely to cause real harm. So: dangerous.