#2138: Allen Quist

Michele Bachmann is crazy, but compared to her mentor, Allen Quist, she can at least occasionally come across as deceptively reasonable (they’re close: Allen Quist’s wife Julie was for instance Bachmann’s district director while Bachmann was in Congress). Quist is a soybean farmer, former state representative, and twice gubernatorial candidate who served in the Minnesota House of Representatives from 1983 to 1989; he ran for Congess in 2013 and won the primaries, but lost the general election. Most notable for his anti-abortion line, Quist believes that abortion should be a first degree homicide and has even written a book, The Abortion Revolution and the Sanctity of Life, about the topic, which does not even try to engage with the moral philosophical literature on the issue. 

During the 1990s, Quist and Bachmann worked together to demolish Minnesota’s state curriculum standards through the group Maple River Education Coalition (MREC) (later EdWatch), considering the curriculum standards to be a gateway to a totalitarian society built on moral relativism due to its reliance on science and truth. In particular, MREC opposed the Profile of Learning, an attempt to bring the state into compliance with federal curriculum standards, which according to Quist was a step toward a United Nations takeover of Minnesota. Moreover, “sustainability” is just a euphemism for a future dystopia in which humans would be confined to public-transit-oriented urban cores (yes, “mass transit” is a conspiracy against freedom) and if the standards were implemented, Minnesota schools would become breeding grounds for “homosexual indoctrination.” Aaron Miller is apparently another one of Quist’s acolytes, especially with regard to their shared views on science and education.

Indeed, Quist has been consistently paranoid about the UN, especially Agenda 21, for decades, and has emerged as one of the leading Agenda 21 conspiracy theorists on the prairie, making several tours of Minnesota’s Tea Party circuit to warn about the terrors of Agenda 21. Part of the agenda, according to Quist – an especially effective talking point among his audiences – is international gun control, which Obama apparently was continuously on the verge of signing during his whole tenure as president. One of the UN’s major strategies for compliance to the gun ban effort is, as Quist sees it, apparently spreading “the myth of global warming”.

To get a sense of EdWatch’s approach to eduction, it is worth looking at Quist’s current efforts as editor of CurriculumModules.org (CMod), a children’s “education” and “learning” website targeted at homeschoolers, which “challenges the worldwide views of established education” and instead offers religiously motivated pseudoscience, anti-science, denialism and myths. Since Quist is a hardline young-earth creationist, one of CMod’s lessons suggests for instance not only that dinosaurs lived alongside humans in the past but continued to do so well into medieval times. As CMod sees it, history books and science books have falsely determined that dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago. Their counterevidence? “[T]he only reasonable explanation for the Stegosaurus carved in the stone on the wall of the Cambodian temple is that the artist had either seen a stegosaurus or had seen other art works of a stegosaurus. Either way, people and stegosaurs were living at the same time.” There is little reason to think that the stegosaurus depiction in question, which in any case does not depict a stegosaurus (but rather a rhino or a boar) unless severe pareidolia is applied, is not a fabrication. Elsewhere, Quist provides what he takes to be scientific evidence for the existence of dragons, and suggests that the Book of Job should be taught as a science lesson: “Today we know beyond a reasonable doubt – Job 41 is a picture-perfect description of SuperCroc,” which is silly on amazingly many levels. Quist once also told a reporter that he believed women were “genetically predisposed” to be subservient to men. Not that Quist knows what genesare.

As a politician, Quist was notable also for his unhealthy obsession with sex (he spent a total of 30 hours during a single 1988 session talking about it), and in particular sex he ostensibly doesn’t like. He campaigned hard against legalizing same-sex marriage, led efforts to prevent extending human rights protections to gays and lesbians, and famously sponsored a (failed) bill that would require AIDS testing for all marriage license applicants. He managed to draw some criticism for suggesting that supporting a gay counseling center at Minnesota State University would be similar to supporting one for the Ku Klux Klan, saying that “its presence suggests university approval for the homosexual lifestyle and the practice of sodomy … You wouldn’t have a center for the Ku Klux Klan,” and that “both would be breeding grounds for evil –AIDS, in this case.”

No fan of the ACA, Quist called it “the most insidious, evil piece of legislation I have ever seen in my life … [that seems to happen rather often in Quist’s case]. Every one of us has to be totally committed to killing this travesty … I have to kill this bill,” and argued that “Obama, Pelosi, [Tim] Walz: They’re not liberals, they’re radicals. They are destroying our country.”

Diagnosis: Wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, denialist and bigot. His influence, however, is greater than you might initially think, as he seems to have been training a small army of deranged extremists for the better part of three decades. 

#2137: Janet Quinn

Janet Quinn is an “Associate Professor, Adjunct,” (a bit unclear what that means) at the University of Colorado School of Nursing, and a true crackpot. Though she does have a PhD in Nursing Research and Theory Development from NYU, her thesis was on therapeutic touch (TT) (Quinn is a former student of Dolores Krieger) and an excellent example of what is accurately known as tooth fairy science: Quinn ostensibly showed that therapeutic touch need not use physical contact in order to produce results similar to the version that used actual touch. Of course, that result is not very surprising since TT has no (non-placebo) health benefits either way – TT is perhaps most famous for being falsified (e.g.) in an elementary school science project (Rosa et al., published in the Journal of the American Medical Association) – but that was not how Quinn or subsequent TT fans interpreted the findings (the dissertation, we emphasize, did not try to show that TT had any effect, just that actual touch made no difference).

According to her website, Quinn has additional training in “Transpersonal Psychology [no less], Holotropic Breathwork™ (certified) [being certified in a trademarked technique is not something that should bolster confidence], Hakomi Body-Centered Psychotherapy (individuals and couples), Spiritual Direction (certified) [again, nothing to be proud of]”. She has also been a “practitioner

of Centering Prayer and Meditation for 20 years” and “[t]eaching, researching and practicing Holistic/Integrative Nursing for over 30 years.” But she is also affiliated with the University of Colorado, some might point out, and indeed she is. Despite the fact that TT is bullshit and Quinn’s other qualifications are steeped in pseudoscienc, her classes and teaching materials are expensive and popular. Ironically, that the perceived benefits of TT are merely reflecting the fact that patients respond positively to extended, caring, interpersonal contact with their nurse was actually demonstrated in a 1989 study by Quinn herself, though she didn’t manage to realize that this was the conclusion.

According to Quinn, TT involves “centering” within your head in order to assess which areas of the energy field feel “out of balance” with the rest of the field; then you clear and mobilize the energy field before, finally, “directing” energy to facilitate healing. Quinn admits, though, that “we don’t have empirical data to demonstrate the existence of a personal energy field,” but “it’s a working hypothesis. In science, you’re allowed to do that.” Well, no; not after it has been shown, as conclusively as tests come, that the technique doesn’t work; it would be a legitimate to entertain such a hypothesis if the technique worked and we hadn’t figured out why it did. Quinn, of course, is not talking about “science” when she says “In science”. (Of course, one may also point out that her “working hypothesis” is a collection of vague metaphors, a half-baked attempt at poetry, and not a working hypothesis at all)

Quinn has also been involved in NCCAM-funded (i.e. taxpayer money) research on Distant Healing Efforts for AIDS by Nurses and ‘Healers’with Elisabeth Targ (daughter of Russell Targ). Targ herself explained the difficulty of doing such research given skepticism in the mainstream medical community; as she put it, she must guard against showing a negative result, because the mainstream will take those negative results and attempt to discredit what she is trying to show. We’ll just leave that admission up there as it is.

Diagnosis: Pseudoscientific nonsense from a New Age crackpot. Her ideas, though, have actually – and despite being New Age mumbo-jumbo with (demonstrably) no health benefits – had a lot of influence on nursing practices and cost taxpayers substantial amounts of money for useless tooth-fairy research. A waste of money, and a waste of a life. Sad.

#2136: Greg Quinlan

Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) is an organization devoted to promoting conversion therapy (also for children) and the (more or less mythical) ex-gay movement, the central ideological commitment being that homosexuality is not a product of biological determination – instead, being gay is “a political identity”. PFOX, which is supported by the Family Research Council, maintains that it champions and protects the rights of ex-gays, though ostensibly apart from their president there are virtually no actual ex-gays in the organization but plenty of anti-gay activists. The current president, Greg Quinlan, however, is, at least according to PFOX, a former homosexual who came out at the age of 23 – he “departed from homosexuality” in 1993, and went on to found the Pro-Family Network, a family values™ (primarily anti-gay marriage) organization.

In 2007, when the D.C. Board of Education approved new health and physical education guidelines, PFOX came out in opposition to “grade-specific sex education and information about HIV/AIDS” because such information “would undermine abstinence-only messages,” a claim that nicely illustrates that this is all about a religious notion of purity, not health, welfare or happiness (given that abstinence programs demonstrably aren’t conducive to the latter aims). Indeed, according to Quinlan, sex health ed classes are arenas for gays to recruit kids into the gay movement – the HIV/AIDS scare in the 80s and 90s was a tool for promoting their agenda, apparently. 

In 2014 PFOX became the target of national ridicule for putting up a billboard next to highway I-95 in Richmond with the text “Identical twins: One gay. One not. We believe twin research studies show nobody is born gay [not quite]” in between photos of two men, seemingly identical twins. However, both images on were stock photos of a single man who identifies himself as “openly gay and happy my entire life,” and not too impressed with PFOX’s billboard. Quinlan was unfazed by the criticism. Though they have petitioned serious organizations for attention, PFOX is currently mostly relegated to sharing the stage with things like birthers, Sandy Hook truthers, Liberty Counsel, Michele Bachmann and similar kinds of lunatic fringe dredge. Nevertheless, their pamphlet Preventing Bullying at Your School, which says that kids become gay because people call them gay and that later in life gay people bully those who “decide to pursue alternatives to homosexuality”, actually ended up being distributed at some high schools in 2012.

Those, of course, are just examples. Quinlan himself is, as you’d expect, a fundie, who in 2012 endorsed Lou Engle’s call to create a prayer movement – take a moment to think about it with this transcript as a prop – to confront the “homosexual and abortion tornadoes” that are “coming to destroy America”. Quinlan also participated at Engle’s Awakening conference, where he complained that New Jersey’s anti-bullying law is being used to bully Christian students and that the law, like most things he disagrees with, is actually fascism. In general, according to Quinlan, “homofascism” is threatening liberty through “anti-heterosexual legislation.” He has also linked homosexuality to pedophilia and called same-sex marriage “a ban on heterosexual rights.” To bolster his “argument” he touts the false claim that childhood molestation causes homosexuality and claims that marriage equality is “the heart of where Satan’s attacking”, which admittedly isn’t much of an argument but still as good as his arguments get.

As for gays themselves, Quinlan argues that gays and lesbians are experiencing “sexual cannibalism” and promote suicide among LGBT youth in order to succeed in “making martyrs out of the kids that we’re recruiting to behave as homosexuals.” You see, gays are all around, even where you don’t obviously see them, and so are their conspiracies. For instance, (then-)Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Elena Kagan are secretly gay – as well as “black-robed Nazis” who seek to “accommodate their own personal predilections, including their own sexuality” – and so is (then-)president Obama; Obama is “a down low president,” as Quinlan perceives things. His evidence? “Rumors”. No, seriously.

Meanwhile, the near-mythical ex-gays are being persecuted everywhere; indeed, the way ex-homosexuals are being treated today is just like what the Nazis did to the Jews, claims Quinlan (with Douglas McIntyre of Homosexuals Anonymous and allegedly ex-transgender Grace Harley), before likening the impact of the gay rights movement, which he described as demonic, to the wreckage of a tornado hitting a town; “we have lost our country,” lamented Quinlan. And to add, well, injury to injury, Satan, too, is working to drag ex-gays back into a homosexual lifestyle, as indicated by the track-record of previously declared ex-gays. It’s quite sad, actually.

There is a decent Greg Quinlan resource here.

Diagnosis: Angry, delusional, fundie conspiracy theorist. Yeah, nothing new. But Quinlan actually wields some influence in certain circles, and must be considered moderately dangerous.

#2135: Hal Puthoff

Harold Puthoff is an engineer and parapsychologist and one of the true legends of pseudoscience. In the 1970s and 1980s Puthoff directed a CIA/DIA-funded program at SRI International tasked with investigating paranormal abilities, collaborating with Russell Targ in a study of the purported psychic abilities of Uri Geller, Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Joseph McMoneagle and others, as part of the Stargate Project. Both Puthoff and Targ became convinced that Geller and Swann had genuine psychic powers, which doesn’t exactly speak too well of their methods or critical thinking abilities. Some of their “research” was summed up in the book Mind at Large: Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Symposia on the Nature of Extrasensory Perception(Puthoff, Targ and Charles Tart.

When psychologists attempted to replicate Targ and Puthoff’s remote viewing experiments (they seem to have invented the term by the way, which is really just a fancy name for “clairvoyance” or “telepathy”), they were unsurprisingly unable to do so. Accordingly, they investigated the procedure of the original experiments to see whether they could explain the discrepancy, and thus discovered that the notes given to the judges in Targ and Puthoff’s experiments contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday’s two targets, or they had the date of the session written at the top of the page. They concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment’s high hit rate (this was not the only problem with the “research”). One may wonder why Puthoff and Targ put the clues in there, but you probably shouldn’t. In fact, the investigators (Marks and Kammann) were initially able only to investigate the few actual transcripts Targ and Puthoff had actually published; to find out whether the unpublished transcripts contained cues, Marks and Kammann wrote to Targ and Puthoff requesting copies, which Targ and Puthoff refused to supply – which is pretty unusual in scientific contexts. Marks and Kammann were nevertheless able to obtain copies from the judge who used them, and guess what? The transcripts of course contained a wealth of cues. In other words, if Targ and Puthoff weren’t frauds, they must have been extraordinarily delusional, possibly even by pseudoscientist standards. Subsequent tests of their hypotheses were negative; moreover, students have easily been able to obtain Targ and Puthoff’s desired results based on the clues left in the transcripts alone. Though bunk, Puthoff and Targ’s experiments are still harvesting press coverage from the credulous (or spineless).

In 1985, Puthoff founded the for-profit company EarthTech International and a purportedly scientific research organization, Institute for Advanced Studies, where he is Director. Puthoff and EarthTech were granted a US Patent in 1998 after five years delay, due to controversy over their claim that information could be transmitted over a distance using a modulated potential with no electric or magnetic field components. The case is still used for educational purposes in patent law to illustrate that even for a valid patent “even a competent examiner may fail to distinguish innovation from pseudoscience.” 

In particular, Puthoff is famous for his promotion of zero-point energy (ZPE); indeed, he is probably the main promoter of the idea. And it is pseudoscience, of course. Puthoff’s work on ZPE lacked transparency and scientific backing, and as such bore a striking resemblance to his psi work.

It is worth mentioning that already in the 1960s, while a devout top-level scientologist, Puthoff wrote, in a scientology publication, that he had achieved “remote viewing” abilities during his ascension through scientology ranks, and that scientology had given him “a feeling of absolute fearlessness.” (He later severed all connections with scientology.) 

Diagnosis: Though it is hard to believe, Puthoff seems to be a true believer, which makes his systematic and striking failures to make his experiments methodologically sound all the more interesting. Probably harmless by now, but his legacy continues to sillify the Internet.

Hat-tip: Skepdic

#2134: Kevin Purfield

Kevin Purfield is an insane conspiracy nut whose main claim to fame is being arrested, apparently for harassing the families of the victims of the Aurora shootings to tell them that their loved ones didn’t really die and that it was all part of a grand conspiracy. The reason he concludes it was a conspiracy is that it is all conspiracies. Purfield also has a youtube channel where he delves into them: 9/11 was a hoax, there are military bases on the moon and what have you. He has earlier been apprehended for trespassing at a shopping center while talking about teleportation and “security bases on the moon.”

Apparently Purfield has also been harassing the families of the Newtown shootings, calling them up to tell them that there was no shooting. This is, of course, a theme that has become so pervasive among fringe lunatics that it has even drawn the attention of mainstream media.

Diagnosis: Ok, so we are talking about diagnosed mental illness here, and we tend to avoid calling those out. But mental illness doesn’t quite absolve you from agency and responsibility. Probably ultimately harmless, but he was certainly not perceived that way (justifiedly so) by the families he harassed.

Hat-tip: Dispatches from the Culture Wars

#2133: Fred Pulver

Tachyons are theoretical particles or waves that travel faster than the speed of light, a recurring theme in popular science, and thus far without empirical support for their existence. New Age religions are religions, however, and have never cared for empirical support. So, according to Fred Pulver, not only is it the case that the “Tachyon Field supplies the energy needs of all living organisms until balance is achieved, then it eases until called upon again. As it is needed, and a depletion occurs, it rushes in until balance is achieved once again;” Pulver has also harnessed its energy. It’s like ormus. Just in case you run out of tachyon balance, you can buy one of his many takionic products (beads, belts, water). The products are of course called “takionic” since “tachyon”, being a common word, cannot be trademarked; “takionic” can.

He claims to have empirical evidence, though: “Motors have been built which draw upon the Tachyon Field for energy. They exhibit strange behavior, such as increasing in speed the longer they run, even though they are connected to no visible power source.” Well, it’s not empiricalempirical: no one has actually seenthe aforementioned motors. But how can you doubt someone who offers to restore your takionic balance for something as mundane as money? Moreover, “[t]akionic products, with their aligned atomic polarities, enhance the body’s natural ability to draw from the Tachyon Field for its energy needs. Athletes have discovered that Takionic products allow them to perform faster and longer, and shorten recovery time. As conduits for input from the Tachyon Field, Takionic products are proving themselves in the sports performance arena.” He probably just forgot to name said athletes due to sheer excitement over the results.

Oh, but there is more: Did you know that “[t]achyon theory is holistic”? Bet you didn’t. It is holistic “because it accepts the notion of two interdependent universes which are actually indivisible: the visible, sub-light speed universe and an invisible, faster-than-light one. Tachyon theory also substantiates omnipresence, a purely metaphysical concept. God is omnipresent (simultaneously existing everywhere). Omnipresent existence can only occur at faster-than-light speeds, since slower-than-light travel takes time to cross space. Therefore, omnipresence can only be an attribute of a Tachyon Universe where time and space are uniform.” This is not quite what “holistic” means, but we have at this point left the realm of coherence and sense behind a long time ago anyways, so why not? He can even explain the powers of healers: “Healers have learned to access the Tachyon Field’s resources for its healing powers more successfully than the average person has.” (Ok, so “explain” may be a bit too strong.) At least he’s got testimonials (some rather confused examples here), including an enthusiastic endorsement from Gary Null, no less.

He’s not the only one to tap the marketing potential of tachyons, though. There is at least also e.g. the, Advanced Tachyon Technologies (ATT) of Santa Rosa. They’ve got chakra balancing kits.

Apparently Pulver is also an expert on sanpaku, the idea that it is a symptom (or proof, or whatever) of physical and spiritual imbalance if the white of the eye can be seen between the pupil and the lower lid when the subject looks forward. The condition can ostensibly be cured by a macrobiotic diet. Apparently both JFK and Robert Kennedy were sanpaku, as was Marilyn Monroe. I suppose we’ll have to confirm with Barry Martin.

“Do we all have to conform to the scientific method before we promote anything? Such rigidity seems counterproductive and illogical to me,” says Pulver when the scientific basis of his claims are questioned. Meanwhile, just to have it both ways, his website states that “[h]undreds of tests conducted on students and adults revealed that this unique headband improved their mathematical test scores by as much as 20-30%. The headband delays mental fatigue and heightens focus and concentration.” The tests are, of course, as unavailable for double-checking as the motors and athletes he claims to have observed.

Diagnosis: Seems to be a true believer, which is pretty incredible.

Hat-tip: skepdic

#2132: Ana Puig

Ana Puig is a Tea Party Operative who was appointed legislative liaison for the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue as part of Governor Tom Corbett’s attempt to turn “Pennsylvania’s state government into a favor mill for campaign supporters.” Puig, previously co-chair of and registered lobbyist for a local group called the Kitchen Table Patriots, had earlier argued that Obama was a Communist in the mold of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, citing her own experience (as a native of Brazil) to argue for a “direct correlation between what’s happening in the United States and what has happened in Brazil and Latin America –  the implementation of 21st Century Marxism. In other words, a camouflaged statement for Communism.” She went on to claim that “21st Century Marxism” – which seems to mean whatever she disagrees with for whatever reason – would be implemented after “a liberal or progressive candidate [like Obama] is introduced to the masses as the messiah that is going to fix all problems imposed to them by evil capitalists.”

Apart from her red scare delusions Puig has been caught defending a Nazi memorabilia enthusiast in her organization as “a historian” and “an extremely smart person,” featured a blog promoting birther conspiracy theories and identified then-president Obama as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood on her group’s website. Not the least, she has spent a lot of warning of the creeping threat of Sharia law in the United States, which, of course, would be inconsistent with a communist takeover, but consistency is, as we all know, a liberal conspiracy. And of course, Puig and her group are climate change deniers, dismissing climate change as “fraud science backed by the mercenary alarmists in the scientific community and the U.N.”

Diagnosis: So predictable, yet so stupid. Ana Puig is, of course, your standard green-ink conspiracy theorist, but for Gov. Corbett what mattered was apparently her ideological commitments and campaign contributions. The really scary thought is that, as long as ideological stance is what matters, it would actually have been difficult for him to find anyone more competent at this point. (Puig herself is, for the record, gone now).

Hat-tip: ThinkProgress