#2795: Jacob-Franz Dyck

The distinction between sovereign citizen activists and common crooks and frauds is a fuzzy one. Jacob-Franz Dyck – insofar as he is still around (we’re not sure) – is a case in point. Dyck, who (ostensibly) believes that U.S. laws don’t apply to him, is a serial harasser and felon who has been defrauding his way across Florida for a while with flamboyant and complicated schemes; in particular, Dyck has been filing sovereign deeds on houses he does not own and allegedly setting up trusts that would ostensibly protect other people’s property from foreclosure or seizure, as well as simulating legal processes by setting up various grand juries and sending lengthy pretend legal letters around – Dyck’s letters are template-constructed stuff that open with invoking the Messiah and a slew of Bible quotes before launching into an incoherent mess of arcane laws and imaginative nonsense, e.g. that banks cannot bring foreclosure actions in state courts that fly an American flag with yellow and gold fringes or that properties are protected from foreclosure by “pure trusts” and “land patents” that can never be broken: “With pure trusts you don’t have to pay taxes and the government can’t tell you what to do with your property”, Dyck tells his clients, who often go on to discover the hard way that such claims are based exclusively on Dyck’s imagination. Dyck is also a former dentist who was stripped of his dental license in 1988 and later spent some years as a self-professed “holistic healer” – as well as some years in prison around the turn of the century for grand theft.

 

Several of his accomplices, such as Gary Chenot and Khamma Inthavong (unlawful use of notary commission and a “simulated legal process” charge), have landed themselves in real and serious legal trouble as a result of buying into Dyck’s incoherent nonsense.

 

Diagnosis: Dingbat insanity, of course, but like those marketing alternative cancer cures, Dyck tends to target people who have landed themselves in real, difficult situations, and desperation is a powerful motivator. Dyck is ruining people’s lives, and insofar as he’s still around, he’s unlikely to have gotten any better. Take note of the name if you live in the relevant areas.

#2794: Claire Dwoskin

The Dwoskin Family Foundation has for a long time served as a generous source of a substantial part of the funding for various anti-vaccine organizations and anti-vaccine activist efforts. Indeed, the foundation has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to organizations like the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) and Generation Rescue, provided substantial funding for Leslie Manookian, Kendall Nelson and Chris Pillard’s antivaccine propaganda movie The Greater Good, and generously supported antivaccine activist Chris Shaw’s group at the University of British Columbia – including 125 000 dollars to cover lab costs for the “Aluminum Toxicity Project” to enable it to reach the conclusions the Dwoskins wanted it to reach. There are more details about the foundation’s funding of anti-vaccine efforts here.

 

In 2013, the Dwoskins – Albert and Claire – also founded the organization Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute (CMSRI) to streamline their anti-vaccine efforts: the organization governed the Childrens’ Medical Safety Research Institute Endowment Fund, which was set up to provide “research grants” to groups and individuals willing to coordinate their results with what the Dwoskins thought the results should be, in particular research on what the Dwoskins determined, prior to research, to be “vaccine induced brain and immune dysfunction”; the CMSRI was founded because “[a]s a private foundation, the Dwoskin Family Foundation was limited to how it could raise and use donated funds. Laws governing tax-exempt organizations made it difficult to dedicate 100% of all donations to philanthropic [i.e. antivaccine] causes. In many situations, especially when dealing with international research organizations, donations were heavily taxed.” And the list of people who have received funding from the CMSRI is long, and includes most of the usual suspects involved in anti-vaccine junk research and misinformation, such as Yehuda Shoenfeld (Israel), who invented the made-up, allegedly vaccine-associated autoimmune disease ASIA, Christopher Shaw (Canada), Lucija Tomljenovic (Canada) (more on Dwoskin’s funding and Shaw & Tomljenovic’s research here), Christopher “no government funded this research [because the Dwoskins did]” Exley (UK), Anthony Mawson, Martha Herbert, glyphosate loon and conspiracy theorist Stephanie Seneff, David & Mark Geier (no less) and Brian Hooker, who have used to funds to produce a string of strikingly flawed and later retracted papers and articles in predatory journals, such as this one by Anthony Mawson (and funding from the CMSRI). There is more information on CMSRI and their efforts here, as well as here – that the Dwoskins have also been substantial contributors to political campaigns (e.g. Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid) at least ensured that their preferred semi-anonymity as antivaccine activsts became hard to maintain. The institute also ran its own blog, where people like conspiracy theorist Celeste McGovern could write about how there is a “conspiracy” to “suppress” anti-vaccine studies by retracting them due to obvious and demonstrable methodological flaws and dishonesty. Fortunately, the CMSRI closed down a couple of years ago after Claire and Albert got divorced.

 

Claire Dwoskin has herself served on the board of the NVIC. And according to her, she is, like most antivaxxers, officially “not antivaccine but pro-safe vaccines”, as illustrated e.g. by her comment to a segment John Stossel aired on his daughter’s struggle with pertussis: “What his daughter went through is NOTHING compared to what the families of autistic children go through every day of their lives. No disease can match this record of human devastation. Vaccines are a holocaust of poison on our children’s brains and immune systems. Shame on you all” (our emphasis). Spoken like a true advocate for safe vaccines (and for the record: vaccines demonstrably do not cause autism) … heck, Claire Dwoskin’s email address is “novaccine4me@XXXXX.com”.

 

Notably, throughout its existence, the CMSRI and the Dwoskin Family Foundation provided substantial funding for efforts to paint vaccines as unsafe and no funding whatsoever for the development of safe vaccines. Rather, the CMSRI “firmly believes”, falsely, that vaccines are “significant causal factors in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, autism, autoimmune diseases and other serious chronic health conditions”. In 2011, the Dwoskins did arrange what they called a “Vaccine Safety Conference” at a luxury resort in Jamaica, where the talks included  “Rethinking the germ theory” and Andrew Wakefield himself speaking about “Autism & Vaccines: a Research Strategy Focused on Cause”; there was nothing about safe vaccines.

 

And CMSRI had a long history of promoting demonstrably false antivaccine misinformation. With regard to the largely mythical increase in the prevalence of ASD based on an increase in ASD diagnoses, the center – presumably Claire Dwoskin herself – falsely stated that “[t]he reason for this increase may be linked to certain ingredients found in vaccines, specifically aluminum formulated vaccines” (nope) and that “current research is suggesting that the use of vaccines are [sic] playing a role in its development.” “current research”, of course, means antivaxx rants; real research unambigously shows that vaccines play no such role. Then there are the toxins gambits, of course; according to CMSRI, but (predictably) not reality, “[c]ertain toxic ingredients in vaccines have not been individually tested for safety such as aluminum adjuvants, polysorbate 80 and Thimerosal”.

 

Now, the CMSRI fortunately closed down when the Albert and Claire started their divorce proceedings, and among the Dwoskins, we have focused on Claire insofar as Albert has apparently come to his senses: “After seeing a great deal of evidence, I have concluded that concerns about the safety of vaccination are unfounded. The best way to protect children is to make sure they have all their vaccinations as recommended by scientists, doctors and other healthcare professionals. […] I regret my participation in the CMSRI’s work and disagree with her [Claire’s] views on the dangers of vaccination.” Good for him. Claire Dwoskin, however, appears unrepentant and proud of her antivaccine efforts, while marketing herself as “a child health advocate, philanthropist and leader of an international effort to address the increasing incidence of chronic illness and disability, including autoimmune diseases, and age related neurological diseases”.

 

Diagnosis: Although she has hopefully lost access to nearly endless funding for her conspiracy theory-fuelled anti-wellbeing projects, Claire Dwoskin remains a deranged conspiracy theorist and a major danger to everything that is nice and good in the world.

#2793: Daniel DuSoleil

Daniel DuSoleil is pastor of the Christian Center of Elko and a creationist. DuSoleil is, however, particularly concerned with how teachers, as he sees it, uses science to bully Christians, and has plenty of hearsay and implausible anecdotes to make his case, such as the story of an anonymous student of his who said she had been called “stupid” in front of a class “because she would not accept the fraudulent evolutionary evidence of Haeckel’s embryos” (which, if at all based on reality, suggests a student trying to use Haeckel’s embryos to discredit evolution, with understandably dismal results): yes, it’s the familiar creationist argument by appeal to persecution. DuSoleil also points out how arrogant and bullyish atheists/proponents of science (DuSoleil doesn’t really distinguish them) are: Indeed some people, to DuSoleil’s consternation, actually openly endorse atheism and put up posters to that effect: “What an offensive way to denigrate Christian students”. Sheer persecution!

In favor of his position on scientific matters, DuSoleil has some well-mined quotes and PIDOOMAs. Did you know that “Einstein believed the universe demonstrated intelligent design”? Neither did we, (nor did Einstein, for that matter), though as a creationist talking point it’s admittedly not particularly original.

 

Diagnosis: Yet another local village fundie denialist. There are lots and lots of them, and many – like DuSoleil – have ready access to audiences that may be likely to consider him an authority. Which is depressing.

 

Hat-tip: The Sensuous Curmugeon

#2792: Kirk Durston

According to the Discovery Institute, who tends to publish his rants, Kirk Durston is a “scientist, philosopher, and clergyman”. Most importantly, Durston is a proponent of intelligent design creationism, and like most proponents of intelligent design, he focuses his efforts on criticizing the theory of evolution or theories of the origin of life or the universe that don’t invoke supernatural forces because he makes the fundamental mistake of confusing (hypothetical) evidence against the theory of evolution with evidence for intelligent design. Not that his criticisms have much merit either. A favorite trick is, predictably, to misleadingly portray real scientific claims and debates.

Much of his writing concerns the alleged “corruption of science”, for instance the fact that scientists sometimes entertain theories that are hard to test (like the multiverse): modern science is, according to Durston, plagued by “ ‘fantasy science,’ where science fiction is often confused with science”; instead, scientists should, as Durston sees it, accept the role of God. He does not try to apply the testability criterion to that one. On other occasions he does claim that intelligent design is “testable and verifiable” because it predicts “functional information” but is predictably stingy about details (like what the hypothesis actually is, what the predicted observation – “functional information” – actually is, and how and why the unspecified hypothesis predicts the particular and specific functional information it supposedly predicts).

 

Diagnosis: Yes, they are still chugging along, even though the intelligent design movement stopped having much impact on anything a while ago, with people like Durston appealing to the same PRATTs intelligent creationists were appealing to twenty years ago. Boring.

#2791: Patrocel Duque

 

Local village idiots self-publishing insane screeds promising to revolutionize everything is hardly news, and we cannot claim to have actually read Patrocel N. Duque’s vanity press-issued book Mathematical Proofs that God Exists, but we feel confident about including him here on the basis of his own description of its contents. Apparently, Duque’s book employs “the infinity equation”, which  is ostensibly “used today in physics and mathematics”, and Duque helpfully “deciphered and correlated it in terms of divinity”. People with any mathematics background might wonder what on Earth he’s talking about, but it’s reasonable to suspect that we’re entering the venerable field of numerology here.

 

And what precisely does he claim to achieve? “Significantly, my book refutes the Big Bang theory of Stephen Hawking, that the world came from nothing and there’s no relevance of God in the world’s creation, even if there is an organizer and designer as espoused by intelligent design proponents”. That is not an entirely precise rendition of ‘the Big Bang theory of Stephen Hawking’, but Duque’s is a branch of mathematics that eschews accuracy and precision. But oh, the book “also refutes Charles Darwin’s evolution of man theory – that man came from the apes”, a theory that Duque speculates might “contribute to the rising incidence of violence in schools and our society” insofar as it’s taught in schools. Indeed, some “verses in the Bible could be proven mathematically,” as well (whatever that means given that they’re not supposed to mathematical theorems), and “the miracle of Jesus feeding 5,000 followers from five loaves of bread and two fish was also proven to be mathematically feasible” (in which case it would, presumably, not be a miracle). So there.

 

Duque himself is apparently based in the US territory of Guam and his publisher is Infinity Publishing, a company that promises to provide you “with the easiest and most comprehensive self-publishing experience”.

 

Diagnosis: Pretty obscure and unlikely to make any significant impact on anything; he might still be counted as a symptom of some slightly disturbing undercurrent of civilization, though, so worth a mention. 

 

Hat-tip: Sensuous Curmudgeon

#2790: Margaret Dunkle

Margaret Dunkle is a Lead Research Scientist at the George Washington School of Public Health’s Department of Health Policy, author and a Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame laureate for her work as “an author, activist, and unsung heroine of Title IX”.

 

More importantly, Dunkle is a completely unhinged conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist, who, according to herself, has “a family member who is vaccine-injured”. Given her public status, however, she gets to publish her conspiracy theories in outlets that have the potential to reach a rather large number of people, and her 2011 piece in the Baltimore Sun, “We don’t know enough about childhood vaccines [we really do]: Are 36 doses of vaccine by age 2 too much [it isn’t], too little, or just right?”, is telling enough. In the piece, Dunkle regurgitates a range of anti-vaccine talking points you could instead locate on the websites of familiar anti-vaccine conspiracy cults such as NVIC or SafeMinds. After complaining that “debates” over vaccines are often “fact-free” because most people fail to know even “[h]ow many immunizations does the federal government recommend for every child during the first two years of life,” Dunkle says that the number is “36”, which is false unless you engage in some deliberately deceptive anti-vaccine counting exercise. Then she cites GayleDeLong’s execrable pseudoscientific data-mining to claim that there is a correlation between vaccine uptake and the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders. There really, really isn’t.

 

Apart from references to garbage pseudo-studies, Dunkle employs a range of standard anti-vaccine tropes, including “too many, too soon” nonsense and complaints about vaccine ingredients, in particular aluminum, which, contrary to anti-vaccine mythology, is safe. Indeed, Dunkle is not afraid of using toxins gambits, especially with regard to thimerosal and formaldehyde, a normal byproduct of human metabolism. Dunkle points out that thimerosal “is 49.6 percent mercury”, but being chemically illiterate (and/or dishonest), she fails to note some rather crucial distinctions.

 

Diagnosis: Unhinged conspiracy theorist and denialist, and regardless of her social standing and position: her nonsense and lunacy on vaccines demonstrates that she is unlikely to be trustworthy or worth listening to about anything whatsoever.

 

Hat-tip: David Gorski @ SciencebasedMedicine

#2789: Robert Charles Dumont

[yes, we’ve mentioned him before, but he deserves a separate entry]

 

In 2014, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation finally took action against DAN! doctor and general quack Anju Usman, director of True Health Medical Center in Naperville and owner of Pure Compounding Pharmacy, for (a long history of) subjecting autistic children to “unwarranted, dangerous therapies”. Usman was fined, ordered to take additional medical education classes, placed on probation and forced to have her work reviewed. Unfortunately, Usman also got to influence the decision on which doctor was to review her work, and the task was assigned to Robert C. Dumont, with the likely consequence that Illinois children will continue to suffer from dangerous quackery for years to come.

 

Dumont is indeed a pediatrician, but pediatrics in the US has long been plagued by quackery, and Dumont is also member of the Raby Institute for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern and an acupuncturist. In fact, Dumont offers an array of “integrative” approaches, including homeopathy, no less. One would conclude that Dumont would not be an ideal candidate for the position of supervising someone with a tendency to offer quackery, but Dumont has, nefariously, also been involved in multiple efforts to whitewash quackery; in 2015, for instance, he testified at an FDA hearing in Bethesda on the regulation of homeopathic remedies, and he has been caught shilling for Boiron, a leading manufacturer of homeopathic remedies and quackery, as an expert witness. At the FDA hearing, Dumont testified, falsely, that homeopathic remedies are “exceptionally versatile and efficacious for many medical problems” and that he has “prescribed homeopathic medicines in the hospital for premature infants”, as well as used it for “nausea, vomiting and losing weight” for a patient undergoing chemotherapy. A poster he wrote with Youngran Chung (apparently his wife), ‘Homeopathy, an Effective, Practical, and Safe Therapeutic Approach: Principles, Evidence and Examples of Practical Application’, similarly gives you an idea of his aptitude for research (and honesty): the poster does emphasize, a number of times, that “homeopathy is an extremely safe modality” (which, even though it’s water, is only partially correct) but doesn’t, despite the promise in the title, even try to indicate that it is effective for anything, since it so obviously isn’t.

 

Dumont is, in particular, using homeopathy for autism quackery – precisely what Usman above was sanctioned for – as demonstrated for instance by his presentation on “Use of Clinical Homeopathy in Autism Spectrum Disorder” at the International Conference of Clinical Homeopathy in Los Angeles.

 

Diagnosis: Utterly delusional and at least a potential danger to people around him. That he is allowed to offer advice to people with medical conditions, including children, is a travesty.