#588: Gabriel Cousens

Gabriel Cousens is a health writer who describes himself in the following manner:

“Dr. Sir Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D.(H), D.D. (Doctor of Divinity), Diplomate of American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine, Diplomate Ayurveda, a physician of the soul, teaches and lives the sevenfold peace. To the process of awakening and healing, Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D.(H), weaves a background as a holistic physician, medical researcher, world-recognized live-food nutritionist, psychiatrist, family therapist, homeopath, Rabbi, acupuncturist, Ayurvedic practitioner, expert on green juice spiritual fasting and detoxification fasting, ecological leader, Reiki master, internationally celebrated spiritual teacher, author, lecturer, culture-bridger, world peaceworker, to give a unique holistic approach to nurturing the hungry soul.”

That ought to tell you quite a bit about what kind of cretin we are dealing with here. Cousens’s work, in all its glory, centers around New Age woo and bullshittery (a mixture, it seems, of sycophancy and criticism of those whose unsupported claims differ from his own – e.g. Johnny Lovewisdom (criticism) and Adi Da (endorsement)). A mainstay of his particular kind of woo is Raw foodism, and he employs a wide arsenal of crackpottery (particularly the Gerson protocol) and New Age religious fluffery to prop up his advice, as well as primitive medieval vitalism: the uncooked baby carrot is “alive”, while the cooked carrot is “dead”; Hence, cooking and pasteurization “kill” food, and raw food is “living”. Why it would be an advantage that the carrot is alive is not entirely obvious, but Cousens does at least have pictures of the auras of energy surrounding the food to prove it. His rainbow diet is aptly featured here.

Apparently Cousens is the founder of the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, “the world's leading spiritual, vegan raw and live food retreat center,” and the author of Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days, in which he claims that enzymes are food-qi and that treating diabetes is easy. It is discussed here. He’s got … anecdotes to back it all up, endorsements by one Joel Fuhrman – who appears not to know the first thing about reality – and plenty of thoroughly false and rather random-sounding assertions. In the accompanying video he does tone down the woo a little to make it more mainstream (without making it anywhere near reality-based), but both the video and the “Raw for Life” Encyclopedia on his website feature “expert” commentaries from Morgan Spurlock, Mike Adams and Gary Null, which shouldn’t exactly confer much authority to his claims.

Cousens has been involved in a lot of nasty bullshit over the years, including raising some controversy over his fantastically crankycellular therapy, and he has been responsible for at least one death, though according to Arizona’s board of homeopathic medicine (yes they have one) Cousens wasn’t guilty of malpractice by their standards – “standards of homeopathy” aren’t much to write home about, though.

With one David Wagner Cousens has also written Tachyon Energy: A New Paradigm in Holistic Healing. No, it is not evidence-based; and yes, it is quantum woo taken just a few steps further.

Diagnosis: A staunch enemy of humanity, Cousens is a monstrous supercrank who unabatedly continues his campaign to fool people into ruining their own lines. Repugnant.

#182: Barbara Marx Hubbard

Nope, she’s apparently not related to that other more famous Hubbard. Barbara Marx Hubbard is the current President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, author of several books and featured in the 2006 film “Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within”, a ‘documentary about rediscovering an enchanted cosmos in the modern world’. Yes, it’s woo, and it’s the quantum type – full-fledged ‘What the bleep do we know’-style.

She claims that humanity, having ‘come to possess the powers that we used to attribute to the gods’, is presently in a critical and dangerous ‘Late Transition’ to ‘the next stage of human evolution’, a transition that was commenced with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima. The idea is ‘Conscious Evolution’, the ‘evolution of evolution, from unconscious to conscious choice’, in other words ‘an awakening of a 'memory' that resides in the synthesis of human knowing, from spiritual to social to scientific as the only solution"

That kind. Read her conversation with the equally fluffily gullible Jeff Mishlove here, or her interview with Dennis Hughes (publisher of Share Guide, The Holistic Health Magazine and Resource Directory) here to get an idea. She is, in other words, your typical new age (“futurist”) bullshitter, an accomplice of Deepak Chopra and Michael Bernard Beckwith who employs scientific concepts she doesn’t begin to (or try to) comprehend, filling them out with wishful thinking and what she wants from post-modernism.

Diagnosis: Another professional propagator of amazing new-age, feel-good gibberish. Her methods seem to be confirmation bias and wishful thinking. She has some followers, but her real impact is uncertain.

#144: Janice L. Gibson

AKA The EMT Empress (her own title!)

As a proponent of Energy Meridian Tapping (EMT), Janice Gibson locates herself in the fluffy far fringes of woo. She rose to some prominence when she offered and organized her services to the Haiti population after the disastrous earthquake (but her efforts were somewhat overshadowed by John Travolta’s offering of scientology ministers for more or less the same purpose, and by the Homeopaths Without Borders). Her technique seems to be related to Gary Craig’s version of Thought Field Therapy, Emotional Freedom Technique.

What is EMT? “Energy Meridian Tapping (EMT) is a user-friendly version of the long established meridian tapping modality called TFT (Thought Field Therapy). Energy tapping therapies have been well documented as significantly improving pain, impaired range of motion, stress, anxiety, phobias, physical symptoms and other health conditions. EMT's basic premise is that the underlying cause of every negative emotion and almost every physical symptom is a disruption of the body's energy flow along the same meridians that were mapped over 4,000 years ago by Chinese physicians.”

Look, this is heavy-duty, unhinged woo, and no – there has been no documentation. None. And we have encountered Thought Field Therapy before. It is serious bullshit.

Her website is here. Seriously.

Her press release for the occasion kinda got off on the wrong foot: “As nearly half the Haitian population has already or will be subject to life-saving amputations, tapping will be useful in helping these people on several fronts” … say what?

And yes, inevitably: “TFT even borrows some of its concepts from quantum physics. For instance, the idea of active information, in which small amounts of energy can affect large systems, is used to support the existence of perturbations.” Great.

More here.

Diagnosis: Well-intentioned idiot. There really is no other remotely accurate way to put it. Janice Gibson is heavily critical-thinking-challenged and wouldn’t recognize a legitimate scientific method if it hit her in the face. Woe the prevalence of failing to distinguish fact and reason from opinion and wishful thinking.

#87: Don & Carol Croft

If you think our last couple of loons were a little low-key, with the Crofts we’re firmly back in tinfoil territory. Listen, for example, to this arbitrarily selected, bitingly convinced and well-informed little quote from Don (on the healing properties of gemstones): “There are books that can teach you the properties of gemstones and minerals and these properties are greatly enhanced by orgonite. My favorite, because it's based on a combination of intuition and empirical testing, is Michael Gienger's CRYSTAL POWER, CRYSTAL HEALING. I don't personally care much for channeled literature because there's no science behind it. Science and spirituality are inseparable, in my opinion. Leaving one or the other out of our personal life leaves us either materialistic or superstitious but when they're in harmony, we're
empowered and intelligent.”

Croft keeps using terms such as “empirical testing” and “science”. I do not think they mean what he thinks they mean.

Don & Carol invented 'tactical' orgonite devices called Orgone generators (as well as adding crystals to enhance their effect) named the Holy Hend Grenade (I’m not sure they get the MP reference), Towerbuster and Cloudbuster to deal with Chemtrails, HAARP & Death towers among other applications (Laozu is opening earth energy vortices with TBs), as well as inventing an orgonite zapper, and energy weapons to deal with the dark side attacks. Orgone energy is apparently “possibly the same or similar to life force energy, chi, or prana”. If you remember, this is really Wilhelm Reich’s idea (here; see our entry on Alan Cantwell). The Crofts are etheric warriors you see, zealously engaged in battles against powers only they can see (though they do claim it’s taking a lot of lives). The best evidence of the power of orgone energy in combating the ruling Nazi parasites is apparently deduced from the way they murdered Dr Reich, and burnt 6 tons of his books, journals and papers (seems a little weak to me, but OK). That there is such a Nazi-conspiracy controlling information is proven by the fact that the original Wikipedia page was deleted, as was the entry for Don Croft. That can only be a conspiracy, right? The Crofts are, in other words, among the ur-tinfoil-hatters and into both the chemical conspiracy and the HAARP conspiracy. And of course they have their own whale.to site(s), including one that describes their adventures (among other things their realization that the Red Cross is a masonic organization).

Most notably, though, is their campaign against cell phone towers. I guess most readers are aware of the completely unsupported and unsupportable claim that such towers are a health hazard, but the Crofts take it one step further. In Don’s own words, he “campaign[s] to help genuinely inquisitive people get past the falsely promoted idea that the towers are for cellphones […] They’re simply not; they’re for destroying the atmosphere and for making everyone sick. They’re also used to target individuals in the population in conjunction with GPS.” The evidence? “Dr von Peters, who spends a lot of time teaching in various medical schools in Russia, told me unequivocally that he's seen absolutely NO death towers in that country, though everyone has a cellphone.” In other words, these towers simply must be part of a conspiracy to kill innocent people. Luckily orgonite is an antidote, so the Crofts and their followers will stay untouched. A perfect system, in other words.
Don and Carol Croft also have a special affinity with cetaceans. Apparently dolphins are some kind of ethereal safeguarding angels of something, unbound by the laws of this world. Don Croft has, for instance, a video of dolphins manipulating gravity. A lot of dolphin stuff can be found here (this is fluffgobbling insanity gone wild, so be prepared).

Diagnosis: Totally beyond reason and sanity; utterly unhinged. They can hardly be considered a major threat to humanity, however.

#72: Deepak Chopra

A.k.a. The King of woo woo

The arch-bishop of woo himself, and probably one of the most influential (and flaky and zealous) crackpots chugging along today. A prolific author of New Age/self-help books (and a regular contributor to that absolutely abhorrent cesspool of anti-science, Huffington Post), Chopra is famous for using poorly understood (or not understood at all) vocabulary from physics, particularly quantum physics, mixed with “Eastern knowledge”. His writings are usually centered around woo-y claims along the lines of “recognize your inner beauty and the quantum entanglement will cure you”. Ardent opponent of “materialistic science” which hasn't yet recognized the ancient wisdom of Eastern spirituality, reincarnation, homeopathy and such. Earns a lot of money.

His most common inference rule is The Galileo Gambit (“scientist uniformly reject my ideas, but hey! Remember Galileo; his ideas were also reject by the scientific community [well, the church, in fact] back in the days; therefore I am right and everyone else are close-minded). An antidote is available here.

Some examples of his style: Chopra bashing skepticism (that is, Chopra fighting against logic and scientific inquiry – spot the fallacies): ; Chopra being taken on by Michael Shermer; Chopra on ”only spirituality can save the world” (and as Myers points out, Chopra neglects to tell us how); Chopra failing to deal with criticism; Chopra ”proving” that there is an afterlife; Chopra in general (this is part 3; links to the earlier ones); Chopra failing critical thinking yet again.

Well, I guess you get the point. This is a guy so utterly unable to grasp the foundations for critical thinking, so completely out of touch with reason, rationality and the ability to distinguish evidence from wishful thinking, that he must set some kind of record.

Diagnosis: This guy is seriously dangerous; he’s been claimed by Time magazine to be one of the 100 most important people of the 21st century; he has a huge following (Mikhail Gorbachev referred to Chopra as "one of the most lucid and inspired philosophers of our time"). His grasp of reason, critical thinking and reality is more tentative than Jack Chick’s, however, and the lunacy he represents might in the long run be even more dangerous than the Discovery Institute.

In short, he is probably the most influential loon in our Encyclopedia, and among the most dangerous (with Cynthia Dunbar and David Barton and some others).

#59: Lee Carroll and Kryon

After a couple of stock loons from the anti-vaccinationist and creationist movements, it’s time to take another plunge into the more outré and downright weird recesses of the looniverse. This is where we find this gem.

Take some time to savor the delectable whiff of Timecube, the exquisite pastel shadings and the breathtakingly amateurish first-time-powerpoint-user-style animations. This is solid stuff.

So, what are they up to? You’ll get a taste of it here.

Here is their most recent announcement: “When many heard the magic of what happened in Sedona in 2009 when Jan [Tober – a member of the Kryon team] took the stage with bowl master William Jones, they wanted more. Jan is now offering a DNA activation using her voice, channelling and simultaneously playing up to seven crystal bowls... all offered as a custom ten minute CD "reading" of your life essence. She takes personal information, then creates a custom CD in her studio! Very well received, many are lining up to have this DNA activation process done.”

You might ask, so what is a DNA activation process? Well, who knows, really – the explanations are mostly word-salad, asserting things such as “Someday your science is going to show that DNA actually sings!” and “[your DNA] is magnetic, and therefore it responds to the grid! […] Now, suddenly in this new energy, your science begins to understand that there are at least 11 dimensions at the heart of every atom of matter. (We have told you that there are 12.) And suddenly you are beginning to understand that even time is variable”

You can also subscribe to their “Marshmallow messages”, daily e-mail messages of love, positive thought, and light, at no cost, sent by E-mail only to the Kryon family worldwide.

Mostly, however, it is about channeling and our relationship to Gaia; the channelings are apparently published in their monthly journal, the Sedona Journal of Emergence. Apparently Carroll and Tober channeled the “original subject of the Indigo children”. You can also click a button to see the DNA names, sounds, paintings and descriptions of the teachings that Lee has channelled on the Twelve Interdimensional Layers of DNA (I admit that I frankly didn’t dare to click that button).

Lee Carroll is the main character, apparently. A biography can be found here. Apparently he’s held meetings almost next to the UN General Assembly. Impressive.

Diagnosis: Kryon seems to be a prime example of unhinged, new-agey, fluffy woo with a post-modernist twist to it, and Carroll must surely rank among the most purebred crackpots out there. I seriously doubt that they have any extensive or detrimental impact, however.

#53: Alan Cantwell

One of the most passionate (and lunatic) defenders of one of the greatest crackpots of the last century,Wilhelm Reich. Among Cantwell’s writings in defense of Reich is this nice article. For those who don’t know Reich’s views, orgone is supposed to be the life force, the material realization of Freud’s libido – pure pseudoscience with strong sexual undertones, and unsurprisingly popular (and taken to the extreme of quackery when combined with new age healing techniques, e.g. in the hands of Reich’s disciple Charles Kelly).

And of course Cantwell takes it a step further. In this article he combines Reich’s orgone theory, rantings about microbiology, Blavatsky and cosmic energy to stunning heights.

And against this background, a grand theory of everything emerges. Why don’t we know about the stuff Cantwell has uncovered? Well, I won’t reveal it here, just direct you to his paper ”The cancer conspiracy”, ”SARS, bioterrorism and the media” and his book on man-made AIDS, ”Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot”, which is available through the New Dawn Book Service.

Cantwell, in other words, is in at the deep end. A selection of his articles can be found here - according to the website, ”no links to these articles is allowed by the Wikipedia medical editors”. You do the math.
Diagnosis: Utter loon and megalomaniac whose approach to medicine is not science, but Cantwell’s law ”most physicians are wrong in their understanding of most diseases, most of the time” (and, tacitly understood, that Cantwell himself is correct). Influence is unknown – the orgonites are pretty common, but Cantwell is probably of the fringes of this fringe.

#49: Roger J. Callahan & Gary Craig

The last decade or so certain psychologists and pseudo-psychologists have been claiming to be could cure any craving or phobia in minutes, sometimes even over the phone, by just a wee bit of tapping and some positive thinking to "rebalance [the body’s] natural energy system." Anything, really, from addiction to biscuits, alcohol, cigarettes to murdering homeopaths. The buzzword is "Thought Field Therapy” (TFT), a mish-mash of psychology, acupuncture, neuro-linguistic programming, hypnotherapy and what amounts to reiki and life force mysticism. It has absolutely no scientific foundation, and test results don’t exactly go in its favor. But woo apparently appeals.

Not only is there no evidence for its efficacy – it also relies on such quack myths as ”meridians”. In fact, the American Psyhological Association asserted that TFT "lacks a scientific basis" and removed support for it in 1999, stating that TFT "does not meet [our] definition of appropriate continuing-education curriculum for psychologists".

The technique was invented and is promoted by – you guessed it – Roger Callahan (pictured right), who terms his treatment "Thought Field Therapy" because he theorizes that when a person thinks about an experience or thought associated with an emotional problem, they are tuning in to a "thought field. and the evidence adduced in support of TFT by Callahan and other proponents comes from uncontrolled case reports that were not peer reviewed. In 2001, in an unprecedented move, the Editor of the Journal of Clinical Psychology agreed to publish, without peer review, five articles on TFT of Callahan’s choosing. Psychologist John Kline wrote that Callahan’s article “represents a disjointed series of unsubstantiated assertions, ill-defined neologisms, and far-fetched case reports that blur boundaries between farce and expository prose.” It has its roots in ancient Chinese medicine.

You can read about them here. And here. And here’s his website:

Dr. Callahan also brags about being endorsed by Kevin Trudeau (who will appear later, rest assured). Perhaps because both were in major trouble with the FTC in 1998).

For their importation of TFT into Africa to treat PTSD and Malaria, see here.

And here is an NPR interview where Callahan claimed TFT successfully treated malaria.

A balanced analysis can be found here.

(hat tip to Monica Pignotti for the last set of links)

Diagnosis: crackpot and charlatan (probably unconsciously). His influence is appallingly wide, and his crackpottery has been adopted by several serious practitioners and even received governmental endorsement.

Roger Callahan's disciple, Gary Craig (pictured left), invented a variant of TFT known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), applied kinesology and pure woo. His website is here.

Critically evaluated here.

EFT is apparently a procedure that ”borrows from the much-heralded discoveries of Albert Einstein”. How, you may think? Well, because ”everything, including your body, is composed of energy”. The residue is borrowed ”from the ancient wisdom of Chinese acupuncture.”

Diagnosis: Pure, delusional crackpot of the worst kind. Impact uncertain, but EFT is a spin-off of some frighteningly popular quackery.

#21: Fred Bell

According to his own website, “… at age 14 Bell was not only working at the University of Michigan on nuclear energy projects, but was also inducted into the U.S. government's project called M. K. Ultra. This early mind control research covered such topics as past life regression [check], and the popular remote viewing used today by the CIA and other intelligence gathering factions worldwide [check]. ... Dr. Bell worked on a magnetic disintegration project later known as the Philadelphia Experiment [check], a high temperature fusion experiment, a bubble project later known as Cold Fusion [check] ... . In addition, Dr. Bell worked with the University of Michigan's Cyclotron doing experimentation with the bombardment of nuclear particles and their collisions involving reverse time as observed in a Wilson Cloud Chamber [check]. As a result of this, Dr. Bell built the World's first time machine called the T-1 Time Travel Transposer that allows time travel into the future in increments of microseconds [words fail, but check]. On his 17th birthday, he was transferred into the United States Airforce. There he began working on highly classified projects, several involving early warning radar defense systems and the detection and tracking of extraterrestrial craft [check].

He then left the defense sector and began studying with Himalayan Masters [check]. During this time he became internationally known as a contactee to a Pleiadean group of extraterrestrial humanoids whom were here to help the people on earth save themselves from their own destructive tendencies [check, I guess]. This group comes from a star system 500 light-years from earth.

Today Dr. Bell is a practicing naturopath, scientist and environmentalist, and political activist ...”

So what does he do? Well, dr. Bell is kind enough to want to sell you, for a fairly steep price, various healing devices of his own invention, based on for example Ozonic Electro-Magnetic Technology, quantum receptors, bio-plasmic energy (a.k.a. healing pyramids) to block negative energy, or the Amazing Andromedan Holographic Projector, which "when worn on the head accelerates the brain into quantum entanglement focusing mode”. Who wouldn’t want that?

His website is here.

It is discussed here.

A somewhat more moderate version of his background.
Diagnosis: Words fail. Probably harmless.