#603: Curtis Dahlgren

I know little else about Curtis Dahlgren, but he has written some columns for RenewAmerica, Alan Keyes’s blognetwork and truly a remarkable collection of nonsense. Indeed, Dahlgren has contributed some of the most absurd rants ever committed to the Internet; a prime example being his rant against the legal system and some decisions he disagrees with in which he blamed their perceived errors on elitism, though the lack of any clear point and connection between his (often weirdly false) claims makes it hard to sum it up in any better than that. At least it deteriorates into a cranky rant about those darn hippies and their horrible “civil liberties”, which they have obtained because courts cherry-pick jury members to get the results they want (i.e. there is some sort of conspiracy going on stemming from the “Dark Force” of the left).

Although it is a little hard to discern exactly what his problem is in said column, it is rather obvious that it was written by someone with a tenuous hold on sanity and reason. Dahlgren has also penned columns trying to unmask the conspiracies among those elitist scientists, and his targets are the scientists in precisely those areas you’d expect, evolution and climate change – he calls environmentalist one of the curses of the present age. Dahlgren shows that it is all a matter of politics (failure to draw the distinction between science and politics is a hallmark of wingnuttery), and cites – apparently as support for his claim – how Russians in the 1860s appropriated Darwinism and hence that the Bolsheviks were influenced by the nihilism contained in the theory of evolution. Hence … I have no idea, except that he laments the fact that people always turn to those greedy scientists when they want their problems solved.

Diagnosis: A source of some of the most absolutely utter bizarreness you’ll encounter on the Internet – apparently coherence is no virtue for Curtis Dahlgren, and truth isn’t even on the radar (I suspect even elementary school kids could easily spot a couple of blatant, bizarre falsehoods in any one of his columns in a few seconds).

#571: Alex Chiu

Alex Chiu is certainly among the craziest people on the Internet, and there are plenty of crazy people on the Internet (Insolitology deemed him the second greatest Internet kook). He achieved some additional fame through being the target of a Daily Show episode in 1999, and his website is here (yes, it needs to be seen in its glorious insanity; see also this).

According to himself Chiu is immortal, and may be the greatest inventor in history and a prophet of God. The former quality is most prominently displayed through his Immortality Rings and Gorgeouspil. The Immortality Rings are (apparently) magnets that people wear as rings, and which makes the wearers immortal since “cells heal crooked,” and have apparently (according to Chiu) been endorsed by none other than Kevin Trudeau (the endorsement is given here, which also seems to be a website run by Chiu). He does have a patent on them (and there is a money back guarantee, though I suppose any such claim must be filed in person), but the patent description is not entirely intelligible. One reason he has offered for why people need to invest in his rings, by the way, is that cemeteries are “gay”, which is a truly excellent reason. Gorgeouspil, on the other hand, is substance that if eaten when wearing the Immortality Rings makes people as beautiful and perfect as Alicia Silverstone. There’s a great discussion here.

His other great inventions have not been commercially released, unfortunately, since there is a danger they may fall into the “wrong hands”. Among these inventions are the Super Chi Flush (cures cancer and blindness), the ability to cast spells, and a machine that cures people from being handicapped. Future ideas include resurrecting people using magnets (lots) and cloning, and a teleportation device. Here’s his “New Darwinism”, his newly invented theory directed at scientists. It has thus far failed to revolutionize the discipline.

His political views are less coherent. Apparently communism is the Anti-Christ, but China ought to invade Taiwan (where Chiu hails from), and the Chinese government is beyond reproach. Furthermore everything the Torah says is true, and anyone who fails to believe in the Torah Prophecies will wear the Mark of the Beast with which the communists are already branding everyone. His work as a prophet concerns primarily his prophecy that China will invade the US in 2005. He also offers financial advice and tells those interested about how the government cheated him for royalties when he solved the economic crisis.

Diagnosis: A phenomenon

#554: Vinoo Cameron

Vinoo Cameron (if that is his real name) is a ”Christian Physician Mathematician” who claims that – apparently – more or less all of our current mathematics is wrong. The fundamental idea for his ”inverse 19 mathematics”, if it can be called ”idea”, seems to be that ”CURRENT MATHEMATICS THEORY is wrong because it is based on a single square plane with a squared center, ‘a circle can never be squared’, vice versa, by a single mathematical plane, the mistake of Riemann, Euclid, Archimedes, and Einstein,” which sounds serious indeed. Cameron’s own solution, and his website, is a collection of purely amazing, randomly capitalized gibberish, with self-proclaimed practical applications: “I feel that with our -1 tangent mathematics, and the -1 tangent configuration, with proper computer language it will be possible to detect even the tiniest leak of nuclear energy from space because this mathematics has two planes.” It is dealt with here. The author shows up in the comments to clarify, and the original email discussed is utterly wonderful (“My papers were accepted as assignment by the worlds top Physics journal, and they said they have a hard time understanding the tangents, write it better.” Shows how profound his discoveries are).

Cameron is, apparently, an MD, which is a little scary on the face of it. His work seems to be related to the crackpottery of the legendary Edgar Escultura, but the extent of the connection is unclear since Cameron’s sentences aren’t always ideally grammatical.

Diagnosis: Hopefully harmless, but intensely crazy

#516: Nathan Bradfield

Nathan Bradfield is probably not a particularly significant figure, but at least he is involved with the organization STACLU, i.e. “Stop the ACLU”. Accordingly, Bradfield has strong opinions on such matters as the division of church and State and about gay marriage. Apparently they are two sides of the same coin, for as Bradfield puts it so eloquently, “homosexual marriage not hurting your marriage is like saying not allowing prayer in schools doesn't affect your prayer at church,” which of course is true, but probably not in the way Bradfield intended. He swings in on the matter of school prayers here with a predictable lack of direction.

Bradfield is also a staunch fan of David Barton and Christian reconstructivism, and is willing to go to great length to defend Barton’s dishonesty, patiently teaching the rest of us that the Separation of Church and State was invented by the Christophobes at ACLU. (He responds to critics here.) The notion of truth seems to continuously elude him in his rants, though that doesn’t prevent him from trying to instruct the rest of us.

Things start to go awry, however, when Bradfield fancies himself a biologist. He appears to get his information from the WorldNetDaily, adding gems of arguments such as this one to the effect that if evolution was true “we would have a plethora of fossils showing where animals mutated more poorly and were killed in ’survival of the fittest.’ Instead we have animals and fish showing up and disappearing.” And when you think he’s hit rock bottom you get “[t]he fact is, virtually every science book and every Ph.D. calls evolution a ’theory.’” (in fact, Bradfield cites some Dennis Peacocke for this argument). He elaborates as follows: “the missing link that bridges species. Evolutionists even call it the ’missinglink.’ You guys have been searching now for more than 150 years. Where is it? Because you can't find it, you, by your own standards, are therefore forced to call evolution a ’theory’ because it is not absolutely conclusive.” Things go downward from there.

And to end where we started, with Bradfield on homosexuality: “The question from homosexual advocates is always, ‘if homosexuality is a choice, why would one choose it if it causes all the emotional distress?’ The answer is simple: The person made a poor moral choice. It's the same reason we see school shootings.”

Diagnosis:Appallingly stupid godbot and fundamentalist. Probably completely insignificant – indeed, Bradfield is honestly not bright enough to be dangerous, and the bar is set pretty low in the groups with which he is trying to associate.

#511: Xavier Borg

Christopher Booker would certainly have been honored with inclusion in our Encyclopedia if he hadn’t been British, but he is so he won’t. Then there is the case of James Bopp, the guy behind the suggested St. Reagan GOP purity test (that St. Reagan would have failed with flying colors), and the attempt to get the Democratic Party renamed ”the Democratic Socialist Party”; but neither instance is clearly ”loon” rather than ”zealous douche”.

Well, enter arch-crackpot Xavier Borg, or ”Engineer Xavier Borg” as he likes to call himself. To be honest, I have no real idea whether Xavier Borg is American, and I don't have a picture, but he is nevertheless well worth covering. Engineer Xavier Borg is out to revolutionize physics with his own, entirely original idea based on the notion that everything is orbiting around a fixed center of the universe, the “Kolob”. In the course of developing his ideas, Borg reinvents practically everything else in physics to make it fit (rejecting matter in favor of “standing electromagnetic waves”), peppers it all with complex equations while simultaneously notoriously failing to provide a mathematical foundation for his basic notions and mechanisms. You can see a respectful but fair critique here (also here).

Borg has plenty of abstracts and papers online. Needless to say none have been published in serious journals. He also appears to run something called the “blazelabs.com”, and appears to be relatively frequently cited by other authors with their own crackpot versions of physics to push.

Diagnosis: A case of pure crackpottery, and as purely a crackpot as crackpots come. Probably harmless, though there are observations of people (non-physicists) who refer to Borg as a credible source, thus bestowing upon him the honor of being a minor bt recognized footsoldier in the battle against science and critical thinking.