#2035: Ralph Moss

One of the grand old men of woo, Ralph W. Moss specializes in cancer crackpottery and has been one of the main promoters of laetrile. There’s a good discussion of that particularly nasty piece of woo here, and more information here.

Moss consistently refers to himself as “Dr. Moss”, and he does indeed have a PhD – in classics. He does not have any relevant medical qualifications. He also claims to have been an associate director of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). The MSKCC says he was a science writer (their letter is here), but that is probably part of the conspiracy to hide the truth. Moss was in any case dismissed in 1977 after accusing the MSKCC of suppressing information supporting the efficacy of laetrile (demonstrably based on falsehoods). He subsequently served on the advisory board of the Office of Alternative Medicine, and marketed the “Moss Reports”, which promote various forms of quackery at a cost of several hundreds dollars per report. He is also president of Cancer Communications Inc., which – despite what Moss might claim – is not a research publication, and one of the “Harkinites”, the “experts” hand-picked by former Senator Tom Harkin to advise the Director of the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine. Moss is apparently still on the Cancer Advisory Panel of the NCCAM, despite having said that “[t]here is nothing inherently ‘ludicrous’ about guided imagery, yoga, massage, homeopathy and therapeutic touch” in curing serious disease. There is.

Moss is the author of numerous books promoting cancer woo and various conspiracies by the medical establishment to prevent cures from emerging because cancer is big business. Moss may even be the inventor of the phrase “cancer industry” (his book Cancer Industry is reviewed here; it’s a garbage mess of distortions and falsehoods) to describe medical-industrial complexes that suppress novel cures for cancer to preserve their income flow from cancer patients, whom doctors torture and abuse instead of curing (“the direction of cancer management appears to be shaped by those forces financially interested in the outcome of the problem,” says Moss). Apparently the industry controls the whole health care system, including the most important journals, which are unwilling to publish “research” by independent altmed crackpots who have recognized that blinding and statistics are just tools of misinformation for the powers that be. Moss’s books have been very influential with Mike Adams, Joseph Mercola and Josh Axe and indeed what may accurately be called “the cancer industry”: the whole slew of ineffective woo and scams pushed on people in desperate situations by people like Moss and his followers.

Moss has suggested several cures for cancers, including utterly ridiculous coffee enemas, in particular the Gonzalez protocol. (He also continues to promote homeopathy.) But his go-to suggestion remains laetrile, which is utterly discredited but woo, insofar as it is based on dogma and religious creed, not science, rarely disappears. Laetrile remains popular among certain groups of conspiracy theorists, and Moss bases his advie on exactly the same old spurious and demonstrably false claims and conspiracies as always. In 2014, for instance, Eric Merola released a “documentary” movie, Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering, promoting laetrile, and heavily featuring Ralph Moss; as expected, the documentary portrays Moss as a whistleblower being fired from MSKCC for having realized that laetrile works, and bolsters that tale with (unverifiable, of course) meetings Moss claims to have had with various people in high places who strangely didn’t have any qualms about spilling the beans to him while being part of a grand and virtually airtight conspiracy to kill of millions of cancer patients to earn some bucks by some unspecified and unspecifiable business mechanism. The movie is discussed here.

Diagnosis: Despite being a deranged lunatic and conspiracy theorist, Moss is still a seriously influential guy, who has probably led a large number of people to their deaths or at least ensured that people die broke and in debt after wasting huge sums on treatments that didn’t and couldn’t have worked. At some level the distinction between delusion and vileness blurs, and Ralph Moss can accurately be described as “vile”.

#2034: Richard Moskowitz

Richard Moskowitz is a homeopath and antivaccine advocate. Apparently Moskowitz was trained as an MD some 50 years ago, but his more recent activities show in the strongest possible way that you should turn elsewhere for medical advice.

As an antivaccine activist (given his background he did make it onto this sorry list of purported anti-vaccine doctors), Moskowitz thinks immunization is an act against God (in “Vaccination: A Sacrament of Modern Medicine” – no link provided). His main idea, though, is that vaccine-preventable diseases are not that bad – a 1/1000 chance of dying from measles is something he thinks you should be willing to deal with, since suffering and death is nothing to worry about as long as it is relatively uncommon – and that if they occur they should be treated with homeopathic nostrums, which don’t do anything and would increase the mortality rate only some (not Moskowitz’s own words). In his article “Unvaccinated Children”, published in the dubious journal (website, really) Medical Voices and discussed here, he even suggests that at least “any child whose sibling or parent previously contracted poliomyelitis, or a severe or complicated case of measles or whooping cough or any of the other diseases listed, should not receive the vaccine prepared against that illness.” A moment’s reflection should reveal that this is not good advice. As for tetanus, Moskowitz recommendation is that“Hypericum can reputedly treat as well as prevent tetanus, but I would recommend giving human antitoxin at the first sign of the disease, since it is far less effective later on.” This piece of advice is actually rather likely to kill you if you ever contracted tetanus. His advice on anthrax (no link provided) would be hilarious if it wasn’t so scary, displaying an almost perfect lack of understanding of the disease.

Moskowitz’s defense of homeopathy reveals an understanding of science and evidence to match his understanding of anthrax, and consists primarily of tirades against Big Pharma (the pharma is shit therefore my magic beans cure cancer-gambit), delusional attacks on real medicine, claiming that clinical trials are not adequate to study homeopathy, since such trials consistently show that it doesn’t work, contrary to Moskowitz’s powers of intuition – how else would he know that homeopathy works, insofar as there can be no proper trials? Besides, modern medicine doesn’t take into account “the energy field of the patient as a whole” – the life force, if you want. He also argues that since homeopathy works in animals and in newborns it can’t be placebo, which is seriously misunderstanding what the placebo effect is and completely missing that part about evaluator bias. It would be interesting to hear Moskowitz try to answer the question of why medical trials use double blinding, but then again it probably wouldn’t.

Diagnosis: Crackpot, pseudoscientist and genuinely dangerous lunatic. He’s apparently viewed as something of an authority in certain anti-vaccine circles, which tells you quite a bit both about them and about him.

#2033: Jennifer Roback Morse

Jennifer Roback Morse is a religious fundamentalist and President and Founder of the Ruth Institute, a radical anti-gay group that for a while was an arm of the extreme anti-marriage-equality organization NOM. The institute has correctly been designated an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Roback Morse rose to prominence – she’s pretty influential – in wingnut circles for a couple of books, as a radio show host, and as “an official spokesman for” and vocal defender of California’s Proposition 8 back in 2008. She is also a signatory to the 2017 Nashville Statement, affirming a complementarian view of gender and a traditionalist view of sexuality. 

Morse’s opposition to gay marriage is to a large extent fueled by her commitment to archaic stereotypes about gay people, for instance the thought that “neither permanence nor sexual exclusivity plays the same significant role” for them; officially, of course, her main argument against gay marriage is that legalizing gay marriage would be “removing biology as the basis for parenthood and replacing it with legal constructions,” but that assumption has little to do with her actual motivation. It is worth pointing out that Morse and her husband themselves adopted a child because they couldn’t have children of their own, which apparently didn’t in their eyes invalidate their marriage. Now, Morse has published a list of 77 non-religious reasons to support Man/Woman marriage. It is, of course, actually a list attacking gay marriage; Morse, who blames Hollywood for the SCOTUS decision on marriage equality, seems to be under the delusion that supporting same-sex marriage is the same as opposing opposite-sex marriages, and is demonstrably not particularly good at seeing rather obvious connections. Most of the points on that list are just vague rewordings of the single aforementioned point about biological foundations for marriage that she doesn’t, in fact, accept herself. If you are interested, the list is discussed in some detail here. Apparently, legalizing gay marriage will also let people with “drug problems, who are mentally unstable,” or who aren’t sure whether they are gay, get married, which is a novel change compared to previous legal restrictions that clearly prevented unstable people and drug users from marrying.

In 2013, she (and her group) was also behind an insane doomsday list of bizarre projected consequences of legalizing gay marriage delivered before the Rhode Island House Judiciary Committee. Morse called the rant the “New Gettysburg Address of the Marriage Movement”, which is about as reasonable as the contents of the rant. Morse is also the kind of person that compares opposition to marriage equality to the position of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, claiming that “the parallels” between Nazi Germany and contemporary America “are really quite chilling” and that what happened in Nazi Germany “is happening to us”. One wonders what she thinks did happen in Nazi Germany. (She relied on Eric Metaxas’s revisionist Bonhoeffer biography, of course.) She has also been promoting ex-gay therapy, arguing that leaving “the gay lifestyle” takes more courage than coming out.

Morse has declared that anyone who “buys sperm” in order to conceive a child should be in jail. This is apparently because of God, though the details of the reasoning process is a bit fuzzy (“The child is now a product, manufactured by adults, and therefore the child cannot be fully the equal of its parent. The object cannot be the equal of its producer or its maker, you know. And so the further we go down this path, the further away we are going from the true ideal of equality before God, of equality before one another, of treating one another with dignity. And the child becomes a kind of chattel. So the legal complications and the sort of ick factor of all of this, it’s important to sort all that out and look at it, but let’s not take our eye off that ball, which is that we have defaced the creator’s plan and intention here by this behavior.” These are not the coherent thought processes of a rational mind). 

In 2012 she suggested that young people should refrain from having gay friends. There is a fine (though somewhat dated) list of other moronic things Morse has said about homosexuality here.

Gender equality

Morse has also weighed in on other social issues. In 2012 she was deeply offended by Obama’s health care mandate, claiming that it was part of a war weighed against women’s fertility. In general, according to Morse, there is no “war on women” but rather a “war on women’s fertility”, where enemy forces are making contraception easily available and encouraging women to enter the workforce after college rather than getting married, staying home, cleaning the house and having children.

The underlying source of all evils is, according to Morse, the sexual revolution, a “totalitarian” movement pushed by “hipsters” and “radical feminists” that victimizes professional women who build their lives “around the lies.” As an example of such totalitarianism is apparently the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate, which she claims is a government effort to “control people’s behavior and even people’s thoughts.” By requiring that insurance plans cover contraception, Morse argues, the government is “stifling dissent by essentially saying: ‘This society will be built around contraception, and there will be no dissent from that.’” Of course, by the same token anymeasure ever passed is by definition a totalitarian one that stifles dissent. 

The sexual revolution has ostensibly been promoted by “population controllers (who think there are too many poor people); hipsters (who just want to be libertines); radical feminists who think babies are keeping women from being ‘equal.’” And yes: of course there is a conspiracy behind it all: “All these groups have one thing in common: They’re controlled by elites, people who want to re-create the world in their own image,” rather than hers.

Apparently the sexual revolution, and especially LGBT equality, are bringing back slavery. In a statement that reveals a lack of knowledge of history to match her delusions about the present, Morse argues that “all of these issues – divorce and remarriage, abortion and infanticide, slavery, the buying and selling of human beings – all of these things, the Christian religion put a stop to. But they’re all on their way back because of the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution is bringing back all of these points.” Indeed, the sexual revolution is “a pagan ideology” that Christians should refuse to compromise with – “the only reason we’re dealing with gay marriage now is because we never faced up to the harms that have already been inflicted by feminism” (conservatives were “tricked” into accepting contraception). Her comments on the Hobby Lobby ruling are no less idiotic.

At least she’s not worried about being on the wrong side of history.

There is a decent Jennifer Roback Morse resource here.

Diagnosis: Incoherent, stupid and evil monster. She fits right in – and has accordingly become a rather influential and prominent voice in – fundie wingnut circles.

#2032: Chuck Morse

Chuck Morse is a rightwing radio host and, well, journalist of sorts, perhaps most notable for his attempted write-in campaign against Barney Frank for the 2004 Massachusetts’s 4th congressional district elections (he did not get enough certified signatures to appear on the ballot). Morse is also the author of Was Hitler a Leftist?, which was heavily promoted by the WND, and in which Morse (among much else) argues that President Obama is “worse than a communist” and, in fact, a Nazi or at least more akin to a “national socialist” than a communist. You see, contrary to popular opinion (fact, in fact), Nazism, according to Morse, is a leftist philosophy, not a right-wing one; and the parallels to the Obama administration are obvious: Hallmarks of a nazi rule that Morse identifies include a national welfare system, nationalization of police forces, and a centralized regulation of private businesses; these are apparently the elements that reallycharacterizes nazism.

Then, in the very next paragraph of his book, and completely without irony, Morse presents one of the most obvious pieces of evidence in his case for the claim that the Obama administration and the Left are like nazis: the use of demonization. Many leftists today, says Morse, don’t just say that their political opponents are wrong but really want to hurt them. 

We’ll just leave it there for readers to assess.

At present Morse seems to be primarily trying to expose the Deep State.

Diagnosis: Self-awareness is difficult, and your lack of it better be serious to count as a loon on lack-of-self-awareness grounds alone. But Morse makes his lack of self-awareness into something of an art form. Congratulations.

#2031: Robert Morrison

The Family Research Council (FRC) is a homophobic, fundamentalist, wingnut denialist group entirely appropriately designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Robert Morrison is senior fellow at the FRC, and staunchly opposed to marriage equality. For instance, when Dick Cheney came out in favor of marriage equality, Morrison lamented that “in this great cultural clash, Dick Cheney has enlisted with the forces of dissolution”. And, like many opponents of marriage equality, Morrison promptly went on to lament the great “devastation that comes from the breakdown of marriage,” apparently willfully oblivious to the fact that legalizing same-sex marriage would rather obviously mean that morepeople would get married. 

Of course, Morrison has shown great willingness to go way more ridiculous than that, such as when he compared the LGBT rights movement to the Vietnam draft, complaining that “the whole country’s being conscripted into a pride parade” (it’s striking how these people so consistently fail to understand, well, words). “It’s a question of defending liberty itself, because they can’t violate the laws of nature and of nature’s God [that’s not quite what “liberty” means], as the Declaration talks about, they can’t violate those laws without trampling religious freedom and political liberty at the same time.” And that, readers, is of course the epitome of a word salad – Morrison evidently thought that putting “liberty” and “the Declaration” into a sentence denouncing LGBT rights would make it rhetorically powerful, but didn’t really think out how to make the resulting sentence make minimal sense; we do, of course, suspect that neither Morrison nor his intended audience would care or even notice. This one is not much better in terms of coherence or meaning. Here is Morrison trying to defend the Southern Strategy without really understanding what it is.

Morrison has also weighed in on other pressing matters, for instance claiming that the government or states failing to mandate reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools creates more “American Talibans”. He has also weighed in on sex education, offering what he thinks of as “proof” that “condom programs don’t work.” The proof is the Monica Lewinsky scandal, “the most deplorable episode in our history.” How that is supposed to be proof of the inefficacy of condom programs is one of many mysteries of the feverish imagination of Robert Morrison (he has no clue, of course; nor does he have a clue what a proofis). Try to make sense of this. He also invoked Bastille Day as well as Jimmy Carter and Library of Congress to argue that we shouldn’t confirm Sonia Sotomayor in one of the most bizarre stream-of-consciousness rants ever penned.

Diagnosis: Might be genuinely stupid. At least he has a precarious grasp of words and their meanings, and the whole idea of inferences from premises seems to elude him – he tries, to be sure, with bizarre results that bear little resemblance to anything recognizable as reasoning. But hate – well, he’s got that one down.

#2030: Connie Morris

Connie Morris is a former member of the Kansas Board of Education and a vocal supporter of the anti-science horde back during the Kansas evolution brouhaha in 2005. (She didn’t like immigrants either.)

So in 2005, prompted by the Kansas Intelligent Design Network and the Discovery Institute, the Board of Education sought to revise the high school science standards to present evolution as a controversial (or false – evolution is “an unproven, often disproven” theory, said Education Board member Kathy Martin, obviously a bit unsure about some central distinctions) theory, in line with the Discovery Institute’s Teach the Controversy campaign, and present intelligent design creationism as a viable scientific alternative (it isn’t). After real scientists boycotted the kangaroo court hearings, Morris concluded that “evolutionists are in a panic mode”, evidently confusing a laughably biased school board hearing with careful, scientific hypothesis testing and evidence gathering. (She also called evolution “a nice bedtime story; science doesn’t back it up”. It is worth pointing out the Morris is lying about thinking that evolution is a nice bedtime story, too). Morris, of course, concluded that Intelligent Design Creationism was superior to evolution: “I’m not a scientist, so how did I decide between the two models? Intuition and my own analysis tell me the comprehensive model [i.e. Intelligent Design] wins. Most of its additions to the standard model simply reflect common sense.” One wonders why she thinks anyone would need any science education at all. She probably doesn’t. Indeed, she really doesn't think schools should teach biology at all: “If this subject is so explosive, why teach it to children? Shouldn’t we leave that to parents?” asked Morris.

Morris got some national attention when she sent a taxpayer-funded newsletter (commentary here) to constituents explaining that “[i]t is our goal to write the standards [of education] in such a way that clearly gives educators the right AND responsibility to present the criticism of Darwinism alongside the age-old fairy tale of evolution;” of course, teachers have to present that information in a neutral and unbiased manner, of course: they just need to ensure that students learn, in biology class, that evolution is an “age-old fairy tale” defended with “anti-God contempt and arrogance.” Morris, who subscribes to a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis, also called evolution “biologically, genetically, mathematically, chemically, metaphysically and etc. wildly and utterly impossible.” Morris, of course, has no background in or understanding of evolution, nor of any of the other fields (including “etc.”) she invoked. It was, by the way, not the only occasion on which Morris made questionable use of taxpayer money.

Morris lost her seat on the Board in 2006 in a primary election, along with a number of fellow lunatics. As expected, Morris blamed “liberal media” for her loss – it’s hard to admit to oneself that one is completely unqualified and batshit insane – noting that “liberal opportunists” (“rude people who have no ethics and morals”) do not mind “slandering people and harming their families and their reputation and their business and their communities and their state ... It’s a shame, and I feel bad for them when they face God on Judgment Day” (i.e. God will punish you and send you to Hell for voting against my political convictions). She also feared that the new Board would “let government schools teach children that we are no more than chaotic, random mutants”, which does not reflect a very accurate understanding of evolution, insofar as natural selection is the opposite of a random process. Anyways, they did. But even though the anti-science measures were rescinded in 2007, it was not the last time deluded Kansans tried to get science out of education.

Morris’s background, including her 2002 autobiography From the Darknessand her tendency to refer to anyone she disagrees with who has a non-Anglo name “illegal alien”, is discussed in some detail here.

Diagnosis: Deranged lunatic, notable not only for her utter disregard and failure to understand basic science, but – like so many fundies – for her complete dishonesty, broken moral compass and lack of minimal decency.

#2029: Alex Moroz

Alex Moroz is the director of the Integrative Sports Medicine program at NYU Langone Medical Center’s Rusk Rehabilitation. Moroz is a trained acupuncturist. Now, when acupuncture is put to the test in well-designed studies, it’s performance is disappointing – it consistently does no better than placebo. How do you think Moroz responds to that? “There is a body of literature that argues that the whole approach to studying acupuncture doesn’t lend itself to the Western reductionist scientific method,” says Moroz. So, when things are studied with some rigor and psychological biases are actually controlled for and Moroz’s favored remedy turns out not to work, Moroz doesn’t change his mind – no, hecannot be wrong; it must be realitythat is wrong, including the whole of science and evidence. And then he throws in the word “reductionist” as a derogatory moniker. There is nothing reductionist about scientific testing, of course. The word doesn’t actually meananything in the context in which he uses it – it’s just there to signal that Moroz is an upward-gazing spiritualbeing: don’t you vulgarly reductionize him, you small-minded ad boring slaves of accountability. 

Of course, acupuncture is not the only woo Moroz defends. Moroz also defends cupping, no less – because “it makes sense” to him and because it’s ancient wisdom, like bloodletting and witch burning. Cupping received some attention after Michael Phelps advertised for it in 2016, and one is a poor woomeister who doesn’t jump to the defense of the latest fad.

Diagnosis: Don’t let this nincompoop come anywhere near you if you actually suffer from anything, and don’t listen to his advice. Alex Moroz is a loon – he’s a snowflake loon who means well, to be sure, but confidence in one’s own convictions and intuitions is on its own no good foundation for giving advice. To be sure, he probably knows something about real medicine, too, but you’ll be better off with those who don’t mix their knowledge with silly nonsense.