#2047: Francis Myles

Now, what the heck is this? Ostensibly, one Francis Myles explains how you achieve “genetic salvation” (if you’re interested, you can go to the video here. “Delusional incoherence” doesn’t even begin to describe the otherworldly gibberish contained therein). The interview in that link was conducted by Sid Roth of the It’s Supernatural! Network, but the WND got in on it too, and it’s to them we have to turn for an explanation: ‘“genetic salvation” is available in Christ to break the chains of failure, disease and calamity – the generational curses – that have plagued whole families throughout centuries.” Well, tough luck with the explanatoryelement, but apparently Myles can cure you (or something) of hereditary sin (?) (or supernatural hexes on your family you inherit genetically) by magically healing your genes (“Myles has been shown by God how to supernaturally change your DNA,” apparently), thereby allowing you to achieve prosperity. This is not how it works. This is not how anything works.

So who, then, is Francis Myles? Well apparently, Dr. Myles (source of doctorate unclear) “is an Apostle to the nations, Senior Pastor of Breakthrough City Kingdom Embassy, Businessman, and Spiritual Life coach to Movers and Shakers in the Marketplace.” Originally from Zambia, he was ostensibly called to the US by the Holy Spirit to found the Kingdom Marketplace Coalition and The Order of Melchizedek Leadership University. (The Melchizedek part might be related to this one, which is not unlikely given the Messianic Judaism connection – Sid Roth is a Messianic Jew – or possibly this one, or possibly something else entirely dredged from Myles’s own deranged imagination.) Myles is also the author of The Return of the Lost Key: Tithing under the Order of Melchizedek. Judging from the video, it is probably a blast.

Diagnosis: Well, we’re baffled. Apparently you can sign up for courses for around $150, which is a small price to pay for transcendental insights, but bad hallucinogens are cheaper and probably yield more coherent results (it would probably be bizarrely interesting, in a trainwreck sort of fashion, to know how they reason, those who actually sign up for Myles’s classes. He is probably harmless, though.

#2046: Steven Myers

Deranged, home-made theories defended with motivated reasoning by “independent scholars” are a dime a dozen, and the Giza pyramid is a common target. Edward J. Kunkel, for instance, argued – in his book The Pharaoh’s Pump – that the great pyramid in the desert at Giza was a water pump. The idea is silly for an impressive range of reasons, but silliness hasn’t stopped independent scholars before and probably won’t in the foreseeable future.

Now, Kunkel is long dead, but his ideas are still ardently promoted by one Steven Myers, who runs a website and a foundation devoted to the idea, The Pharaoh’s Pump Foundation, which, Myers claims, is going to build a pump using ancient Egyptian technology. It’s been going for a while, but we haven’t seen much by way of goal accomplishments. Now, whywould Myers want to build a pyramid pump, you may wonder? Apparently because the “ancient pumping technology is nonpolluting and does not require fossil fuels or electricity to operate.”And now you may wonder precisely how they did operate. Well, according to Myers, the pyramid pump was fueled by fire. It must be a novel type of non-polluting fire, then, presumably fed by the renewable, lush and fertile forests of the Giza area. There seem to be some gaps still in the Kunkel-Myers hypothesis.

Perhaps he has given up on it. Apparently the project was motivated in part by the doomsday rants of Richard Noone, and the pumps ostensibly needed to be built with some urgency to pump away the water from melting polar ice caps following the cataclysmic events of May 5, 2000, when Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were aligned with Earth, a date that came and passed with no notable weather events (or pumps).

Of course, Myers is not without his critics. Christopher Dunn, for instance, has argued that the Giza pyramid is a power plant working “by responding harmonically with the seismic energy contained within the Earth.” As Lakatos pointed out, competing research programs are important to good scientific progress.

Diagnosis: At least he’s harmless. Which is more than can be said of many of the loons covered here recently.  

Hat-tip: Skepdic.

#2045: Ned Myers

Not really sure who Ned Myers is, but he is definitely a creationist, and at one point got the opportunity to lay out his delusions about science in a column in the (now defunct?) Daily News Journal. In the column, Myers was concerned that in 2011 “American public school students place 23rd in scientific literacy when compared to 34 other developed nations”. And you know why they did poorly? “A strong case can be made that one reason for this poor showing is that we teach evolution as science” (that they also teach evolution as science in the other countries on the list notwithstanding). You see, according to Myers “Webster’s dictionary defines science as, ‘Knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws, especially as obtained and tested through scientific method.’ Macro evolution, whereby one species evolves into another, falls short of this definition. Evolution cannot be considered a general truth because it cannot be experimentally tested or proven by using scientific methods.” This is false, and evolution is easily testable by standard scientific methods. At the very least Myers himself provides a good indication of some of the reasons for the US’s poor science showing.

Diagnosis: Ignorant dimwit. Probably a very minor figure, though.

#2044: Amy Myers

Amy Myers has, over the course of recent years, risen to become something resembling a bigshot in the worthless-supplement industry, with a brand that promises to sell nonsense for often vaguely defined conditions. Now, Myers is, indeed, an MD, but she markets herself as a functional medicine practitioner and is the founder and director of Austin UltraHealth, a functional medicine clinic. Functional medicine stands to medicine like diploma-purchased-online-by-following-the-link-in-a-spam-email stands to education. And her supplements are the kind of supplements that “support MTHFR, adrenal stress, and detoxification efforts” (($43.97 for 120 tablets). Anyone with the faintest knowledge of medicine would of course immediately call “bullshit”. But those with the faintest knowledge of medicine are not in the target audience for these products, of course. 

Myers is also the author of a couple of rather popular books, The Autoimmune Solution: Prevent and Reverse the Full Spectrum of Inflammatory Symptoms and Diseases and The Thyroid Connection, both of which should be shunned like the plague by anyone seeking anything remotely resembling medical information. The former claims, without any foundation in fact or reality, that “over 90 percent of the population suffers from inflammation or an autoimmune disorder” – the recipe is simple: convince the reader that she has a disease that doesn’t exist, then push a fake cure that does nothing. “Until now, conventional medicine has said there is no cure,” says Myers, which is technically correct given that there is nothing to cure, and responds with “a cocktail of toxic treatments that fail to address their root cause” – and yes, that is the astonishingly dishonest “doctors-only-treat-symptoms” gambit, no less. Currently, Myers is part of the Goop group, and in particular responsible for developing the Goop vitamin/supplement protocol, Balls in the Air, “designed for women who want to stay on top of their A game”. The protocol is about empowerment, you know; actual health benefits and truth have nothing to do with it.

Myers has been particularly influential on the gluten-free misinfo scene, and has written articles (or rathe rinfomercials) in HuffPo spreading various types of misinformation about gluten. Not all of her writings mention that she, coincidentally, also sells online courses on Celiac/gluten-free diets for the meagre sum of $49. 

She has also made a name for herself scaring potential victims with horrid tales of parasites as a likely cause of Hashimoto’s, which is nonsense but surely a good way to lead worried people (including the Morgellons crowd) to her online store and buy her (not cheap) “comprehensive test”. I think we can all tell you in advance what the results of that test and subsequent recommendations are going to be. Suffice to say, the Myers’s Way® Parasite Control Program is not gonna go easy on your wallet. It is certainly not actually going to improve your health, but you may not ever actually realize that: “My objective is to empower you to discover the root cause of your symptoms and be able to self-treat at home with food and supplements,” says Myers – or, put differently: do not seek a second opinion from a different doctor before enrolling or during treatment!

Diagnosis: She’s good at marketing; we’ll give her that. Her claims have no grounding in facts, of course, but that’s never a particularly major obstacle when designing a good marketing strategy. 

#2043: Dave Mustaine

Dave Mustaine is the co-funder of Megadeth and thus a celebrity loon in the tradition of such luminaries as Ted Nugent. Mustaine has voiced his support for an impressive range of wingnut conspiracy theories and is, for instance, a birther, having claimed that Obama was born outside of the US and therefore ineligible to be president (“Why hasn’t somebody moved to impeach this man,” asked Mustaine: “With all of the proof about his birth certificate being a fake, and you see the signs in Kenya saying, ‘The birthplace of Barack Obama.’ Hello! Come on, guys. How stupid are we right now?”). And in 2012 he accused Obama of staging the Aurora mass shooting and the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting in order to push a gun control agenda (he also pushed wingnut Fast and Furious conspiracies and said that the country looked like it was turning into “Nazi America”, which is so inanely meaningless that we won’t bother). When family members of victims were unimpressed with Mustaine’s comments, he told Alex Jones that he didn’t have any intention to hurt anyone with his comments. He still thought it was a conspiracy.

Yes, Alex Jones. Mustaine is a fan, and even wrote the album Endgame based on Jones’ film of the same name in order to “educate his fans and the general public about the march towards a New World Order and Global government”.

Before being born again, Mustaine claims to have practiced black magic. “When I got into black magic I put a couple of spells on people when I was a teenager and it haunted me forever, and I’ve had so much torment,” said Mustaine, and is apparently unwilling to play certain older tracks because he thinks their black magic powers might hurt someone.

Trivia: To celebrate his non-endorsing endorsement of Rick Santorum in 2012, Mother Jones put together this quiz.

Diagnosis: Ok, so it’s a celebrity loon, and we sort of sympathize with those who think that we shouldn’t give these any more attention. But Mustaine’s deranged conspiracy theories are of a particularly odious kind, and if we could just convince one person not to give this guy any more money, we think we’d be doing something good.

#2042: Mark Musser

Rev. Mark Musser is an anti-environmentalist and author of the book Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrifice of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust. The purpose of the book is to “expose the integral, indeed indispensable, role the ‘Green’” movement played, from the late 1800s into the 1940s, in shaping Nazi anti-Semitism and the ‘final solution’ of Hitler’s Holocaust,” which should have made it a rather short book if its author was minimally able to care for reason, evidence or truth. Musser, however, is not, and ends up claiming that the real cause of Hitler and the Third Reich was concern for the environment: “The verdict is unavoidable: National Socialism’s ‘scientific’ Social Darwinism – Darwinian evolutionary biology’s “survival of the fittest” applied to societies competing for scarce resources [that is not what it is] – provided the justification for the Holocaust precisely because of its nature-based ethos that valued the natural world above people.” Now, we suspect that the verdict was unavoidable, given that Musser was the author and had already decided what the verdict was going to be long before he started investigating the issue.  

Of course, the book is a warning. As Musser sees it today’s environmental movement is based on the same (i.e. foundational nazi) ideas: just consider abortion, which is apparently motivated by environmentalist concerns. Just think about that great and long-standing champion of environmentalism at any cost, China, for instance, and its one-child policy – it is all about environmentalism, dude. And apparently you shouldn’t think that “it can’t happen here”. Just think about the eugenics programs during the first decades of the twentieth century and Planned Parenthood. One gets the distinct feeling that Musser is a bit uncertain about what “environmentalism” might be, and has a tendency to lump abortion, environmentalism and evolution together into some sort of Big Satan. Indeed Musser has explicitly argued that evolution, animal rights and environmentalism are three strands of the same idea, and thus all equally the forces behind Nazi thought and dehumanization of non-Aryan groups. Environmentalism, as Musser sees it, inevitably leads to fascism and tyranny, and the U.S. may accordingly be destroyed like ancient Israel if America chooses to go down that road. “Nature is viewed as a holistic tyrant, so to speak, and holism really teaches tyranny. Fascism is all connected here. You have to bow everything to nature’s holistic inter-relatedness and you can’t buck anything with regards to what nature does. This is the problem with environmentalism and why it’s so dangerous,” says Musser. So there. At least if you needed an illustration of the difference between an argumentand free-flowing associations of unconnected ideas, you’ve got a good one here.

The book was heavily promoted for instance by the Cornwall Alliance, a wingnut fundie non-profit created for the purpose of ranting and raving against environmentalism, which is apparently willing to push any deranged book, pamphlet, idea or speaker that comes to a conclusion they like.

Musser has also written The Nazi Origins of Apocalyptic Global Warming Theory, Green Lebensraum: The Nazi Roots of Sustainable Developmentand Enviro-Baalism-Fascism. We haven’t read them, but suspect some of the idea promoted in the last one is discernible from the following explanation: “Israel would be the example of this originally, as they were commanded to go in and subdue the promise land and fill it and that’s what they did and for a while it was a good land, then these other things came in, environmentalism came in and destroyed their culture, what I call the Baalism, the nature worship, instead of worshiping the Creator they worshiped nature and this led to the destruction of their society. I think the same things are happening in our own country today too.” That description neglects, of course, to mention the mechanism by which Baalism led to the destruction of their society: Apparently you should avoid environmentalism because otherwise God will come and smite you. The connection from, uh, this to environmentalism being inherently fascist, should be clear. 

Diagnosis: Good grief.

#2041: Abdul Alim Musa

A.k.a. Clarence Reams (original name)

Imam Abdul Alim Musa is a Muslim activist, director of Masjid Al-Islam in D.C., member of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, popular speaker and, perhaps most notably, founder and director of As-Sabiqun, an anti-Semitic Muslim group (more here) that advocates for the creation of a global Islamic state that would abolish all “man-made” forms of governance, as well as the Islamic Institute of Counter-Zionist American Psychological Warfare. If the name of the latter suggests unhinged anti-semitism and conspiracy mongering to you, then you are entirely correct. Sometimes considered something of a cult leader, Musa is an outspoken fan of the political Islam embodied by Ayatollah Khomeini, and has made several visits to Iran as a (self-appointed) representative of Muslims in the United States and supporter of the Islamic revival (he frequently appears on Iran’s anti-semitic Press TV).

The Sabiqun group claims to have a national presence and centers in multiple US cities, but appears to be, ultimately, relatively small and centered around Alim Musa’s DC mosque and the Masjid Al Islam mosque in Oakland, California, which is led by the movement’s other main figure, Imam Amir Abdul Malik Ali. The purpose of the group is explicitly to challenge to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and it is resolved to work “for the purpose of reestablishing the system of governance known as Khilafah, or the Caliphate.” Apparently they predict that Islamic rule will be established in the U.S., which it calls “the Islamic State of North America,” by “no later than 2050” – “Islam went everywhere in the [ancient] world … so why can’t Islam take over America? … We are on the right road,” says Musa. In an article in the Sabiqun newsletter in 2002, the group claimed that there is “open warfare" between Muslims and the U.S., which it described as “the united forces of kufr [non-believers] … the criminal constitutional dictatorship of the USA.”

Now, you’d be excused for thinking that Sabiqun is a fringe group, but Musa (and Ali) have been invited to speak at a number of large community mosques around the US, as well as events organized e.g. by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, Muslim American Society, the Islamic Circle of North America and the Islamic Society of North America – not all of which are at least usually considered fringe – as well as vehemently anti-semitic organizations such as the Muslim Congress. They are also popular with many Muslim student groups, such as the Muslim Student Union at the University of California, Irvine, and enjoys a concerning presence at many US college campuses, documented here. Musa has for instance been invited by student groups (one example) to give “vehemently Anti-semitic” speeches in which he e.g. asserts that America was controlled by Jews, and that “Yahuds are the enemy of humanity.”

Anti-semitism

According to Musa, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was operated by Jewish people: “Who ran the slave trade …who funded [it]? You’ll study and you will find out: the Jews…It was the Jewish bankers…in Vienna, with pockets full of money, funding and insuring, that’s who did it…. you can’t tell us about no holocaust. Between the African Americans and the Native Americans, everybody else’s stuff was small potatoes.” According to Musa, Zionist American agents were also behind 9/11 (“George Bush brings down the World Trade Center, blames it on us [Muslims] and then claims himself dictator over the world”). Indeed, the Israeli Mossad and the U.S. government are apparently behind 90 percent of the terror attacks in the U.S. and abroad since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, including the attempt to blow up an American airliner heading for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, designed to put deranged, fundamentalist violence-promoting theocratic conspiracy theorists like Musa in a bad light.

It was apparently also the Zionist-controlled American government that flooded the country with heroin in the 1960s to snuff out the black rebellion. In general, the US is more or less controlled by Zionists – the government is “Zionist occupied” by “Zionists in Hollywood, the Zionists in New York, and the Zionists in D.C.” – who “all collaborate” to oppress Blacks and Muslims. No fan of the Arab Spring events, Musa claimed the whole thing was a Western conspiracy to “wipe Islam off the map”.

Musa himself claims that his attacks are directed at Zionist supporters of Israel and not at Jewish people in general (“One of my best friends is a rabbi!”, claims Musa), which is somewhat blatantly contradicted by what he actually says.

The Islamic Institute of Counter-Zionist American Psychological Warfare was founded in 2011. As Musa put it, “[f]or 30 years, Masjid Al-Islam [Sabiqun’s mosque] has been carrying on a direct, face-to-face struggle against the monolithic Zionist American regime ... We are an anti-Zionist American psycho-guerrilla warfare movement. We use all available tools found in our environment in exposing the anti-Islamic, anti-human policies of this Zionist American system.” The mission of the center is “to counter the concerted efforts of the enemies of Islam to sustain a false characterization of Islam and Muslims as a dangerous threat to global stability and tranquility.” If that is the goal, then Musa’s own rants are certainly not helping. In particular, the center was established to “monitor Zionist and Israeli networks, circles, and clubs which deceitfully infiltrate Muslim and Black groups,” as well as to “[a]nalyze the Zionist grip on humanity established via the media and economics.”

In 2009 Musa was listed as one of 22 people banned from entering the United Kingdom. According to the UK government, this was because he was “[c]onsidered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by fomenting and glorifying terrorist violence in furtherance of his particular beliefs and seeking to provoke others to terrorist acts.” He is.

There is a decent resource on Musa and his groups here.

Diagnosis: Though way less influential than the anti-Sharia crowd likes to think, Abdul Alim Musa and his groups are, it should be emphasized, more influential than many others seem to realize. He is, in any case, one of the most deranged lunatics alive in the US at the moment.