#2480: Dave Asprey

The bulletproof diet is a version of the “Paleo” diet constructed and promoted by web-marketer and blogger Dave Asprey. The basic idea is that you should eat the way you intuit how they ate back in the stone ages, when everyone – as consistently shown by the remains discovered – were malnourished but didn’t get cancer because they usually didn’t live long enough to develop cancer. In particular – and that’s presumably the claim Asprey is particularly known for – you should drink (his) buttered coffee. His 2014 book The Bulletproof Diet did not particularly impress the experts: “Although the book tends to cite references accurately, it fared poorly in scientific accuracy due to dietary recommendations that are not well supported by the bulk of the scientific literature. It does not present convincing evidence that fungal toxins impact cognitive performance, and this seems unlikely due to the extremely small amounts found in typical foods and beverages.” 

In general, Asprey’s recommendations are characterized by cherry picking, a tendency to cite studies that don’t really claim what he thinks they claim (or that they suggests, as when he conveniently fails to mention that the studies are performed on mice but not humans), or that he mischaracterizes partially because he doesn’t know enough about the rest of the field nutrition to determine the significance of the findings – Asprey has no credentials in any field relevant to the issues he talks about. 

His fans are more impressed than the experts, given that the scientific establishment must be corrupt since they, who have no financial stakes in the issues, are critical of the advice of Asprey, who does. So it goes. He’s got plenty of celebrity endorsements as well. In fairness, many of his recommendations are unlikely to harm and may even help (though not necessarily for the reason he gives), though some are ridiculous rubbish, such as his opposition to sucralose and his endorsement of raw milk. 

The bulletproof diet’s trademark selling point, however, is promotion of consuming large amounts of stimulants, specifically caffeine and the prescription drug Modafinil. Indeed, Asprey recommends replacing breakfast with substantial amounts of “Bulletproof Upgraded Coffee” (mixed with a spoonful of “Bulletproof Upgraded MCT Oil” and fat – his diet tends to forego proteins in favor of fat) because it is purportedly low in fungal toxins, something Asprey falsely claims is bad for cognitive performance. He also claims that most people are “[s]uffering from a Modafinil Deficiency”, which is false and gels poorly with his general appeal to cavemen given that Modanifil is a synthetic drug. Asprey claims to have been on a 300mg daily dose of the stimulant for more or less a decade, together with synthetic hormones (“testosterone replacement therapy”). He also suggests injecting your own urine into yourself to relieve allergy symptoms. Which is, hopefully needless to say, not a very good idea. Science writer Julia Beluz characterized Asprey’s bullshit aptly: “The Bulletproof Diet is like a caricature of a bad fad-diet book. If you took everything that’s wrong with eating in America, put it in a Vitamix, and shaped the result into a book, you’d get the Bulletproof Diet.” There are other, reasonable critiques of his bullshit here, here and here. 

Asprey managed to throw himself into the limelight again in 2020 when he decided to “hack coronavirus” (“biohacking” remains his favorite term) and endorsed a long list of products that aren’t going to help you, including andrographis, probiotics, vitamins, coenzyme Q10, omega fatty acids, black cumin seed oil, hydroxytyrosol, sulforaphane and l-glutamine, and directed readers to his own products for sale. The fun lasted until The Federal Trade Commission asked him to stop because he could provide no evidence for the efficacy or safety of his advice. 

Diagnosis: Yes, he is indeed everything that is wrong with America rolled up into one, perhaps apart from fundie wingnuttery. His products do not work, his advice is shit, and he is, for all practical purposes, a conman, even though he probably does believe his own claims. 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki, Julia Beluz

#2479: Frank Arguello

Frank Arguello is a cancer researcher, MD and author, most famous for his promotion of “atavistic oncology” and “atavistic chemotherapy”, which is silly pseudoscience based on misunderstanding evolution and summed up in his book a book Atavistic Metamorphosis: A New and Logical Explanation for the Origin and Biological Nature of Cancer, which also resulted in his Atavistic Chemotherapy Clinical Trial™ (yes, that’s a trademark), a website and – possibly – an apparently ongoing (since 2011) “clinical trial” hosted in Mexico. He seems to have once been a real researcher, but doesn’t seem to have published anything serious for the last 20 years – that is, since before he started pushing his own, home-made, grand unified theory of cancer.

 

The fundamental idea behind Arguello’s hypothesis is that cancer is a reversion to a primordial cell type. That idea was promoted by a couple of physicists who did not realize that it was already acentury old, and just as silly now as it was a century ago, but which even if it had been true would not have provided any support for Arguello’s nonsense. Of course, Arguello can’t show much by way of other evidence for his thoughts, either, though he has … you guessed it: cherry-picked testimonials (and as is common with these kinds of quackery, we are of course not told what treatments the patients producing the testimonials actually did receive).

 

Going through the details of Arguello’s claims would require a bit of stage-setting; fortunately, it is done in detail for us here. Suffice to say, if atavistic chemotherapy worked as well as Arguello claims, it would be easy to demonstrate it with a few relatively small clinical trials for different tumor types – apparently, however, his treatments are so obviously effective that he doesn’t really recognize the need. That he instead offers vague testimonials and tours Canada and the US looking for patients (without revealing what his protocols are) should really tell you everything you need to know. And no, his results are not published in any peer-reviewed journals – ostensibly because he has no peers.

 

But of course there is a conspiracy: In his own eyes, Arguello is a brave maverick doctor standing strong against the forces of disinformation and darkness, and the reason atavistic chemotherapy hasn’t caught on isn’t that it’s bullshit contradicting well-established principles of biology and evolution based on 150 years of evidence, or because the hypothesis really provides no useful predictive power for treatment; no, it is due to the nebulous and nefarious workings of Big Pharma to suppress information, and the armies of shills they employ to try to discredit him. Following a familiar trick among pseudoscientists, Arguello even offers to face a “public challenge” by conventional oncologists to demonstrate the efficacy of his methods by treating a patient with stage IV breast cancer, based on criteria that are, in practice, impossible to meet (for instance because it requires the participants to be a reputable academic cancer center and the set-up of the challenge has no chance of passing anything that an ethical review board any such center would be bound to obey). Employing another familiar trick from pseudoscientists, Arguello does not respond well to science-based criticism.

 

Diagnosis: Pseudoscientific crank – really, Frank Arguello is a nice case study in the workings of pseudoscience and some typical pseudoscience tricks, threats and gambits. His antics might seem almost funny until you realize that he targets some of the most vulnerable and desperate among us.

#2478: Julaine Appling

The Wisconsin Family Council (WFC) is, as the name suggests, an extremist Taliban satelite group that advocates and lobbies for Christian fundamentalist policy, notably advocating for corporal punishment in religious schools and opposing laws granting rights to children, sex education, gay marriage, and laws designed to punish sexual abuse in churches. The WFC is, formally, a Family Policy Council, i.e. an organization affiliated with Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council.

 

The WFC was founded by Marvin Munyon in 1986 (who, according to many of his former students, himself has a long history of violence against children, which is relevant to explaining some of WFC’s policy positions), but the current CEO (2021) is Julaine Appling. Appling is, as you’d expect, vehemently anti-gay and opposed to same-sex marriage. Back in 2009, when Wisconsin started allowing domestic partnerships, Appling and the WFC filed a lawsuit to stop them, with Appling calling the law “an assault on the people, the state constitution, the democratic process, and the institution of marriage” and complaining that government officials “are pandering to a marginal group of people and we’re challenging that in court,” because protecting minorities is apparently unconstitutional. The lawsuit received national attention, partly because Scott Walker, who took over as governor of Wisconsin during the trial and was thus named defendant, agreed with the lunatics and tried to stop the case. The courts did not agree with the plaintiffs. Appling also wanted Wisconsin to throw gay people who got married outside of Wisconsin in jail.

 

Part of the problem with gay marriage, as Appling sees it, is that it “ensnares” people in “sexual sin”, which “kind of wraps its cords around you until you become completely identified by it” and makes you “no longer able to distinguish between right and wrong and good and bad.” We recommend taking a few seconds to appreciate the sheer insanity of that piece of reasoning. Appling also claimed that recognizing same-sex marriage will pave the way for “adult–child” marriages, because she is utterly unable to draw distinctions.

 

Appling is also anti-divorce and has lobbied to make it more difficult for (heterosexual) couples to get a divorce: “marriage is indeed under attack and no-fault divorce is one of those attacks,” said Appling. In 2010, WFC even attempted to criminally prosecute teachers for teaching state-mandated comprehensive sex education, and in 2017 WFC notably opposed legislation that would make it easier to prosecute clergy members who molest children and sue religious organizations for failing to deal with abusers in the wake of the abuse scandal in the Catholic archdiocese of Milwaukee. Family values, you know.

 

Other (2021) members of the WFC’s board of directors, noted for future reference, include:

 

-       Jack Hoogendyk, Michigan politician

-       Randy Melchert, former President of the Civil Rights Section of the State Bar of Wisconsin

-       Lee Webster, representative on the Wausau School District school board

-       Jo Egelhoff, Appleton politician

 

Diagnosis: Complete mindrot, and the putrid mess that is the ugly mind of Julaine Appling is, unsurprisingly, fuelled by hatred, anger and paranoia. She has certainly lost some important battles in the culture wars, but she remains a non-negligible adversary for anyone who cares about reason, truth, decency and autonomy.

#2477: Vasken Aposhian

Hurair Vasken Aposhian is a toxicologist and emeritus professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Arizona, and although he has legitimate credentials, Aposhian is a somewhat infamous promoter of pseudoscience and a wide range of crazy ideas about mercury. As some sources laconically puts it, his “views about mercury in vaccines and in dental amalgams go against the consensus of the medical community and are controversial”.

 

Aposhian has advocated for the false idea that thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism, and testified for instance before the Institute of Medicine in 2004 before they issued a review concluding that the evidence favors rejecting a vaccine–autism link. (According to apparent sycophants on his Wikipedia article – it is unclear why he has one – Aposhian’s position on thiomersal is in line with the WHO, which “are adamant in their view that thimerosal (aka thiomersal) is a serious threat to human health and are pushing for a worldwide ban”: that is a blatant lie, easily checked by actually looking at WHO’s position statement: “WHO supports continued use of thiomersal as an inactivating agent and preservative for vaccines”). He is most famous, however, for his participation as an “expert” on the side of wrong and spectacular pseudoscience in the Autism Omnibus trials in 2007, where he claimed that the autism of Michelle, the plaintiffs’ daughter, was caused by “mercury efflux disorder.” Aposhian was apparently pushing the novel idea that the thiomersal in one vaccine damaged Michelle’s immune system to the point that the MMR vaccine (which never contained thiomersal) penetrated the GI tract and attacked the brain; indeed, the theory is so novel that he testified, on the stand, that he had elaborated it “about three or four weeks ago” based on journal articles from other scientists (i.e. he just made up a story out of nothing right before he was supposed to testify in court). He was slaughtered on cross examination and forced to admit that there was no record of any child becoming autistic as a result of mercury exposures.

 

Aposhian is also a long-standing promoter of the false idea that mercury in dental amalgam fillings are unsafe, claiming for instance that “these fillings continuously emit mercury vapor, which will go to the brain and is converted to mercuric mercury” where it “will damage nerve and it will damage brain tissues.” The claims are ostensibly backed up by his own “research” based on subjects given the widely discredited “provoked testing” chelating agent 2,3-dimercapto-1-propanesulfonic acid.

 

Aposhian is, unsurprisingly, also affiliated with quack organizations like the American Board of ChelationTherapy (ABCMT) (well, at least he was a decade or so ago), a small conspiracy theory group chaired by Rashid Buttar that offers bogus “board-certification” for grifters and quacks willing to attend a weekend course, score 65% on an examination in which 60% of the questions are True/False, and administering 1000 unsupervised disodium ethylene diamine tetra-acetic acid (Na2EDTA) infusions. You should stay well away from anyone who bothered to get that board certification. Other advisors to the group were Robert Rowen and Robban Sica.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, there are quacks and pseudoscientists with real credentials, and there is certainly a career to be made by going over to the dark side. The fact that it’s the same names that show up every time quacks need “legitimate” experts (like in court cases, where their local naturopath or conspiracy theorist with a webpage won’t do) is notable. Aposhian is old, strange and looney. Don’t listen to him on anything whatsoever.

 

Hat-tip: rationalwiki

#2476: Andrew Anglin

The Daily Stormer (TDS) is a neo-Nazi and white supremacist website founded by neo-nazi troll Andrew Anglin, and … well, we’re not really going to spend much time on the details here. The website features a demographic countdown in their side bar showing a countdown of time allegedly remaining until whites become a minority in the United States, and is full of anti-semitic slurs. Anglin founded the website with help of his father, Greg, who ostensibly owned (by 2017) two gay bars and had a Christian counseling center doing conversion therapy. According to himself, Anglin used to read the works of Chomsky and “all that Communist, Jewish stuff” before aligning himself with neo-Nazism. He also appears to have endorsed MGTOW ideology.

 

According to Anglin, the globalist, Zionist, Communist, Jewish conspiracy currently counts as its members the libertarians, feminists, supporters of racial equality, critics of reparative therapy, anarcho-capitalists, transgender kids, “Shillary Clinton”, Alex Jones, The Archbishop of Canterbury, “The Jewropean Union”, Ted Cruz’s wife (who should apparently be imprisoned or put to death for being part of the great Jewish banking conspiracy to overrun America with Mexicans), Milo Yiannopoulos and Bernie Sanders. Though an ardent supporter of former President Trump, TDS was quick to point it out when he was, as they saw it, “being held hostage by Christ-killing Jews …” and “forced” to say things that didn’t line up with what the TDS wanted him to say.

 

If you need detailed examples of the racism, anti-semitism, hatred of gay people and conspiracy theories promoted by the TDS, you can find some here. We don’t really feel any particular need to quote them.

 

Among other people who have, at some points, contributed to TDS, you’ll find Andrew Auernheimer (upcoming), Joshua Ryne Goldberg (under the pseudonym “Michael Slay”) and Texas-based neo-Nazi and host of The Krypto Report, Robert Warren “Azzmador” Ray.

 

Diagnosis: It’s trolling. Anglin and his fellow reporters probably don’t believe half of what they write; they just don’t care, and neither do their followers. If you thought this had anything to do with truth, you’ve completely misunderstood; rather, the whole TDS is a form of culture jamming. The tactics are explained here. That observation doesn’t mean they’re less dangerous than you might have thought, quite the reverse; nor does it mean that Anglin is anything but a hateful, delusional conspiracy theorist.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2475: Jake Angeli

A.k.a. Q Shaman

A.k.a. Jacob Anthony Angeli Chansley (real name)

A.k.a. Qanon the Barbarian

A.k.a. Vanilla the Hun

 

Ok, so this guy really needs no introduction, but Jake Angeli is in any case a conspiracy theorist and QAnon protest figure from Phoenix going by the title (?) QAnon Shaman or Q Shaman, because he is, according to himself, a “shaman”, which is obvious from his “shaman dress” consisting of a coyote-fur headdress with bovine horns, red-white-and-blue facepaint and neo-pagan far-right tattoos. His shamanic practice consists of screaming about Satan-worshipping pedophiles controlling the world (i.e. Pizzagate) while being dressed up in his naughty retro Chewbacca bikini, as well as insurrection attempts. He was promptly arrested in January 2021.

 

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office memorandum charging Angeli with two felonies in the wake of the 2021 US Capitol riot, Angeli “believes that global elites are running the world, that United States leaders are part of a secret rings of child abusers who practice satanic worship, and other debunked theories. He has repeatedly demonstrated dramatic, erratic behavior, an inability to conform to societal norms, and an unwillingness to appreciate the consequences of his actions. He abides by his own belief system, acts accordingly regardless of the criminal consequences, and brings others along with him. His ability and willingness to conform his behavior to pre-trial supervision conditions appears to be virtually nil.” 

 

A fixture at far-right rallies, Angeli reportedly led his own protest rally in September 2020 at Arrowhead Mall in Glendale, in which he claimed a spiral sign close to the bathrooms in the shopping centre was “an FBI pedophile code”. At one point, Angeli was actually also in the Navy, but he was kicked out after refusing to take his anthrax vaccine.

 

Upon his arrest, prosecutors presented ample evidence of his … character, including the following transcript from one of his Youtube videos, which seems to sum up his ideas fairly well (quoted at length): 

 

“So in order to beat this evil occultic force you need a light occultic force you need an occultic force that is of the side of God of love on like almost like on the side of the Angels OK as opposed to the demons all right and so as a shaman I am like a multi-dimensional or hyper-dimensional being okay I am able to perceive multiple different frequencies of light beyond my five senses and it allows me to see into these other higher dimensions that these entities these pedophiles these rapists these murderers these really high up people that they almost like hide in the shadows in nobody can see that because the third eye ain’t open okay and that’s where things like fluoride and stuff like that comes in so the horns the horns are hey man you mess with the Buffalo you get the horns bro and if you ever tried messing with the Buffalo that doesn’t work out too well for many people this right here this is coyote skin according to the Navajo the coyote is like the trickster almost like almost like a benevolent force so I’m wearing the skin of the trickster I got two tails here okay so the trickster messed with the bull got the horns okay and the face paint is representative of the Native American tradition of like donning on warpaint of some sort only this is only this is a war that is of like a spiritual nature okay so because it’s a war of a spiritual nature you need symbolism okay in the symbolism here for me is you got the blood on the sign the bullet holes Q sent me this shows the the the secret war in the behind the scene. Hey if you don’t know who Q is Q is the highest levels of the military in the intelligence community disseminating above top secret information to pay attention to the republic so we can take our country back from globalists and communists and satanists.”

 

His motivation for participating in the 2021 insurrection might also best be summed up in his own words: “What we did on Jan. 6 in many ways was an evolution in consciousness, because as we marched down the street along these ley lines, shouting ‘USA’ or shouting things like ‘freedom’ … we were actually affecting the quantum realm.” In jail, Angeli refused to eat unless given organic food because anything else would ostensibly make him literally physically sick. 

 

After being arrested, Angeli was promptly thrown under the bus by his fellow QAnon and Trump supporters, many of whom accused him of being an Antifa agent provocateur, based for instance on (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jake-angeli-viking-capitol-blm/) pictures from a BLM protest that he was actually counterprotesting, but in which his QAnon sign was cropped out. There is a lesson here, but if you were able to learn it you would probably not have thrown your lot in with these people to begin with.

 

Diagnosis: Though we don’t usually cover … people like Angeli, he sort of launched himself into a rather public role. Indeed, he has become something of a symbol of the pro-Trump movement and idiotic conspiracy mongering in general – a rather fitting symbol, to be fair.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2474: Ruth Angela

Young-earth creationists struggle to understand the basics of the theory of evolution, and although we’ve had ample opportunity to deal with creationists, there are other groups that struggle with the fundamental ideas of evolution, too, as exemplified e.g. by the book The Guru’s Gift: A Kundalini Awakening. Presented in a press release as “Waking up to Our True Nature – Kundalini Awakening: The next phase of human evolution,” the book is published by Lotus-Blessings, which is not only a vanity press, but the website of its author, Ruth Angela. Now, even having seen some excerpts, it is hard to pin down Angela’s misunderstanding in detail – apparently, Kundalini is “the feminine aspect of God inside us comparable to active nuclear power,” whose awakening through meditation will “negate” our limitations and bring us to the “cusp of a new stage of human evolution” – given that the whole thing is a spectacular mess of incoherent New Age and self-help ramblings, but at least the book promises to take up “subjects such as: reincarnation, time and the human mind, flight in the body, visiting other planets, extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, out-of-body travel, healing by intention, healing modalities, entities, elementals, parallel universes, the third eye, the pineal gland, co-creation, time fluctuations, magic, Kumbhak breath, double vision, involution vs. evolution and so forth.” If you think this is what you need, it certainly is not what you need. Don’t listen to gurus.

 

Diagnosis: Ok, so given that her mind runs on nebulous associations of incoherent, sparkling idea fumes, it might be misleading to say that she misunderstands evolution. It’s more a matter of appropriation. Dingbat nonsense it is in any case.

 

Hat-tip: Sensuous curmudgeon