#2173: Derrick Robinson & the FFCHS

Derrick Robinson is the president of Freedom from Covert Harassment and Surveillance (FFCHS). I suggest reading the name of that group again. Yes, the FFCHS is committed to fighting the use of (in particular) electromagnetic frequency (EMF) weapons (a weapons-grade version of this) ostensibly deployed by the powers that be to harass and monitor citizens, even driving them to acts of madness. Aaron Alexis, perpetrator of the Washington Navy Yard shooting, had for instance contacted the FFCHS before going on his killing spree to seek relief from what he believed was an attack by electromagnetic frequency. The FFCHS is not the appropriate place to turn to if you think this is happening to you. 

Like many others, Robinson, a Cincinnati-based janitor, is convinced that nefarious groups of people are following and controlling him, presumably as part of a test of neurological or other weapons, and he claims to have been tortured and abused by gang stalkers and “neurological weaponry” since leaving the Navy in 1982. “People will say you are delusional,” Robinson admits, but he insists that he isn’t. There are, in fact, quite a number of people with similar stories, and Freedomfchs.com’s stated mission is accordingly to seek justice for those singled out by “organized stalking and electromagnetic torture.” Apparently they have also arranged conferences and contacted government representatives who have sometimes pretended to take their complaints seriously. The group’s website is here. Here is their page on how to protect yourself from attacks. It is a very fascinating page, though it seems to have been partially hijacked by quacks peddling supplements and woo to a receptive audience. One of their tips is to use orgone, which in very many ways is probably the appropriate response to the threat. The suggestion that you get a concealed weapons permit is a bit more worrisome. (“The stalkers know I have a gun and know I am a crack shot, because they followed me to the shooting range and watched when I applied for my license” – user Dona.)

Apparently Robinson is also Executive Director at People Against Covert Torture and Surveillance, International. We are not entirely sure how this organization is related to the FFCHS. He has also been interviewed on Coast to Coast AM, of course.

Diagnosis: Let’s just be tactful and leave this section blank, shall we?

#2172: Scott Alan Roberts

Ancient aliens did not visit Earth to guide human evolution and lay the foundation for modern civilizations, but Scotty Roberts is one of those who think they did. It is all explained in his book The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim: The Untold Story of Fallen Angels, Giants on the Earth, and Their Extraterrestrial Origins, which is precisely as scholarly and intellectually compelling and rigorous as the title promises. Roberts’s guiding premise is a couple of passages in the Bible and the books of Enoch about Nephilim, giants and angels, which he interprets through an impressively delusional mass of associations and pseudoscience – including numerology – to arrive at the conclusion he had already decided was true, namely (it seems) that angels, which Roberts concludes must be aliens from outser space, begat the Nephilim. The Nephilim then mated with humans to produce a special bloodline of magic beings, and the Great Flood happened to destroy these “demonic hybrids” and remove all traces of alien DNA from the human gene pool. But then, Roberts actually seems to admit that what he is doing is not science or fact but theory and philosophy (he is not actually doing theory or philosophy either), therefore he can apparently also dismiss objections based on fact or science without engaging with them. His educational background apparently consists of a ride on the Bible college circuit.

Numerology? Oh yes: “In the occult science of Numerology, the number 33 represents the ultimate attainment of consciousness. Keeping that in mind, it is very interesting to note that the geographic location of Mount Hermon, the very place where the Watchers are said to have descended to the earthly plane, lies on the 33rd parallel, which is a latitude of 33° north of the equator. If you trace the 33rd parallel to the exact geographic global opposite from Mount Hermon, you will find yourself directly on top of the most controversially mythic place in current ufological history: Roswell, New Mexico. Mount Hermon, where the Watchers descended to the earth, and Roswell, New Mexico, are exact polar opposites on the same 33rd degree north latitude. The global coordinates of Mount Hermon and the Roswell crash site are no accident, and speak to some deeper, perhaps secret significance.” Of course, Roswell and Mount Herman are not even remotely global (or “polar”) opposites, but that observation would presumably be precisely the kind of fact in which Roberts is not interested. 

Apparently Roberts is not just any kind of whale.to-style whacko with a website, however – he actually seems to enjoy a bit of status on the ancient aliens conspiracy theory scene and has for instance arranged conferences (such as The Paradigm Symposium: Re-visioning our place in the universe; yeah “paradigm”– few things scream “crackpot” like (mis)use of the word “paradigm”) with luminaries like Erich von Däniken, George Noory, and Giorgio A. Tsoukalos. Roberts is also the founder and publisher of Intrepid Magazineand editor-in-chief of SyFy’s Ghost Hunters official publication, TAPS ParaMagazine. His other books include The Secret History of the Reptilians and The Exodus Reality.

Diagnosis: Completely unfettered by the constraints that control the intellectual capacities of the narrow-minded, such as reason, accountability or fact. Probably relatively harmless, but it isa bit disconcerting to note how popular this kind of nonsense actually is.

Hat-tip: Pharyngula

#2171: Keith Roberts

A.k.a. GodsWordIsLaw

Keith Roberts is a raging, maniacal, religiously fanatic bigot known by the handle @GodsWordIsLaw (and, it seems, @GodsLandGodsLaw), though his Twitter account seems to be suspended at present. He was also the founder of the organization Christians for a Moral America and, for a few months in 2012/2013, generally known as perhaps the most homophobic and hateful lunatic on Twitter, especially in the wake of getting into a spat with Ricky Gervais after writing “Thank God for Christopher Hitchens’ death” the day after Hitchens died and subsequently telling Gervais that “Atheism is poison, may God have mercy on your soul before he dropkicks you into HELL” (no, he doesn’t seem to understand the concept of mercy; it’s not the only concept he doesn’t grasp). And when George Michael had to cancel some concerts due to pneumonia, Roberts claimed that “[a]pparently George Michael has AIDS. Figures since he’s a homosexual and it goes with the territory. Another sodomite bites the dust?” and encouraged his supporters to “[p]ray for George Michael’s demise. He has chosen a satanic lifestyle and must meet an appropriate end”. In general, Roberts has expressed concerns with a political environment that is supportive of gay rights: “We have an OBLIGATION to the general public to make sure homosexuality is recriminalized. Sodomy is destroying the health care system.” He would also engage with critics, offering nuggets of insight like “What a whiny old queer you are. You’ll be six feet under soon (AIDS) so hopefully we wont have to put up with it much longer.”

Here is Roberts arguing that atheists die sooner than Christians.

Diagnosis: A minor character, but a pretty deranged one. He’s been quiet for a while, so maybe he has come to his senses? We’ll include him nonetheless.

#2170: David Roberts

David Roberts is an Ohio-based new age crackpot and woo merchant. His impressive repertoire of pseudoscience and nonsense can be viewed on his website The Game of Time. According to the website Roberts is also a Pleiadian starseed upon whom is bestowed the task of sharing the infinite wisdom of the stars with us mere mortals. We’ve had the opportunity to encounter a number of Pleiadian starseeds before.

Roberts’s website is sometimes a bit challenging to make sense of, but there are at least plenty of New Age ramblings, weird color schemes and 1990s-style clip art (rainbows shooting out of things is a recurring theme). Topics include: the law of attraction, pseudopsychology, subtle energies, quantum woo, pseudoexistentialism, time travel, parallel dimensions, and a variety of impressively misunderstood concepts and ideas from something resembling science, complete with stream-of-consciousness associations and equivocations (“remember that another way say Light is Energy, and another is Matter,” says Roberts, channeling Humpty-Dumpty). Apparently everything is ultimately magic; light is magic, energy is magic, leverage force and gravity are magic (“[o]f its many magical qualities, none are as impressive as the infinite reach of gravity”), magnetism is magic (“[a]nother form of invisible attractive force we don’t understand is magnetism” – yes, f***ing magnets, how do they work; and “[m]agnetism is also related to another form of magic – electricity”), sound is magic (“[s]ound turns out to be a gravitational phenomenon, so by these definitions is already a form of magic” – dare anyone suggest that there might be something off with Roberts’s definitions, then?), as is fire, chemistry, desire, thought, choice, reinterpretation, cooperation, genius, visualization, subconsciousness, fear, love, deception and – not the least – money (“a form of stored magic”). 

There are also miracles. “To anyone who is grounded in science and logic like myself, the idea of a miracle can discredit one’s theories,” Roberts admits, but … well, we’ll let him explain it himself: “We find ourselves here in the third dimension, with corresponding rules. Another way to say fourth dimension would be our subconscious world [pretty sure those two expressions are not semantically equivalent]. Yet another would be the universe itself [ditto], thus it seems that our three-dimensional experience extends into the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension is also the realm of possibility. Beyond that lies the fifth dimension and what we might call the beginning of the “spirit world”, where it seems the rules change and new possibilities open up. Beyond the spirit world, rules change once again and eventually, in the tenth dimension, impossible things become possible.” It’s admittedly more of a “claim” than an “explanation”. Here is Roberts’s time theory. Which is more of an incoherent stream of associations than a theory.

If you have money to offload, you can purchase Roberts’s Pleiadian Healing Tarot Cards, which are produced with clip art and allow up to seven people to share their energy – they don’t divine the future, but will rather heal the soul and open your mind up to the different dimensions of existence in the multiverse. Falsify that, you science worshippers! You can also order his pdf books Heal Yourself in Time and 12 Dimensions of Consciousness and Beyond.

Diagnosis: Mostly harmless. But according to his website, he has “worked on this project for eighteen years,” which is profoundly sad. 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki. Roberts is apparently not happy with his rationalwiki entry; his response is here.

#2169: John Robbins

John Robbins is a New Age and alternative health author, environmentalist & animal rights activist, nutritionist (the quack kind) and fringe anti-GMO conspiracy theorist. Robbins was originally heir to the Baskin-Robbins icecream empire, but decided to make a career as a woo guru instead. He has subsequently published several books promoting vegan diets and cancer quackery, characterized by little concern for factual accuracy but great affinity for conspiracy theories; they include Diet for a New America (successful enough to make it onto this list of non-recommended health books; some of the inaccuracies and straightforward lies of the TV version of the book are discussed here), Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World’s Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples (the phrase “scientifically proven” at least shows rather nicely that the claims have little to do with science or scientific evidence), Reclaiming Our Health: Exploding the Medical Myth and Embracing the Source of True Healing (oh, yeah) and Voices of the Food Revolution: You Can Heal Your Body and Your World with Food! (hint: you cannot; food is not medicine). Robbins is known to write compellingly and convincingly, which is actually not that hard if you can use whatever falsehood and inaccuracy you could think of as premises for your conclusions (your readers, being non-experts, wouldn’t be able to tell anyways). Robbins is also on the advisory board of Naked Food Magazineand the founder of EarthSave, which was created as a response to the success of his book Diet for a New America. Not the least, Robbins participated in the conspiracy flick Thrive, though has later admittedly distanced himself from the core nonsense of that movie. Currently, Robbins is promoting his bullshit (such as “empowerment packages”) together with his son Ocean Robbins.

Robbins is a relatively significant figure on the anti-GMO activist scene. In 2013, for instance, Robbins (John and Ocean) organized, together with fringe lunatic and former yogic flying instructor Jeffery Smith (this guy), a “GMO Mini-Summit”, featuring an impressive line-up of GMO-related conspiracy theorists such as Thierry Vrain and Consumer Reports’s Michael Hansen, and an equally impressive range of PRATTs, denialist talking points and references to the spectacularly debunked and retracted Seralini study.

John and Ocean Robbins are currently running the “The Food Revolution Network,” a chemophobia-promoting, veganism-hyping organization well-known for its commitment to delusional pseudoscience, such as the 11-part video series “The Quest for Cures … Continues” (available at the thetruthaboutcancer website, a conspiracy page nicely illustrating Badger’s law), featuring Ty Bollinger as well as Ocean Robbins. The series is reviewed here, and there’s another good review here. “If you ignore the information I have to share with you, you are leaving yourself open to getting one of the diseases we all dread,” warns Ocean Robbins in a promotional video. “Alternative facts” does not even begin to describe the character and amount of misinformation that follows. Apparently the Robbinses at one point attempted to hoodwink Sanjay Gupta into service for one of their quack summits, but Gupta – otherwise no stranger to hype and shaky evidence foundations – wisely shied away from their rambling trainwreck of woo and conspiracy mongering.

Diagnosis: Another marketing-savvy quack, and a dangerous one: to those with little background in science or medicine, Robbins’s claims may perhaps come across as more reasonable-sounding than the wild-eyed, semi-coherent conspiracy theories of, say, Ty Bollinger or Mike Adams, but that’s a result of marketing savvy, not because any resemblance of a foundation in evidence, accountability or fact. 

#2168: Joel Robbins

Joel Robbins is a (licensed) chiropractor and “naturopathic physician” who operates the Health & Wellness Clinic of Tulsa, Oklahoma (currently Robbins Natural Health, it seems). Robbins has a degree from the British West Indies Medical College, a diploma mill, and a bogus naturopathic “degree” from a diploma mill called the Anglo-American Institute of Drugless Therapy, credentials that are worth paying attention to when assessing both the reliability of his practice and his general character. He nevertheless seems to enjoy a reputation as something resembling an authority in certain woo circles; Judy Seeger proudly mentions studies with him, for instance, and he made it onto this list. According to himself, “Dr. Robbins views traditional medicine as being useful for crisis care – saving a life –but it does little to address the cause of health problems,” a common and ridiculously false trope among altmed hucksters and crackpots that often reflects these people’s crackpot idea of some underlying, magical cause of all disease that scientists don’t recognize, most commonly: “Nutrient deficiencies and toxicity," which Dr. Robbins believes "are the basic contributors to disease.” This is, of course, nonsense.

Robbins is perhaps most famous for being one of the most ardent promoters of live blood cell analysis, which can hardly be described as anything but a scam: based on a picture of the patient’s blood cell, the practitioner will prescribe various treatments and dietary supplements (usually conveniently matching the practitioner’s own store). As a diagnostic procedure, live blood cell analysis has absolutely no scientific merit, and no foundation in evidence or facts. It has, however, been pushed by MLMs. Indeed, the multilevel marketing company Infinity, of Scottsdale, Arizona, which pushes the scam together with “enzyme pills” that can help with the enzyme deficiency their salespeople discover by using the tests (they falsely claim that that “enzyme deficiency” is widespread among American people), lists Robbins as a member of its Professional Advisory Council. Even grand woomeister Andrew Weil dismisses such tests as “completely bogus”.

In addition to bogus nutritional advice, Robbins’s clinic offers and recommends juicing, enzyme therapy and detox programs, as well as vitamin injections (a scam), IV therapy (another scam) to “promote removal of toxins, including heavy metals and chemical, [l]iver cleanse, [i]mmune System boost [and n]utrition replenishment”, and oxygen therapy (yep, a scam, that one too). And rest assured: Robbins’s brand of chiropractic is of the most deranged pseudoscience kind conceivable, based on the idea that “[c]hiropractic care is the art and science of assisting the body in returning to a state of health by increasing the communication between the brain and the body”; according to Robbins’s institute the brain’s “ability to communicate that message to the body for healing is sometimes hindered due to nerve and blood vessel impingement,” which Robbins can fix “by mechanical realignment of bones of the body as needed.” Needless to say, none of this is even coherent from a reality-based point of view.

And if you don’t know what’s wrong with you – or whether anything is – don’t worry: Robbins and his institute have a battery of tests in addition to live blood cell analysis, from “neurotransmitter testing” to “bio-meridian screening”. They will definitely find something, and luckily have a cure to sell you for whatever is found as well.

Diagnosis: He seems to have quietly scrubbed his website of references to his diploma mill diplomas, but the information remains as trustworthy as ever. Crackpot and bullshit promoter.

#2167: Rita Roark & Sara Ebarb

Rita Roark used to be a science teacher at Negreet High School in Negreet, Louisiana, a position she used as a platform to teach kids that the Bible is “100 percent true”, promote young Earth creationism and tell her students that evolution was an “impossible” and “stupid theory made up by stupid people who don’t want to believe in God” – “if evolution was real, it would still be happening,” Roark allegedly said: “Apes would be turning into humans today” (a variant of this, only dumber.) Nope, not a hint of understanding of evolution or science (or the Constitution). Roark would also for instance feature Christianity-related questions on her science tests. 

Her practices were, though apparently typical of the area and the school, of course unconstitutional, and Roark achieved some fame when her practices were brought to light in Lane v. Sabine Parish School Board, a case filed by the ACLU on behalf of the parents of a Buddhist student. When the student, C.C., failed to fill in the expected answers on Roark’s Christianity-related “science” questions, Roark would belittle him in front of the class, and even calling Buddhism “stupid”. When C.C.’s parents objected to the practice, the Sabine Parish superintendent Sara Ebarb told them “this is the Bible Belt”, and suggested that the family either convert to Christianity or move to another school. 

Needless to say, the US district court ruled quite unequivocally against the school board, even going out of its way to explain to the defendants what the ruling implies. The school board, however, refused to admit to wrongdoing. The state, too, is apparently refusing to see the problem. Meanwhile, David Klinghoffer at the Discovery Institute was kept busy trying to spin the story as far into alternate reality as he could.

Diagnosis: Dangerous fundie who, like fundies often do, hate the Constitution and should have no business being let even near a science classroom (other than as a strikingly obtuse student). But she is pretty zealous about winning souls for Jesus, and in some Louisiana schools, that is apparently precisely what the goal of education should be.