DC's Improbable Science: Recent Episodes
None
Googling ‘bioresonance therapy’ produces a large number of hits. One of the first comes from the Oxford Chiropractic Clinic, which says
“Bioresonance is one of the most exciting innovative complementary health therapies of our time. It is a bespoke therapeutic approach that is noninvasive, painless and energetically supports the body by addressing potential causes of chronic and degenerative disease.”
“By enhancing the body’s cellular energy levels and ability to detoxify, almost any condition can benefit. It is a safe therapy to use alongside traditional and alternative medicine and is not used to diagnose or treat dis-ease.”
Almost needless to say, the claim that “almost any condition can benefit” is made-up nonsense. As so often, sciencey-sounding language is used to sell the product.
“Bioresonance is a form of oscillation medicine, founded on the theory of Quantum Physics, that all matter is in motion, oscillating and vibrating.”
Once again, there is an allusion to quantum physics. It makes no sense at all. It’s just a pretentious bit of gobbledygook, written by someone who has no idea what quantum physics is. The spiel continues:
“This motion is in the form of waves which can be measured and defined by their frequency. All parts of the human anatomy, cells, tissues, organs, systems etc. have a particular spectrum of frequencies relating to them. The same is true for pathophysiology (dis-ease processes), bacteria, viruses, parasites, mould, heavy metals, pesticides, environmental toxins, electromagnetic smog, geopathic stress, essential vitamins, minerals and probiotic bacteria.”
The implied claim to fix anything whatsoever is a sure sign of quackery.
In 2019, Les Rose and Mandy Payne wrote, in the HealthSense newsletter, about one particular “bioresonance” device, the Resonator, which is sold by Anthony Grant via his website. They were astonished to find that
“one of the complaints had been brought by the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA). In fact, the MHRA is itself the statutory regulator for medical devices, so why was matter referred to the ASA [Advertising Standards Authority], an independent body whose code is voluntary, instead of using its own regulatory powers?”“one of the complaints had been brought by the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA). In fact, the MHRA is itself the statutory regulator for medical devices, so why was matter referred to the ASA [Advertising Standards Authority], an independent body whose code is voluntary, instead of using its own regulatory powers?”
The fact is that neither the ASA nor the MHRA are effective regulators. The ASA upheld all the complaints about the “Resonator”, but all it can do is to request that the advertisement must not appear again in the form complained of. That was in June 2021. The recommendation was simply ignored, and, in January 2025, resonator.uk continues to make the same grotesque claims that were condemned by the ASA.
Anthony Grant contacted HealthSense after seeing the article and offered to supply his product free of charge for us to examine and try. HealthSense accepted his offer and he duly supplied two Resonators. Since I retired, I no longer have access to an oscilloscope. But, luckily, a neighbour, John Nickalls, is a recently-retired electrical engineer. He kindly agreed to look at what’s inside the resonator. His report can be downloaded here.
What’s in the box?The box has an on/off switch and sockets for the two handgrips which appear to be made from sections of copper pipe.
Opening the box reveals that it contains a single semiconductor chip. It is a simple square wave generator. A search with Google Lens shows that very similar devices are widely available on the web. They are cheap -prices for the chip are mostly between £0.74 and £5.00. -for example from Ali Express Ali Express or from ebay
Grant sells the device for £97.00. That sounds like a healthy profit margin.
Open circuit (no load attached), the device produces a 30 kHz square wave between 0 V and 9 V, with 50% duty cycle (as set on the device).
When a 1 kΩ resistor was connected across the tubes (crudely simulating a body load) the voltage change was roughly halved (to about 4.3 V), which suggests that the source resistance of the semiconductor device in the ‘high’ output state (i.e. 9 V) is about 1 kΩ.
What matters for the response of the body is the current that flows, rather than the voltage that drives it. This was monitored by placing a small (100 Ω) resistor in series with the negative side of the resonator output. During these measurements the copper pipes were held, one in each hand, as the instructions that come with it specify.
The upper trace (red) shows the voltage across the copper handgrips. The fact that it doesn’t rise instantly shows that the body has capacitance as well as resistance.
The lower trace (blue) shows the voltage across the 100 Ω resistor, which is directly proportional the current flowing through the body of the person who is holding the copper hand grips. Following the rise of the applied voltage, the current the flows peaks at 40 mA `and declines over a few microseconds to about 10 mA. These values are inferred by applying Ohm’s law to the voltage across the 100 Ω resistor (blue trace). For example, the peak voltage on the blue trace is about 4 V and this corresponds to a current of 4 V / 100 Ω = 0.04 A = 40 mA.
These currents, of a few tens of milliamps, would be in the potentially dangerous range if they were direct currents, or varying slowly, like mains currents (50 Hz). But oscillating currents, like that produced by the Resonator, are more complicated. The concept of resistance has to be replaced by impedance, and understanding that needs an understanding of complex numbers (numbers that depend on the square root of minus one).
In this case, we can circumvent the theory by noting that the person holding the handles felt no sensation at all. A current of this size would normally be expected to stimulate motor nerve fibres and cause muscle contractions or, potentially, bad effects on the normal rhythm of the heart. The fact that there was no perceptible sensation felt by people holding the handles suggests that the high frequency of the pulses causes most current to flow through the superficial layers of skin, with relatively little flowing through underlying muscle. That is just as well, because the currents would otherwise be dangerous.
The only comparable frequencies are used in bioimpedance measurements. This is a notoriously inaccurate method that attempts to estimate lean body mass by passing a high frequency current, often 50 kHz, through the body, but this uses currents in the microamp range, so at least it is safe.
So what is the effect of the Resonator?According to its website
“The “Resonator “ is an electronic bio-resonance, non-invasive device. It is not a medical device. As with any electronic device, it works or it doesn’t. The Resonator works.
It does not come under the requirement of clinical trials etc. Clinical trials are conducted on new drugs to ensure they do no harm and that they work better than a placebo. It does not require a CE mark as it is not a medical device and causes no harm.”
“The Resonator produces a resonant frequency in microamps [not true] from a tiny 9-volt battery that kills your parasites, and bad bacteria and destroys viruses. The 30kHz frequency vibrates at 30,000 times a second, shaking the pathogens to pieces.”
It is obviously absurd to say that a device that’s claimed to kill “your parasites, and bad bacteria and destroys viruses” is “not a medical device”. That’s said in a (futile) attempt to justify ignoring the ASA’s verdict.
Almost certainly the Resonator has no effects whatsoever. The claim that “The Resonator works” is true only in the sense that it does indeed produce an oscillating 30 kHz voltage. But it does not work in the only sense that matters. The idea that a bacterium can be “shaken to pieces” by any electromagnetic field that could be tolerated by the human body is not established. Even if it were possible, it’s very obvious that objects of such vastly different size and shape as parasites and viruses would all have very different resonant frequencies: they couldn’t possibly all resonate at 30 kHz.
The myth of bioresonance started in the 1930s with an American, Royal Raimond Rife. His work has never been reproduced and has sunk into obscurity. But even he didn’t pretend that all bacteria have the same resonant frequency. In 1936, he produced a table that claimed to show the resonant frequencies of various bacteria. They varied from 139.2 kHz (for Anthrax) to 1.6 MHz. None were as low as 30 kHz. The idea that there was something magic about 30 kHz originated much later.
Rife’s work was dismissed until a naturopath, Hulda Clark, revived it in the 1980s. She wrote books with titles The Cure for All Cancers (1993), The Cure For HIV / AIDS (1993), The Cure for All Diseases (1995) and The Cure For All Advanced Cancers (1999). Anyone who writes about the cure for all diseases is pretty obviously seriously deluded, or, perhaps, a charlatan. Her claims were too much, even for luminaries of the world of alternative medicine: for example, Andrew Weil described them as “bizarre”. And the Swiss Study Group for Complementary and Alternative Methods in Cancer (SCAC) issued a strong warning to cancer patients considering Clark’s methods. Even she didn’t claim that a single frequency would kill everything. She sold a device called a Syncrometer which she claimed would detect relevant frequencies but this was clearly fraudulent. The FTC intervened and Clark moved her clinic from San Diego to Mexico, to avoid lawsuits. Nonetheless, Grant recommends her work to readers of v.
Anthony Grant can be heard in an interview with Michael Marshall, of the Merseyside Skeptics group and the Good Thinking Society. Grant, on his website, says that the resonator “runs at microamps, (1,000,000 of an amp)”, a claim repeated in the interview. As shown above, this is not true – it is in the milliamp range. It’s clear that he has little understanding of either physiology or physics – e.g. the definition of Hertz on his website is totally garbled “Hz (hertz) is the cycle of an alternating frequency that travels in one second”. He admits that there is little evidence for the effectiveness of the device, and, as usual, he attributes this to the cost of doing clinical trials. That’s true of huge phase 3 trial, but it would be cheap to do experiments with bacteria, but they haven’t been done.
ConclusionAnthony Grant appears to believe genuinely in the device he’s selling. It is always hard to distinguish between delusion and fraud. This dilemma was discussed perceptively by the US physicist Robert Park, in his book Voodoo Science: the road from foolishness to fraud (Oxford University Press). In summary, his thesis is that those who propagate these ideas often start with a genuine belief that what they say is true. Rejection of the ideas by sensible people just makes them more determined. Eventually, though, it probably dawns on many of them that they have made a terrible mistake. At this point, some recant, but more often they have so much reputation to defend, and frequently too much income to protect, that they will continue to propagate their ideas even after they have realised that they are wrong.
Grant’s is a small scale operation, so the number of people who are likely to come to harm as a result of his activities is limited. From that point of view, I feel almost guilty for being hard on him. Nevertheless, selling medical devices that clearly don’t work is not a good way to earn a living.
What should be done? This story is really about the regulators who fail abysmally to do their job. In the USA, they are more effective, at least in the most egregious cases like that of Hulda Clark. The MHRA failed to take action in this case and the ASA did what little it could, but its judgement was simply ignored. This is not good enough.
Back to my old interest in medicine that doesn’t work. And the fact that there is such a huge market for medicine that doesn’t work is, in large part, a result of regulators who fail to regulate.
One example of a regulator that fails to protect the public from health fraud is the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council -the CNHC (known colloquially as OfQuack). I have history with them, having offered my services to them, and, astonishingly, been accepted. There I found a lot of well-meaning but poorly-educated people: they had no idea about what constituted evidence, and very little interest in finding out. Of course, I was asked to resign and when I declined to do so, I was fired.
AI reports on health claimsThat’s one reason that I was happy to play a small part in a recent study of the health claims made by people who are registered with the CNHC. [link to the paper -it’s open access]. Registration is voluntary: anyone can practise as a naturopath or reflexologist with no need for qualifications and no check on their activities. But if they do choose to register with the CNHC they’ll appear on their website, and that confers on them a (spurious) sort of respectablity.
In the study, artificial intelligence was asked to identify false or misleading claims made on the web sites of practitioners who were registered with the CNHC. Only the practitioners of the most obviously pseudoscientific subjects were included (Alexander Technique, Aromatherapy, Bowen Therapy, Colon Hydrotherapy, Craniosacral Therapy, Healing, Kinesiology, Microsystems Acupuncture, Naturopathy, Reflexology, Reiki and Shiatsu).
The AI assessed text from 11,771 web pages, scraped from 725 web sites. It identified false or misleading claims in 704 (97%) of the websites. The complete list of 23,307 claims identified by AI, with the reasons that AI provided, can be downloaded at https://osf.io/hnuqs (better not try printing it out -it has 2370 pages).
A few of the web pages were read by four humans, and the humans identified a comparable number of false or misleading claims to that found by the AI.
What does this mean for AI?It seems that the AI did a good job in identifying false and misleading claims. That surprised me because AI has to learn from what it finds on the web. And the information on the web about reflexology, craniosacral therapy and naturopathy etc, is almost all nonsense -just sales talk. The fact that AI wasn’t fooled by this shows that the information that was used to train the AI came, almost entirely, from reliable sources, The sources of training material are a human choice. So the finding that AI can judge that reflexology is nonsense is actually a result of the human intelligence that decided which sources were reliable and which were not.
I’ve tried asking AI several real science questions and I’ve been very disappointed by the answers. The AI showed no ability to judge between different, but legitimate, points of view. For example there is a lot of good material on the web about statistical inference (but also quite a lot of mediocre stuff).
When I asked about the interpretation of p values, the first answers were quite accurate but entirely frequentist. When I pointed out that likelihood and Bayesian approaches are often critical of the frequentist interpretation, the AI apologised and tried again (the mock humility of the apology was particularly horrid). After a few more prompts, the AI came to a view of the problem which was quite close to mine. That doesn’t mean that my view is right. It means that, with helpful prompts, AI can be led to almost any conclusion you wish.
Once again, the biggest influence is the human intelligence that guides the AI. The computer algorithm showed NO understanding of the problems. It spat out a version of the material that was used to train it. It was at the level of a mediocre undergraduate. The only way to detect that it was AI was that it answered in better English, with fewer spelling mistakes than most undergraduates can manage. That makes its use doubly dangerous.
Implications for regulation of alternative medicineIt’s been obvious for a long time that the regulators of alternative medicine fail totally to protect the public from false and misleading claims being made about the products that are being sold to the public. That is shown abundantly by this paper. The number of false or misleading claims that were found on the web is inevitably an underestimate of the real number. AI could count only claims that were made in public, on the web. It couldn’t count the number of false claims that are made in private conversations, nor the number made in printed advertisements.
It’s clear from the huge number of false claims made by CNHC registrants that it would take a lot of time and effort for the CNHC to fulfil its duty to protect the public from them. The benefit of using AI is not that it’s any better than humans at detecting false and misleading claims. The benefit lies entirely in the speed with which it can do the job. That’s why the senior author of the paper, Simon Perry, offered the use of his methods to the CNHC. So far they have shown little interest in accepting that help. All that I can infer from this is that the CNHC has little interest in the false claims made by its registrants, as long as they keep paying the registration fees. It hasn’t changed much since I was part if it, 14 years ago.
ConclusionsAI looks quite promising for some problems where the task is limited and the rules are clear. Learning to spot cancerous tissue in radiographs, when trained on enough radiographs in which the human diagnosis turned out to be accurate. AI also did a good job in detecting false or misleading claims by practitioners of various sorts of alternative medicine, though this reflects the (human) choice of reliable sources of information. The speed with which this can be done should be useful to regulators who are interested in stopping the spread of misinformation. Sadly most regulators show very little interest in doing that part of their job.
Ai seems to have done a good job in predicting protein folding. That is a very restricted task, and there is a lot of (mostly) reliable information to train on. There is a lot of hype about its use for drug discovery, but the training data for that job is often crude and inaccurate.
But general-AI has a long way to go. It has no understanding of what it says. At the moment it’s mainly a tool for crooks, fraudsters and charlatans whose intent is to deceive.
Is it bad to write for hard-right outlets?
There is no doubt that the Overton window has shifted to the right during the last decade or two. It is now common to hear people saying things that, even in 2010 would have been thought to be frankly fascistic.
I recall a conversation with the great biophysicist, Sir Bernard Katz, in 1992. He had come to UCL in 1936 to escape from the Nazi regime in Leipzig. When I suggested to him that he must have been very pleased about the reunification of Germany, he pulled a long face and said “hmm, let’s wait to see what crawls out from under stones”. He was, as so often, right. The radical right party, Alternative für Deutschland, has gained strength, especially in the former East Germany.
It isn’t long since we used to laugh at the USA for the far-right tendencies of Fox News. Now we have its direct equivalent in GB News and Talk TV. Neither carries much advertising. GB News lost £42 million last year. In an evening of watching GB News, the only advertisement that I heard was for boxt.co.uk who sponsored the weather forecast. So, who is paying for them? It seems to be much the same people who are paying for other far-right sites like Spiked Online and for slightly more subtle organisations that have sprung up to push hard-right views. These include UnHerd, Quillette and The Critic. Mostly it’s super-rich business people whose wealth allows them to push for laws that make them even more wealthy while pretending to be on the side of the people against the “elites”. In the case of Talk TV it’s Rupert Murdoch. In the case of GB News, and UnHerd, and the Free Speech Union, it’s Sir Paul Marshall.
Paul Marshall (read more about him) is a very wealthy hedge fund manager -one of the elite group of wealthy people who find it convenient to pretend that they are on the ’side of the people’. A curious characteristic of the hard right is that they seem to believe this: a sufficient condition to believe something is that it isn’t true. In order to join their cult you must be against vaccines, against lockdowns, against climate change mitigations, against electric cars, against science, against universities, against the BBC, against any sort of regulation. It is all weirdly contrarian. What they claim to be for is free speech, though naturally that’s more important for people they agree with.
There are some quite ingenious people behind the hard-right’s attempts to take power. The attempted coup was obvious when Trump urged his supporters to storm Congress on January 6th, 2021, and it’s obvious in his rhetoric in 2024. In the UK it is more subtle, but equally dangerous. The idea seems to be to get people indignant about things like climate change by producing a non-stop deluge of misinformation. The fact that 99.9 percent of scientists agree that climate change is a danger to the future of our planet means nothing to them -they seem to regard it as proof that there is a conspiracy by the “elites” to oppress the people.
Spreading conspiracies is a useful tool for the far-right. They vary from the slightly plausible to the batshit crazy (Jewish space lasers, anyone?). In the words of Steve Bannon, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”. In other words, provide so much misinformation that people get disorientated.
Some good fact-checkers have arisen in an attempt to counter the flood of misinformation. Needless to say, the hard-right are against them. BBC Verify does a good job in telling us what’s true and what isn’t. And the BBC appointed its first specialist disinformation and social media correspondent, Marianna Spring. She’s done a terrific job in investigating conspiracy theorists. She’s talked to some of the more extreme people -those who claim that the Covid virus doesn’t exist and that the pandemic was a hoax, and that the Manchester Arena bombing was staged. Needless to say, she’s incurred the wrath not only of Twitter trolls (many thousands of abusive messages and death threats), but also of UnHerd, which pretends to be moderate.
Simon Cottee published in UnHerd, “The hypocrisy of the BBC’s misinformation war: Marianna Spring is as dogmatic as her trolls”. (Cottee is a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Kent.) It includes gems like:
. . . an entire industry of journalists, academics and experts has arisen to hunt down, track and police misinformation. In some ways, this industry is just as creepy and alarming as the conspiracy culture it gorges on, mirroring its familiar pathologies of distortion and hyperbole.
So the people who warn about dangerous conspiracies are just as bad as those who spread them?
Conspiracy culture, for those who are part of it, offers a profound spiritual enlargement of the world, imbuing it with hidden meanings, mysteries and secrets. Conspiracies can be engaging and fun and thrillingly transgressive.
So that’s all right, then.
There is a lot of information about the organisations and people involved in the recent burgeoning of hard-right sites in a fascinating paper by Huw C. Davies and Sheena E. MacRae: An anatomy of the British war on woke (https://doi.org/10.1177/03063968231164905). One name that keeps cropping up is Toby Young. You can read more about him on his Wikipedia page. Despite the fact that he’s edited his own page 282 times, it’s less than flattering. He ran Lockdown Sceptics, and now runs The Daily Sceptic and the Free Speech Union. His character can be judged also from this selection of his puerile tweets from 2009 (when he was 45 years old, not 15).
A dilemma
Outlets like UnHerd, The Critic and Quillette are somewhat less extreme than Breitbart and Spiked. They are designed to seem reasonable and to tolerate, even to invite, some progressive opinions. I’d argue that this makes them even more dangerous than the more extreme sites. If you want to know where their political sympathies lie, look at comments on their articles (but hold your nose before doing so). At a time when we have the most right-wing government in my lifetime, their number one enemy is that very government. They are fiercely critical of any Conservative who isn’t a member of the group of far-right insurgents whom John Major called “bastards” in 1993, and whom an ally of David Cameron, 20 years later, called swivel-eyed loons.
The stimulus to write this piece came when I noticed that some of my heroes had been writing for them. That has created a dilemma for me, so I’ll put both sides of it. First, though, the problem.
First, I noticed that Sense About Science is debating at the Free Speech Union. Sense about Science is an organisation that advocates good science and explains it in an accessible way. It has written good pamphlets on a lot of topics, though the fact that it’s taken money from industry inevitably means that it will be regarded with a bit of suspicion. Being involved with Toby Young’s blatantly anti-science Free Speech Union can surely only add to those suspicions.
Then I got another shock when I saw that Alan Sokal was also involved with the Free Speech Union. I loved Sokal’s book, Intellectual Impostures, in which he, with Jean Bricmont, talk about his spoof paper which demolished the absurd pretentiousness of post-modernist philosophers. The cover of his book appears on the masthead of my blog, where I have posted about his work. I was therefore very surprised when I found that he, a physicist, had spoken at Toby Young’s anti-science Free Speech Union. It’s on YouTube.
I was even more astonished when I found that Margaret McCartney and Deborah Cohen were publishing in UnHerd. McCartney is a GP in Glasgow and a prolific journalist. Cohen is a first-rate investigative medical journalist. They are both people whose work I admire hugely. Why on earth are such people giving succour to the hard right?
Declaration of interest. I count Sokal, McCartney and Cohen as friends. I have huge respect for all of them. McCartney, Cohen (and I) have all received the Health Sense UK award. We were all what was described as sceptics before that word was purloined by the forces of anti-science.
My dilemma
It could certainly be argued that I’m wrong to be upset that people with whom I agree on almost everything, are engaging with the hard right. Talking is good and they are taking their messages to people who will often not agree with them, not preaching to those who already agree.
On the other hand, they are attracting readers to organisations that are far to the right of anything I’ve known in my lifetime. Organisations that, if they got their way, would result, I believe, in an authoritarian government which would have much in common with fascism.
One possible explanation lies in the cleverness with which the hard-right has used wedge issues to divide people. If you put the word ‘transgender’ into UnHerd’s search box, you get 466 hits. It’s a topic that is an obsession of all the new hard-right sites. They bang on about it incessantly. That seems odd because only 0.5 percent of the population are affected by it. It’s also odd because the same people who would, at other times, be saying that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, are now seeking to appear as champions of women’s rights.
I suspect that this is a clever calculation on the part of hard-right outlets, which are generally opposed to science. It’s designed to win over rationalists by asserting again, and again, and again, that biological sex can’t change. Of course it can’t. I don’t need people like Toby Young to tell me that. Most people nevertheless think that people with gender dysphoria should be treated with kindness. I have given my opinions on the transgender question already. It isn’t that hard. Yet the heat that is generated has allowed otherwise reasonable people to be sucked into the orbit of the hard-right.
That is tragic.
The post How do we stop a resurgence of fascism? appeared first on DC's Improbable Science.
Go to follow-up
| “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”Steven Weinberg |
In 2003, I started a web page that documented the horrors of the Iraq war. The title of the page was corrie.html, because one of the first entries was about Rachel Corrie. This was it.
| On Sunday, 16th March 2003, a 23-year-old American peace activist, Rachel Corrie, was crushed to death by a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the Israeli army destroying homes in the Gaza Strip.You can read here some of the emails that she sent home before she died. And a reaction from the Naomi Klein in the Globe and Mail (Toronto).” Katharine Viner has edited her writings for a new play, on an ordinary woman with an extraordinary passion”. [Guardian] | |
At the time, John Sutherland documented some of the terrifyingly violent reactions of ‘patriotic’ Americans. One ‘patriot’ wrote
“Anyone who would burn an American flag deserves to be bulldozed to death!!! Hopefully the US government will aim some bulldozers at the next group of war protesters, those anti-American motherfuckers.”
Guardian 31 March 2003
Already in 2003, long before Trump and Farage, the polarisation was very obvious. Now it is worse.
The original post is here. At the same time, I started a web page about education and religion (here), which concentrated on the undesirability of having religious schools. Needless to say, the stimulus to return to these topics is the war that’s raging between Israel and Gaza, now.
Israel and HamasThe history of Israel could scarcely be more tortuous. I have often thought that the postwar foundation of the state of Israel was unfair on the people who lived there already. The foundation resulted from European postwar guilt about the holocaust, so space for displaced Jews should surely have been found in Europe. But that is not what Jews wanted. They wanted Palestine. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their towns and villages. Naturally, the people who already lived there were peeved. Imagine the reaction if it had been proposed to set up Israel in Yorkshire.
If it were not for religion, it’s possible that it could have been made to work.
Hamas is a theocratic dictatorship (it was originally elected in 2006, and there have been no elections since then). The founding documents of Hamas make absolutely explicit their genocidal intentions. They are truly blood-curdling.
In summary, this is what Hamas wants
- The complete destruction of Israel as an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a theocratic state based on Islamic law (Sharia),
- The need for both unrestrained and unceasing holy war (jihad) to attain the above objective,
- The deliberate disdain for, and dismissal of, any negotiated resolution or political settlement of Jewish and Muslim claims to the Holy Land, and
- The reinforcement of historical anti-Semitic tropes and calumnies married to sinister conspiracy theories.
These aims are no different from those of ISIS/Islamic State. That’s why they butchered so many Israeli citizens. on Saturday 7 October 2023. How is it possible for humans to behave with such savagery? I’m reminded of Richard Dawkins’ reaction to 9/ll.
“. . . tell them there’s a special martyr’s reward of 72 virgin brides, guaranteed eager and exclusive.
Would they fall for it? Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.”
“Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. “Mindless” may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.
It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.”
Richard Dawkins Religion’s misguided missiles, 15 September 2001
Two of the best accounts that I’ve read are both from Jews. Jonathan Freedland, writing in the Guardian, and Isaac Saul, whose writings I recently discovered via Twitter.
“The word pogrom was not meant to exist in Hebrew. In the new Israel, the very idea of Jews being murdered en masse, their children butchered before their eyes, was meant to have been banished to the realm of bitter memory.”
“Because Hamas is not identical with the Palestinian cause: it is a curse on it. With a founding charter, never revoked, packed with explicit, medieval anti-Jewish hatred, it has become an Isis-style force of bloodcurdling cruelty, one that brings calamity down on its own people – a calamity that threatens now to become even more devastating.
It isn’t that difficult. You can condemn Hamas and name its actions as evil, even as you support the Palestinians in their quest for a life free of occupation and oppression. And there should still be room in your heart for a Jewish child whose last moments were filled with unimaginable terror – the same terror his grandparents, and their grandparents, thought they had escaped for ever.”
Jonathan Freedland After the pogrom in Israel, the angel of death is licking his lips
Isaac Saul is an American journalist who operates a news site, tangle.news. I chanced on a tweet from him
You can read his full post at Tangle News (scroll down to My take for his commentary). Here are some quotations.
“I don’t believe Hamas is killing Israelis to liberate themselves, nor do I believe they are doing it to make peace. They’re doing this because they represent the devil on the shoulder of every oppressed Palestinian who has lost someone in this conflict. They’re doing it because they want vengeance. They are evening the score, and acting on the worst of our human impulses, to respond to blood with blood”
“The Arab states had already rejected a partitioned Israel repeatedly before World War II and rejected it again after the Holocaust and the end of the war. They did not want to give up even a little bit of their land to a bunch of Jewish interlopers who were granted it all of a sudden by British interlopers who had arrived a hundred years prior. Who could blame them? It had been centuries since Jews lived there in large numbers, and now they wanted to return in waves as secularized Europeans.”
“Are Israelis and British people “colonizers” because of this 20th century history? Sure. But that view flattens thousands of years of history and conflict, and the context of World War I and World War II. I don’t view Israelis and Brits as colonizers any more than the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Romans or the Mongols or the Egyptians or the Ottomans who all battled over the same strip of land from as early as 800 years before Jesus’s time until now. ”
“Palestinians are devoid of any real unified leadership, and the Arab world is now divided on the issue of Palestine. Israel is unwilling to give the people in Gaza and the West Bank more than an inch of freedom to live. These are largely the refugees and descendents of the refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars that Israel won. And you can’t keep two million people in the condition that those in the Gaza strip live in and not expect events like this. ” “
You cannot keep two million people living in the conditions people in Gaza are living in and expect peace.
You can’t. And you shouldn’t. Their environment is antithetical to the human condition. Violent rebellion is guaranteed. Guaranteed. As sure as the sun rising.
And the cycle of violence seems locked in to self-perpetuate, because both sides see a score to settle:”
“Iran probably helped organize the attack and the money freed up by the Biden administration’s prisoner swap probably didn’t help the situation, either. Israel’s increasingly extremist government and settlers provoking Palestinians certainly didn’t help.”
“Nor does illegally continuing to expand and steal what is left of Palestinian land, as many Jews and Israelis have been doing in the 21st century despite cries from the global community to stop. A violent response was predictable — in fact, plenty of people did predict it.”
“Am I pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? I have no idea.
I’m pro-not-killing-civilians.
I’m pro-not-trapping-millions-of-people-in-open-air-prisons.
I’m pro-not-shooting-grandmas-in-the-back-of-the-head.
I’m pro-not-flattening-apartment-complexes.
I’m pro-not-raping-women-and-taking-hostages.
I’m pro-not-unjustly-imprisoning-people-without-due-process.
I’m pro-freedom and pro-peace and pro- all the things we never see in this conflict anymore.
Whatever this is, I want none of it.
Isaac Saul, Tangle News, 10 October 2023
There is scarcely a word in Saul’s post which I don’t heartily embrace. The bloodthirsty cycle of vengeance continues. Until somebody has the courage to break it, it will get worse.
We now have two sides, each vowing to wipe the other off the face of the earth. How can this be happening in 2023? Most people just want to live in peace and happiness. One would have thought that, after two world wars in the 20th century, people would have learned more sense. It seems that we are slow learners. Our primitive savagery is never far from the surface. I can only conclude that mankind has a long way to go before before it reaches a civilised state.
As Steven Pinker says, we are heading in the right direction. It’s not so long since all states butchered their citizens. Some still do. It remains to be seen whether mankind learns to manage its affairs better before we are all wiped out by nuclear Armageddon or climate change.
The excellent cartoonist, Ben Jennings, put it perfectly in the Guardian.
Follow-upI’m baffled by the way many people on the left, with whom I usually agree, are making apologies for Hamas. They are no more worthy of support than ISIS/Islamic State. They are murderous thugs who use barbaric tactics to impose their own perverse interpretation of Islam on the rest of the world. The appalling thing is that the barbaric behaviour of Netanyahu’s government gives them (a bit of) plausibility.
I’ll add here references to subsequent writings which I’ve found helpful. First, the excellent Anne Applebaum points out that their are no longer any rules of war.
There Are No Rules
States and quasi-states are using extreme, uninhibited violence against civilian populations.
By Anne Applebaum 9 October 2023
“In Ukraine, Russia has once again used artillery, cruise missiles, and drones, including Iranian drones, to hit an even wider range of civilian targets: houses, apartment buildings, churches, restaurants, ports, grain silos. Just last week, Russian missiles hit a shop and café in the small village of Hroza, killing more than 50 people. This kind of strike had no conventional military justification. The point is to create pain, cause civilian deaths, and sow disruption—nothing else. Russian propagandists praise the destruction and call for more: “We should wait for the right moment and cause a migration crisis for Europe with a new influx of Ukrainians,” one of them told a television talk show.”
“The Hamas terrorists paid no attention to any modern laws of war, or any norms of any kind: Like the Russians, Hamas and its Iranian backers (who are also Russian allies) run nihilistic regimes whose goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online. ”
“Democracies, led by the United States, bear a lot of the blame too, either for refusing to enforce anything resembling order when they could, or for violating the rules themselves. George W. Bush condoned interrogation black sites and torture during the War on Terror.”
“Donald Trump went out of his way to pardon American war criminals and continues to advocate extrajudicial murders, among other things implying that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be executed. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has notably indulged the most extreme voices in Israeli politics, including political figures who explicitly seek to undermine Israel’s independent judiciary and Israeli rule of law, and parties whose members openly advocate for the mass expulsion of Arabs from the country. ”
“Open brutality has again become celebrated in international conflicts, and a long time may pass before anything else replaces it.”
And another piece from The Atlantic, which points out that Iran has set a trap for Israel.
Israel Is Walking Into a Trap
Storming into Gaza will fulfill Hamas’s wish.
By Hussein Ibish October 13th,2023
“Like almost all other acts of spectacularly bloodthirsty terrorism, Hamas’s assault on southern Israel was designed to provoke an emotional and equally or even more outrageous response by the targeted society.”
“Iran and Hamas are counting on Israel to attack Gaza with such ferocity that the international sympathy of the past week toward Israel, even in the Arab world, evaporates quickly and is replaced by outrage at the suffering inflicted on the 2 million residents of Gaza.”
“So now Israel will triple down on the dehumanization and collective punishment of all of these “human animals.”
“Tehran couldn’t ask for more.”
The post Bloody Religion appeared first on DC's Improbable Science.
Today, in desperation, we sent a letter to our MP. Usually such letters get a boiler plate response, dictated by Conservative Central Office. We aren’t hopeful about changing the mind of our MP. Before he was elected he ran a shockingly misogynist web site, now deleted. But it’s essential to do what one can [...]
This is a transcript of the talk that I gave to the RIOT science club on 1st October 2020. The video of the talk is on YouTube . The transcript was very kindly made by Chris F Carroll, but I have modified it a bit here to increase clarity. Links to the [...]
I am going to set out my current views about the transgender problem. It’s something that has caused a lot of discussion on twitter, much of it unpleasantly vituperative. When I refer to ‘problem’ I’m referring to the vituperation, not, of course, the existence of transgender people. Short posts on twitter don’t allow nuance, [...]
There will soon be an election for the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales. I support Dr Sexton for the job. Here’s my endorsement. I’ll say why below.
I support Dr Sexton as a candidate to lead the Green Party (England and Wales). She said “The Green Party is a political party, not a [...]
During the Black Lives Matter demonstrations on Sunday 7th June, the statue of Edward Colston was pulled down and dumped in the harbour in Bristol. I think that it was the most beautiful thing that happened yesterday. Colston made his money from the slave trade. 84,000 humans were transported on his ships. 19,000 of them died because [...]
This example illustrates just how fast exponential growth is. It was proposed on twitter by Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur) who attributes the idea to Simon Moores. The stadium version is a variant of the better known ‘grains of wheat (or rice) on a chessboard‘ problem. The stadium example is better, I think, because the [...]
Jump to follow-up
The inquiry into UCL’s historical role in eugenics was set up a year ago. Its report was delivered on Friday 28 February 2020. Nine (the MORE group) of the 16 members of the inquiry commission refused to sign the final report and issued their own recommendations. The reasons for this lack of consensus included the [...]
Jump to follow-up On Sunday 23 September, we recorded an interview with Rosi Sexton. Ever since I got to know her, I’ve been impressed by her polymathy. She’s a musician, a mathematician and a champion athlete, and now an osteopath: certainly an unusual combination. You can read about her on her Wikipedia [...]
Jump to follow-up If you are not a pharmacologist or physiologist, you may never have heard of Bernard Ginsborg. I first met him in 1960. He was a huge influence on me and a great friend. I’m publishing this here because the Physiological Society has published only a brief obituary.
Bernard with his wife, Andy (Andrina). You [...]
Jump to follow-up See also The history of eugenics at UCL: the inquiry report. On Monday evening (8th January 2018), I got an email from Ben van der Merwe, a UCL student who works as a reporter for the student newspaper, London Student. He said
“Our investigation has found a ring of academic psychologists associated with Richard Lynn’s [...]
Jump to follow-up Today we went to see the film Goodbye Christopher Robin. It was very good. I, like most children, read Pooh books as a child.
Image from Wikipedia I got interested in their author, A.A. Milne, when I discovered that he’d done a mathematics degree at Cambridge. So had [...]
Jump to follow-up This piece is almost identical with today’s Spectator Health article.
This week there has been enormously wide coverage in the press for one of the worst papers on acupuncture that I’ve come across. As so often, the paper showed the opposite of what its title and press release, claimed. For another stunning example of [...]
The last email of Stephan Grimm has had more views than any other on this blog. “Publish and perish at Imperial College London: the death of Stefan Grimm“. Since then it’s been viewed more than 210,000 times. The day after it was posted, the server failed under the load. Since than, I posted two follow-up pieces. On December [...]
Jump to follow-up The "supplement" industry is a scam that dwarfs all other forms of alternative medicine. Sales are worth over $100 billion a year, a staggering sum. But the claims they make are largely untrue: plain fraudulent. Although the industry’s advertisements like to claim "naturalness". in fact most of the synthetic vitamins are manufactured by [...]
‘We know little about the effect of diet on health. That’s why so much is written about it’. That is the title of a post in which I advocate the view put by John Ioannidis that remarkably little is known about the health effects if individual nutrients. That ignorance has given rise to [...]
This is my version of a post which I was asked to write for the Independent. It’s been published, though so many changes were made by the editor that I’m posting the original here (below).
Superstition is rife in all sports. Mostly it does no harm, and it might even have a placebo effect that’s sufficient to make a difference of 0.01%. That might just get you a medal. But what does matter is that superstition has given rise to an army of charlatans who are only to willing to sell their magic medicine to athletes, most of whom are not nearly as rich as Phelps.
So much has been said about cupping during the last week
that it’s hard to say much that’s original. Yesterday I did six radio interviews and two for TV, and today Associated Press TV came to film a piece about it. Everyone else must have been on holiday. The only one I’ve checked was the piece on the BBC News channel. That one didn’t seem to go too badly, so it’s here
BBC news coverage It starts with the usual lengthy, but uninformative, pictures of someone being cupped, The cupper in this case was actually a chiropractor, Rizwhan Suleman. Chiropractic is, of course a totally different form of alternative medicine and its value has been totally discredited in the wake of the Simon Singh case. It’s not unusual for people to sell different therapies with conflicting beliefs. Truth is irrelevant. Once you’ve believed one impossible thing, it seems that the next ones become quite easy.
The presenter, Victoria Derbyshire, gave me a fair chance to debunk it afterwards.
Nevertheless, the programme suffered from the usual pretence that there is a controversy about the medical value of cupping. There isn’t. But despite Steve Jones’ excellent report to the BBC Trust, the media insist on giving equal time to flat-earth advocates. The report, (Review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s coverage of science) was no doubt commissioned with good intentions, but it’s been largely ignored.
Still worse, the BBC News Channel, when it repeated the item (its cycle time is quite short) showed only Rizwhan Suleman and cut out my comments altogether. This is not false balance. It’s no balance whatsoever. A formal complaint has been sent. It is not the job of the BBC to provide free advertising to quacks.
After this, a friend drew my attention to a much worse programme on the subject.
The Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2, at 12.00 on August 10th, 2016. This was presented by Vanessa Feltz. It was beyond appalling. There was absolutely zero attempt at balance, false or otherwise. The guest was described as being am "expert" on cupping. He was Yusef Noden, of the London Hijama Clinic, who "trained and qualified with the Hijama & Prophetic Medicine Institute". No doubt he’s a nice bloke, but he really could use a first year course in physiology. His words were pure make-believe. His repeated statements about "withdrawing toxins" are well know to be absolutely untrue. It was embarrassing to listen to. If you really want to hear it, here is an audio recording.
The Jeremy Vine show
This programme is one of the worst cases I’ve heard of the BBC mis-educating the public by providing free advertising for quite outrageous quackery. Another complaint will be submitted. The only form of opposition was a few callers who pointed out the nonsense, mixed with callers who endorsed it. That is not, by any stretch of the imagination, fair and balanced.
It’s interesting that, although cupping is often associated with Traditional Chinese Medicine, neither of the proponents in these two shows was Chinese, but rather they were Muslim. This should not be surprising as neither cupping nor acupuncture are exclusively Chinese. Similar myths have arisen in many places. My first encounter with this particular branch of magic medicine was when I was asked to make a podcast for “Things Unseen”, in which I debated with a Muslim hijama practitioner and an Indian Ayurvedic practitioner. It’s even harder to talk sense to practitioners of magic medicine who believe that god is on their side, as well as believing that selling nonsense is a good way to make a living.
An excellent history of the complex emergence of similar myths in different parts of the world has been published by Ben Kavoussi, under the title "Acupuncture is astrology with needles".
Now the original version of my blog for the Independent.
Cupping: Michael Phelps and Gwyneth Paltrow may be believers, but the truth behind it is what really sucks The sight of Olympic swimmer, Michael Phelps, with bruises on his body caused by cupping resulted in something of a media feeding-frenzy this week. He’s a great athlete so cupping must be responsible for his performance, right? Just as cupping must be responsible for the complexion of an earlier enthusiast, Gwyneth Paltrow.
The main thing in common between Phelps and Paltrow is that they both have a great deal of money, and neither has much interest in how you distinguish truth from myth. They can afford to indulge any whim, however silly.
And cupping is pretty silly. It’s a pre-scientific medical practice that started in a time when there was no understanding of physiology, much like bloodletting. Indeed one version does involve a bit of bloodletting. Perhaps bloodletting is the best argument against the belief that it’s ancient wisdom, so it must work. It was a standard part of medical treatment for hundreds of years, and killed countless people.
It is desperately implausible that putting suction cups on your skin would benefit anything, so it’s not surprising that there is no worthwhile empirical evidence that it does. The Chinese version of cupping is related to acupuncture and, unlike cupping, acupuncture has been very thoroughly tested. Over 3000 trials have failed to show any benefit that’s big enough to benefit patients. Acupuncture is no more than a theatrical placebo. And even its placebo effects are too small to be useful.
At least it’s likely that cupping usually does no lasting damage.. We don’t know for sure because in the world of alternative medicine there is no system for recording bad effects (and there is a vested interest in not reporting them). In extreme cases, it can leave holes in your skin that pose a serious danger of infection, but most people probably end up with just broken capillaries and bruises. Why would anyone want that?
The answer to that question seems to be a mixture of wishful thinking about the benefits and vastly exaggerated claims made by the people who sell the product.
It’s typical that the sales people can’t even agree on what the benefits are alleged to be. If selling to athletes, the claim may be that it relieves pain, or that it aids recovery, or that it increases performance. Exactly the same cupping methods are sold to celebs with the claim that their beauty will be improved because cupping will “boost your immune system”. This claim is universal in the world of make-believe medicine, when the salespeople can think of nothing else. There is no surer sign of quackery. It means nothing whatsoever. No procedure is known to boost your immune system. And even if anything did, it would be more likely to cause inflammation and blood clots than to help you run faster or improve your complexion.
It’s certainly most unlikely that sucking up bits of skin into evacuated jars would have any noticeable effect on blood flow in underlying muscles, and so increase your performance. The salespeople would undoubtedly benefit from a first year physiology course.
Needless to say, they haven’t tried to actually measuring blood flow, or performance. To do that might reduce sales. As Kate Carter said recently “Eating jam out of those jars would probably have a more significant physical impact”.
The problem with all sports medicine is that tiny effects could make a difference. When three hour endurance events end with a second or so separating the winner from the rest, that is an effect of less than 0.01%. Such tiny effects will never be detectable experimentally. That leaves the door open to every charlatan to sell miracle treatments that might just work. If, like steroids, they do work, there is a good chance that they’ll harm your health in the long run.
You might be better off eating the jam.
Here is a very small selection of the many excellent accounts of cupping on the web.
There have been many good blogs. The mainstream media have, on the whole, been dire. Here are three that I like,
| In July 2016, Orac posted in ScienceBlogs. "What’s the harm? Cupping edition". He used his expertise as a surgeon to explain the appalling wounds that can be produced by excessive cupping. |
Photo from news,com.au |
Timothy Caulfield, wrote "Olympic debunk!". He’s Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Alberta, and the author of Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong about Everything.
“The Olympics are a wonderful celebration of athletic performance. But they have also become an international festival of sports pseudoscience. It will take an Olympic–sized effort to fight this bunk and bring a win to the side of evidence-based practice.”
Jennifer Raff wrote Pseudoscience is common among elite athletes outside of the Olympics too…and it makes me furious. She works on the genomes of modern and ancient people at the University of Kansas, and, as though that were not a full-time job for most people, she writes blogs, books and she’s also "training (and occasionally competing) in Muay Thai, boxing, BJJ, and MMA".
"I’m completely unsurprised to find that pseudoscience is common among the elite athletes competing in the Olympics. I’ve seen similar things rampant in the combat sports world as well."
What she writes makes perfect sense. Just don’t bother with the comments section which is littered with Trump-like post-factual comments from anonymous conspiracy theorists.
Follow-up