Opinion by Consumer Advocate Tim Bolen
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at things, I, Tim Bolen, have become a primary information source about an organization that, for purposes of intentional misinformation, calls itself “the quackbusters.”
I have OTHER NAMES for them. So do their victims. Some of those names, but not most, can be used in polite company.
Again, unfortunately, a current definition of who and what these people are, is not information that sits comfortably with most of my readers. Why? Because what I am about to tell you is not conversation for a family Sunday Dinner Table.
The audio tapes, and the video tapes, I link to, to make my case, so-to-speak, will make most people physically ill. But they clearly identify, in strong graphic rendition, exactly what the psychological makeup of the current quackbuster operation actually is.
But, one must know the enemy. Even if it’s just to know their neck size for the noose, so to speak.
The Definition of a “quackbuster…”
The health care system in the US is junk. Why? Because patient care is selected, not on what is best for the patient, but what is most profitable for the provider. The system is focused ONLY on dealing with health issues that have a highly profitable, patented, and approved by the FDA medication, or an equally mega-expensive surgery available for them. ALL of the rest are virtually ignored.
All of them. For instance:
(a) In the United States alone there are 800,000 victims of Cerebral Palsy – and the official mantra is that “nothing can be done for them. They should be institutionalized.”
(b) There are 750,000 victims of Autism Spectrum Disorder – and the official mantra is that “nothing can be done for them. They should be institutionalized.”
(c) There are 3,400,000 victims of Traumatic Brain Injury – and the official mantra is that “nothing can be done for them. They should be institutionalized.”
(d) I could go on almost endlessly leafing through the facts and figures of US health care and where it fails: Autoimmune diseases and disorders, diabetes, stroke, heart disease, mitochondrial disorders, and of course the heartbreak of cancer.
Why? Because our status quo system of health care has little, or nothing, to offer these people towards resolution – and, with our current health care thinking – never will. Because the US health care system is profitable, there is no point – for there is no profit in resolving health issues. And, we the people have let this happen.
It is the “quackbusters” job to do two things: (a) discourage or make certain that no innovation is allowed that would change this paradigm. They need to make sure that none of these health issues are ever fixed, nor even properly addressed, especially with health paradigms that compete for health dollars generated by drugs and surgery, and (b) demonize those that criticize the status quo (anti-vaccinations, fluoride, mercury amalgam, aspartame, GMO, dental root canals, etc.).
The questions that arise, of course, are: “What kind of people would create this horror for Americans and others around the world? Who would do this to other humans?. Are they sociopaths, psychopaths, sub-humans with pervasive personality disorders?
I am about to answer those questions. You are not going to like reading about what I found out. In short, there has been a “takeover” in the quackbuster ranks.
Most of the “old quackbusters” have disappeared for one reason or another…
The old National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) is completely gone. Quackwatch’s Stephen Barrett has completely removed the names of the old Board Members from the website – and now he seems to run it all himself.
But, as for the old quackbusters:
Victor Herbert, the screamer, died penniless, of cancer. Obviously, the mega-screw-up of him, using Michael K. Botts, Esq to sue everybody in the US Health Freedom Movement in the late 1980s, cost him financially, physically and emotionally. Botts tried another case for Herbert that went all the way to the US Supreme Court, and had an even worse, and obviously more expensive, outcome.
Bobbie Baratz, the “artful résumé” guy, the last known “President” of the NCAHF, you just don’t hear about too much anymore. I guess he hides out in his Peabody, Massachusetts\s hair removal salon these days. I know he’s been ambushed significantly when he shows up to testify, all puffed up similar to his résumé. I usually have fun helping with that. That video of bobbie crying, while testifying at a hearing a few years ago, has made the rounds and generated much laughter.
John Renner, the one who made the quacklist of 2,500 Doctors, died on the operating room table of heart problems. Renner railed against chelation therapy for heart disease (which likely would have saved his life). Yup.
Wallace Sampson, known mostly for his sneering, seems to have dropped off the face of the Earth since he was roughly humiliated in the Gerson documentary.
William Jarvis, after his exit from Loma Linda University, is simply MIA.
Terry Polevoy was suing other quackbusters. He’s about as popular as jock itch.
So who is left in 2011?
In February of 2008 I wrote an article called “The Six Components of the 2008 Quackbuster Operation…” For the most part all of the information there is still good. What I am doing here is updating it.
I believe that the New York misinformation agency’s role, I spoke of in the earlier article, has been diminished. The way I see it the current “quackbuster” operation, almost three years later, is run out of Amherst, New York, and for the most part, its daily functions are completed by a small, but determined, worldwide group publicly describing themselves as “Skeptics.”
These “Skeptics” claim to embrace several odd concepts, most of which find few constituents in America, nor any nation or community which bases its civilization on the Judeo/Christian Ethic. In short they are godless. In that, they have no rules of behavior and even fewer people that will put up with them in their communities.
More, their recruiting appeal designates EXACTLY the kind of people they are looking for, and welcome into their midst. It says “many skeptics and non-religious people experience a feeling of isolation in their communities, and even among friends and family.”
But, as their critics claim, this group are not true skeptics, but pseudo-skeptics – a group of society’s ego-deprived losers, those that simply do not fit in anywhere – and never will. Once embraced into the Pseudo-Skeptic fold they are taught destructive argument techniques and sent off to do battle, primarily on the internet, usually using anonymity, with those that the central unit has propagandized them to believe are the enemy – those that espouse advances or changes in the health care paradigm..
As I will explain, that godlessness, and their concurrent rejection of our dominant society’s belief structure, leads them to reject, also, the idea that we, as a society should help each other, doing the right thing, as it were. Consequently, this belief system puts this group directly in conflict with proponents of what has been labeled Alternative Medicine – but is, in actuality, Advanced Medicine.
The central unit, calling itself, in years past, CSICOP, and now shortened to CSI, sometimes CFI, is for the most part unsuccessful in its quest. Started originally, for whatever stupid reason, to confront claims of the paranormal, it was so badly battered by the paranormal scientific community, and nearly spat upon by the US media, that it, wanting to find use for the carefully built cadre of nutcase soldiers, simply shifted its focus from the paranormal to what it describes, by their own definition, as “quackery.”
And that seems to be the organization’s savior, for last year’s budget, from so-called anonymous contributions, was 3.2 million dollars.
How they operate…
I first came across these people, and their operation, back in 1999 when I took on author/health humanitarian Hulda Regehr Clark PhD as a Crisis Management client. I found them, using fake names, invading Clark’s internet discussion groups spouting the nastiest, most defamatory, scenario’s possible – with an obvious attempt to dry up Clark’s support base. I just shifted Clark’s discussion groups over to a “monitored” group, and kept the smelly riff-raff off the page.
As you may recall, the attack against Clark was easily beaten off, for, although these people had developed a Modus Operandi, once it was understood it was easy to beat. In fact the project increased Clark’s popularity, and her world-wide book sales by 60%, sending the quackbusters into a rage over this.
At the same time I found that the same people, some using four or five different pseudonyms, had invaded what is called Usenet performing the same kind of nastiness, personally attacking anyone who espoused Advance Medicine.
But, that was then – this is now…
Over the years the quackbusters lost one humiliating battle after another, causing, I think, a shift in who was running things. Although some of the same people were, and are, still there, including Stephen Barrett, I am convinced that certain things happened. The quackbusters got more vicious and more focused.
Getting more focused is easy. Virtually any group can do that. It’s the getting “more vicious” part that raised my antennae. I had to ask the question “even hiding behind fake internet identities, what kind of people treat others like this?”
And I found the answer.
Then, just last week, the Federal Government stepped in…
James Randi, the man who bills himself as the “Amazing Randi,” is one nasty little piece of work.
James Randi, along with CSICOP‘s Paul Kurtz, are the two people who organized, I believe, and run today, the worldwide “Skeptic” (pseudo-skeptic) organization. At the second level of management are people like Steven Novella, David Gorski (Orac the Nipple Ripper), Paul Lee, Stephen Barrett, etc. Although the group is essentially small, they organized to control health care articles on the Wikipedia website, and created a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) network designed to catapult their anti-good-health-care articles to the first page of Google and other Search Engines. Viciousness is their game.
On September 8th, 2011, Federal Agents working for the US State Department, knocked on James Randi’s door, not particularly looking for Randi, but for Randi’s live-in-lover, a person who calls himself “Jose Luis Alvarez,” a name stolen years ago, say the Feds, from a New York man. In their newspaper article, “Celebrated South Florida artist Jose Alvarez accused of identity theft” the Broward County Sun Sentinel says:
“Celebrated Plantation artist Jose Luis Alvarez has earned an international reputation with colorful, modernist paintings that have been showcased in South Florida museums and galleries.
He’s always dabbled in abstract concepts involving personal and artistic identity, an exploration that began as a young man when he teamed with famed magician James “The Amazing” Randi on the world stage.
Now, there are deeper questions surrounding Alvarez and who he actually is — a mystery about the man himself, beyond his creative persona.
To federal authorities the 43-year-old Alvarez is a cipher, a man truly without any identity. They refer to him as “FNU LNU” — law enforcement acronyms for first and last names unknown.
Alvarez is now in federal custody, accused of stealing the identity of a New York man and misusing it for more than 20 years. Goateed and scholarly looking in hip eyeglasses, Alvarez — if that indeed is his name — had his first appearance Friday morning in federal court in Fort Lauderdale.
“We don’t know who this person is,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Bertha Mitrani told a magistrate, while explaining that authorities would seek to hold Alvarez without bail at a hearing next week.
Alvarez first began performing to international audiences in the late 1980s as “Carlos,” channeling the spirit of an ancient seer in contact with other worlds.
It was an elaborate hoax carried out as performance art.
Alvarez’s transformation into “Carlos” was part of Randi’s crusade to expose mystics and psychics around the world as frauds. The two men, who live together in Randi’s Plantation home, met when Alvarez was a teen, and they put on the “Carlos” performances for 15 years.
More recently, the artist’s paintings were featured this spring at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, and have graced Art Basel in Miami and galleries in New York and San Francisco.
Alvarez’s alleged alternate reality came apart Thursday morning, with the arrival at his door of an investigator from the U.S. State Department who specializes in fraudulent passports, visas and other travel documents. Alvarez initially said he was born in Venezuela, then said New York, according to court records. He was arrested on a charge of supplying false information to obtain a passport, a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The charge filed against Alvarez alleges he stole a New York man’s date of birth and Social Security number, which he used to obtain a U.S. passport in 1987. He has since renewed the passport twice.”
But the Sun Sentinel also says in another article titled ‘The Amazing’ Randi, renowned supernatural investigator, immersed in mystery about partner’s alleged ID theft.” The writers say:
“Alvarez is not just an artist, but an ardent backer of Randi’s philosophy of using science to debunk the assertions of people who fraudulently claim to possess paranormal abilities, Dmitrovsky said…
…A lecture he gave at the University of California in Berkeley earlier this year about his artistic pursuits was described thus: “Jose Alvarez will guide us through his own personal journey of investigation into the realms of consciousness, mysticism, spirituality, magic, shamanism, space exploration, and paranormal phenomena. Utilizing the concept in theoretical astrophysics of parallel universes and space as a continuum membrane with no beginning or end, Alvarez will place his cast of characters as a stand-in for the strong human desire for knowledge and transformation and his continued visual inquiry into the realms of the fantastic and the philosophical.”
State Department investigators got onto his trail last August, when a New Yorker named Jose Luis Alvarez applied for a passport to attend his sister’s wedding in Jamaica. His application was flagged as potentially fraudulent, because a passport had already been issued in his name.
“He’s had my identity for 20 years,” the New York Alvarez said Friday, when reached by telephone by the Sun Sentinel. “Why is he stealing my identity? Is he illegal?”
Let’s paint the picture…
I am about to answer that question I proposed up above, where I said “What kind of people would create this horror for Americans and others around the world? Who would do this to other humans?. Are they sociopaths, psychopaths, sub-humans with pervasive personality disorders?
I’m going to show you, from their own words and actions, who the “Skeptics” (pseudo-skeptics) really are. You are not going to like what I show you. Unfortunately what I show you is very real.
(1) I want you to take a brief look at a video on Youtube. It is of James Randi and Steven Novella. Novella is a close associate of Randi’s, and as the video dialogue explains, they work closely together. Novella is the head of the New England Skeptics and they are, I believe, the center-point for the Wikipedia and Google SEO projects. You don’t have to watch the whole video. The first few minutes will give you all you need about “the close relationship” between these two – and, most importantly, you will be able to recognize James Randi’s voice. I will give you access to that video in a minute.
(2) Then I want you to listen to an audio tape, one of seven I have involving James Randi. All of these tapes circulate through the internet, and they have been talked about for years. The Canadian news media mentions them prominently. I have talked about them before. But here, from the Toronto Star:
February 11, 1996, Toronto Star: “What I had hesitated to mention is that the colorful Randi has been involved in a number of lawsuits. Part of the evidence brought against Randi was a tape of his telephone conversations, of explicit sexual content, with teenage boys. Randi has at different times claimed that the tape was a hoax made by his enemies to blackmail him, that he made the tape himself, and that the police asked him to make it. Whichever version is true, it’s amazing indeed that such a person could be taken seriously as a scientific adviser in an organization dedicated to denying claims of child sexual abuse.” This tape was played during a trial in which Randi was accused by Eldon Byrd, a good friend of Uri and a former Naval Surface Weapons Center researcher, of defamation by claiming he was known pedophile. True or not, during the trial Byrd and his team played a tape on which Randi was speaking to a small boy about sex and how much it would cost. Randi claimed it was all a setup by Byrd and the boys on the tape were prank callers. The judge wasn’t so sure about that, especially because Randi voluntarily called back one of the boys after the latter told him his money was running out.” To read the whole piece, click here.
(3) Then I want you to watch one more video – this time, in its entirety. A sub-group of the “skeptics” (pseudo-skeptics) calling themselves the “Skepchicks,” who it looks to be, are primarily employees of “skeptic” organizations, host their blogs with a webmaster named “Steve” who, I believe, is the POSTER BOY for “skepticism.”
I have had a lot of experience dealing with “skeptics” most of which hide behind anonymity. If “skeptics” could be stereotyped “Steve” would be the mold. I have the strong impression that every “skeptic” sub-group is made up, primarily, of “Steves,” in various shapes and colors.
And, they want to manage your children, and your healthcare.
(4) Before you watch and listen to the recordings I want to reiterate something important – all of the skeptic sub groups were organized and are/were managed by Paul Kurtz and James Randi. Like recruits like…
CSICOP (CSI), the “skeptic” flagship has a three million two hundred thousand dollar ($3,200,000) annual budget – from anonymous sources. Read carefully the text below, about Paul Kurtz.
“Prometheus Books is the leading publisher of pseudoskeptical, materialist, secular humanist and atheist books in U.S. According to wikipedia “Prometheus Books is a publishing company founded in August 1969 by Paul Kurtz, who also founded the Council for Secular Humanism and co- founded Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is currently the chairman of all three organizations. Prometheus books publishes a range of books, including many about science, especially those of a skeptical nature“
Note that Prometheus Books was founded by Paul Kurtz, the atheist and materialist philosopher founder of the pseudoskeptical organization CSICOP (now called CSI).
Well, if you enter to the website of Prometheus Books, and see the section on “Human Sexuality”, you’ll see titles explicitly or implicitly endorsing, promoting and justifying (with pseudo-scientific and “rationalistic” jargon) pornography, prostitution, paedophilia, sado-masochism, zoophilia, and other sexual aberrations and pervertions. In other sections you’ll see titles supporting abortion and infanticide, or weird behaviours like transvestism.
The original “Human Sexuality” section of Prometheus Books catalog was edited by CSICOP/CSI Fellow and International Academy of Humanism Secretariat Dr. Vern Bullough, who according to wikipedia was “a member of the editorial board of Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia.”
This pseudo-scientific and immoral journal (Paidika) was a pro-paedophilia journal. According to wikipedia “Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia (1987–1995) was a journal published by the Stichting Paidika Foundation. Articles drawn from it are available from a number of pro-pedophile activist websites. Its editor was Joseph Geraci and the editorial board included articles by writers Frits Bernard, Edward Brongersma, Vern L. Bullough, and D. H. (Donald) Mader, some of whom campaigned as pro-pedophile activists“
The Recordings…
(1) The Steven Novella – James Randi interview. Note the smugness. Click here.
(2) One of the James Randi sex with young boys audio tapes – several few minutes long, but long enough for any parent of a young child, realizing that that youngster on the other end of that conversation could have been theirs….
This recording was from a telephone answering machine – so there are a few unrelated messages before you get to the boy. Listen to what the boy says about where he got Randi’s phone number – the Arcade where the children go on the boardwalk.
After listening to this tape you will realize why virtually every State in the Union has a fifteen day waiting period between buying a handgun, and getting delivery of that weapon… Click here.
(3) Listen to “Steve” tell you about his position. Take what he says literally. Want this guy as your next-door-neighbor? The head of your local Boy Scout Troop? Working for the local Child Protective Services? Park Patrol? Click here.
There’s One More Thing…
There’s one more video you might want to watch. James Randi has bragged about it for years. In it he brags that he, James Randi, “made” Jose Luis Alverez, when he was still a teenager, using him in his stage acts, and making him into “Carlos.” I think that the Federal Prosecutors, and the Grand Jury that indicted the man who claims to be Jose Luis Alvarez, need to see this video.
Maybe new charges would be filed – something like “conspiring to…” or “aiding and abetting…” against James Randi? Click here.
Stay tuned.
Tim Bolen – Consumer Advocate
– See more at: https://bolenreport.com/feature_articles/Doctor’s-Data-v-Barrett/Who-the-2010-2011-Quackbusters-are.htm#sthash.RTG5NcHK.dpuf