Category: lunacy

Eric Clapton argues that pharmaceutical advertising hypnotized him into getting the covid jab that did him in

January 25, 2022 • 9:00 am

The more Eric Clapton opens his gob about vaccination, the dumber he looks. He would be well advised to shut up and play his axe.  While there is a minute possibility that Clapton did indeed get sick from his injection, I suspect that if he is now chronically ill, it may well be due to something else. But even if it was the jab that did him in, he has no business trying to persuade the world to avoid vaccination against Covid.There are enough data on immediate side effects to show that he is a real outlier and not the norm.  And the idea that he was hypnotized into getting the jab. . . . well, I have no words.

See the tweet at the bottom for what is also my reaction.

Below is the first part of a two-part interview of Clapton by “The real music observer”, David Spuria. (A second part is promised.) This one is eighteen minutes long, and prompted the NY Post article below it.

The most bizarre part of this video is Clapton’s claim that he was manipulated by Big Pharma advertising into getting a covid jab. The notes below, which are from the interview, were reprinted in the Post.

Eric Clapton’s career “had almost gone anyway” until his campaign against conventional medicine took off.

The 76-year-old musician went on the Real Music Observer YouTube channel to discuss how his life has changed since reluctantly taking AstraZeneca’s therapy in 2021. Clapton has since become outspoken about his anti-vaccination stance.

He claimed that he’d been duped into getting the COVID-19 jab by subliminal messaging in pharmaceutical advertising — and urged others not to fall for it.

“Whatever the memo was, it hadn’t reached me,” he said, referring to the “mass formation hypnosis” conspiracy theory, which gained traction in 2021 as part of anti-vaccine propaganda. (In related circles, it’s also been called “mass formation psychosis.”)

Credited to Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet, the theory essentially points to a sort of mind control that has taken over society, allowing for unscrupulous leaders to easily manipulate populations into, for example, accepting vaccines or wearing face masks.

“Then I started to realize there was really a memo, and a guy, Mattias Desmet [professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium], talked about it,” Clapton continued. “And it’s great. The theory of mass formation hypnosis. And I could see it then. Once I kind of started to look for it, I saw it everywhere.”

JAC: That is known in the trade as “confirmation bias.”

Clapton recalled “seeing little things on YouTube which were like subliminal advertising,” he said.

His “preexisting condition”, which he claims caused him to get really sick after the jab, seems to be a bad back caused by a nerve inflammation. Well, perhaps. But to blame your taking the jab on subliminal manipulation—hypnosis, for crying out loud!—is risible.

:. 

More from The Post and the video, including his collaboration on anti-vax music with Van Morrison:

The former Cream guitarist also talked about his efforts with fellow British songwriter Van Morrison to speak up on behalf of other artists against vaccine requirements.

“My career had almost gone anyway. At the point where I spoke out, it had been almost 18 months since I’d kind of been forcibly retired,” he said, as pandemic restrictions shut down live events for months.

“I joined forces with Van and I got the tip Van was standing up to the measures and I thought, ‘Why is nobody else doing this?’ … so I contacted him.”

He said Morrison, 76, complained that he wasn’t “allowed” to freely object to vaccine requirements.

“I was mystified, I seemed to be the only person that found it exciting or even appropriate. I’m cut from a cloth where if you tell me I can’t do something, I really want to know why,” the “Cocaine” singer said.

He sounds calm and rational (the British accent helps), but what’s coming out of his mouth is nonsense. Now of course he has the right to say anything he wants, including his theory of “mass hypnosis”, but we can fault Clapton for trying to persuade others to avoid a preventive that has been shown to work. As he says, “I had a tool [his music], and I could do something about that” [i.e., promulgating his crazy views].

Click on the screenshot to read the Post article, though if you watch the 18-minute video above, you don’t really need to. 

I think this tweet is appropriate.

h/t: Barry

Helen Mirren attacked for portraying Golda Meir because Mirren’s not Jewish

January 7, 2022 • 11:15 am

OY VEY!  DOUBLE OY VEY! Helen Mirren has been cast as Golda Meir in an upcoming film on the late Israeli Prime Minister, and people are beefing about it. About ten years ago this wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow, but now the Pecksniffs are tut-tutting about the choice because Mirren isn’t Jewish. I vehemently disagree.

Now sometimes there is a need for authenticity—and authenticity without insult. While Mirren required extensive makeup to look like Golda, I would not sanction a white man playing, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. The history of blackface is too pernicious and racist to allow that.

But can a black woman play Golda Meir? I don’t think so, for it would affect the “suspension of disbelief” essential in watching any such movie. There has to be a degree of versimilitude to make the reader immerse himself in the movie’s reality. Could the Robert Redford of old play Truman Capote in the movie “Capote”? I don’t think so, for we know what Capote looked and acted like. Those images are burned too deeply into our neurons to make a Redford performance credible. Could a black man play Richard III? I’m not opposed to that simply because, although we know the King wasn’t black, we wouldn’t be preoccupied with the trope of “blacface” during the movie.

Can Helen Mirren play Golda Meir, even if she’s not Jewish? OF COURSE! So long as she looks sort of like Meir, and tries to adopt a sort-of Israeli accent, why should we beef? She is, after all, a wonderful actress.  Does knowing that Helen Mirren isn’t Jewish (she may be an atheist, for all I know) really detract from the movie? Only to the Pecksniffs. Yet they are here infesting the Guardian: click the screenshot to read:

Here they go:

Maureen Lipman has criticised the casting of Helen Mirren as Golda Meir in a forthcoming film about the former Israeli prime minister, saying that the character’s Jewishness is “integral”.

In comments reported by the Jewish Chronicle, Lipman said she “disagreed” with Mirren’s casting. She added: “I’m sure [Mirren] will be marvellous, but it would never be allowed for Ben Kingsley to play Nelson Mandela. You just couldn’t even go there.”

But there are good reasons not to go there, and it involves external appearance, not internal religious beliefs. Richard Burton, after all, played Thomas Becket in the eponymous 1964 movie, and Burton wasn’t a Catholic or an Anglican, but an atheist. So what? It was a good movie.

Here’s why the Pecksniffs object, but with the inervention of sanity:

The Jewish Chronicle’s piece cited a number of controversial instances of “Jewface”, including Tamsin Greig’s recent suggestion that she ‘probably’ should not have been cast in the sitcom Friday Night Dinner and the row over a stage production of the musical Falsettos in 2019, which contained no Jewish cast or crew members. It also quoted actor and comic Sarah Silverman’s comments on the mooted casting of Kathryn Hahn as Joan Rivers in a TV series: “Right now, representation fucking matters. It has to also finally matter for Jews as well. Especially Jewish women.”

In contrast, the playwright and director Patrick Marber was quoted in the Jewish Chronicle article as objecting to the primacy of “lived experienced” in casting decisions, saying: “I fucking hate that expression. Because ‘lived experience’ is sort of a denial of what creativity is and denies the actor the fundamental challenge and right to become someone else to impersonate another human being from another time, from another culture from another religion and another sexuality and other gender.”

Marber added: “I think a Gentile can play a Jew and a Jew can play a Gentile. I don’t like it when someone plays a Jew and gets it wrong. [But] I don’t like quotas.”

How can you “get it wrong” when you play a Jew? There are so many Jews on the world, many of them atheists, that I don’t see how someone can “get it wrong.” But kudos for Marber. His statement about “lived experience” is precisely right.

And Sarah Silverman objects! Seriously? It’s not as if Jews have been underrepresented in the movie industry! And remember, Dame Sarah, both Paul Newman and Sal Mineo, neither of them Jews, both played Jews in the 1960 movie Exodus I remember this scene well:

 

I’m a secular Jew, and I don’t think that “lived experience” is necessarily for great actors like Mirren. All that’s important is that they convince us they were the character. Here’s Mirren made up as Meir, unrecognizable as the actress.

Famous biologist Ernst Mayr about to be heaved into the dumpster by the Society of Systematic Biologists

January 6, 2022 • 9:15 am

This really peeved me when it came to my attention, for the man up for cancellation—it’s not fully settled yet—was someone I knew, a a scientific hero of mine, and one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. I am speaking of Ernst Mayr. Further, there are NO grounds for effacing his name from an award—as proposed by the once-venerable Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB)—save that he was a white man. That’s it. He was not a racist—in fact, he fought for equality for all and repudiated racism (see below). Nor did he, as far as I’m aware, ever say anything “problematic”.  His only sin was his pallid skin.

For this (there are dark hints that he said “problematic” things, but these aren’t identified in the SSB’s statement), the Society—partly founded by Mayr—is proposing to eliminate Mayr’s name from the Ernst Mayr Award, given annually to the best student paper presented at the SSB’s annual meeting (by the way, Mayr also endowed that award and left a sum in his will to keep funding it.) This makes it quadruply shameful that the SSB is voting whether to cancel him. The good news is that the members’ vote hasn’t yet been taken, and it requires two-thirds of the membership to take his name off the award. I’m hoping the SSB members are not such sheeple that they will vote for this misbegotten proposal.

Forgive me if I seem excessively steamed—after all, nothing permanent has yet been done—but Mayr was a good man, a superb biologist, and the man whose writings, more than anything else, helped inspire me to go into evolutionary biology and, in particular, the study of speciation. His early books, including Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) and its large update, Animal Species and Evolution (1963) are classics of the genre, and helped bring to the attention of biologists that the origin of species was not only a problem that Darwin really didn’t solve, but also proposed a way to solve it (the “Biological Species Concept” combined with geographic isolation of populations, or “allopatry”).  His work, combined with two charismatic undergraduate teachers at William & Mary (Jack Brooks and Bruce Grant) are what got me started working on speciation and its genetics, summarized in my 2009 book with Allen Orr, Speciation. I knew Mayr at Harvard and spoke with him occasionally, always finding him strongly opinionated (and sometimes wrong) but also polite and courtly. But he was wrong in matters of biology, not morality or ethics.

When Mayr turned 90, the Society for the Study of Evolution, which he also founded, put out a special issue devoted to him, and I was honored to write the chapter assessing his contributions to speciation (free access here  or here). And when he died at 100, I wrote his obituary for Science, which you can see here. If you want a short take on how important he was, I’d suggest reading the Science obituary.  You can read about his contributions to systematics here; I’m not as familiar with them as with his contributions to evolutionary biology, for I’ve never done systematics. Yet, as I said, he helped found the very society that proposes to erase him and the award that he endowed, also endangered.

The SSB announcement here, which I’ve reproduced below, notes that the Council (governing body) of the SSB voted to put to their members a proposal to eliminate the name of the award for the best student paper at the annual meeting. The proposal, as you’ll see, is to change its name from “The Ernst Mayr Award in Systematic Biology” to “The Outstanding Student Presentation Award in Systematic Biology.” That’s a nameless generic award, and I wonder if the proposers feel any shame at removing from the award the name of the man who funded it, and is still funding it. I consider that unethical as well as dumb.

So, here’s the announcement, and I’ve put my own comments and questions in bold brackets within the text.

SSB Council Review of the Mayr Award and Award Names

In the summer of 2020, the SSB Council began a discussion about potentially renaming the Ernst Mayr Award in Systematic Biology at the request of society members [How many society members asked? A handful? A lot? Does it take more than one?]. Since then, the SSB leadership have been working in conjunction with the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee to learn more about the origin of named awards and their representation of the diverse membership within the society. Renaming the award is one step toward greater inclusivity within the society, as named awards often lead to feelings of exclusion among those who are members of underrepresented groups whose scientific contributions continue to remain unrecognized. [ This keeps being asserted, but how true is it? Do minority students or women truly feel hurt and excluded at getting an “Ernst Mayr” award, or even by the existence of that award? That sounds unbelievable. If this is the case, though, then they should rename the Nobel Prizes, for Alfred Nobel endowed these most famous science awards in his will, and he was an Old White Man. Further, one must balance the degree of “hurt feelings”, if any, against perpetuating the memory of the name of Mayr and of his legacy. Students are already beginning to forget who he was, even as they labor in fields he started.] At a council meeting following Virtual Evolution 2021, the Council voted to propose to all members an award name change, in conjunction with other actions intended to better recognize SSB’s history and legacy. [I consider that last statement bogus, as how better to recognize the SSB’s legacy than to give an award in its founder’s name?]

The SSB Council proposes to rename the Ernst Mayr Award in Systematic Biology to the Outstanding Student Presentation Award in Systematic Biology. Our scientific community is more diverse than the cohort of early scientists with recognized contributions to systematics and science generally [True: this is part of the history of the field, indeed of society, which has become more inclusive.] Many current members do not see themselves reflected in awards that bear the names of these early scientists and can feel excluded as potential recipients as a result. In a field whose composition still does not reflect global human diversity, having an award named after a particular individual reinforces that members with other identities are outsiders. [Here we see the key to why this is being proposed: members don’t “see themselves reflected in the award”, and what they mean is  “in sex and race”. Women, as they imply, are too fragile to bear having an award named after a man, and minorities too fragile to accept an award named after a white person. They won’t say this explicitly, but it’s clear that this is what the proposal means. Are they saying that NO award should be named after any person? For, after all, if an award is named after anyone, it will limit severely the number of people who can “identify” with that person.] By proposing this name change, we hope to address this specific barrier [Is it a barrier? What is the evidence?] to making our society more inclusive and welcoming. [This, to me, is the most ludicrous part of the proposal. It is simply performative wokeness. Does the SSB council think that the award has actually hindered people from going into systematic biology? If so, then they have a low opinion of the ambition of future systematic biologists! Nobody thinks that blacks, women, Hispanics, and so on will come pouring into the SSB once the award is renamed. The proposal is performative wokeness alone, for it will accomplish nothing to promote racial or sexual equality. Rather, it is simply a big virtue signal meant to say, “Look how much we care about the oppressed!”] We, the SSB council, are made up of a diverse group of people who don’t all view Mayr in the same light. [Okay, what is the disagreement, then? I don’t think any two biologists view Mayr in the same light! If there’s controversy about his statements or activities, tell us what it is!] This proposal is not intended to cast judgement on the legacy of Ernst Mayr, who was a prolific and profound scholar of evolutionary biology and a dedicated champion of students, nor are we intending to defend the contents of his writings which some find problematic.[WHICH writings? How are they problematic? Note that they don’t list any, and I believe that whatever is considered “problematic” is at best trivial. Or perhaps it was Mayr’s controversial–and probably erroneous–views on founder-effect speciation?] We are grateful for Mayr’s generous gifts to our society, which created the endowment that allows us to support student research today. [Not grateful enough to keep his name on the prize! And of course this is a statement about the legacy of Ernst Mayr, which is that his mere name makes minority systematic biologists uncomfortable.]

The Council sees preservation of the society’s history and increasing diversity, equity and inclusion as synergistic endeavors toward the improvement of our community. The proposed change continues our history of becoming more inclusive over time: for example, in the 1990s we changed from the Society for Systematic Zoology to the Society of Systematic Biologists (and changed the journal name as well) to welcome members of our community who do not study animals. [Inclusivity of fields is not nearly as invidious as removing someone like Mayr’s name on the grounds of “inclusivity”. The only people who would be convinced by this analogy are those who aren’t thinking very clearly and are blinded by ideology.] Thus, SSB President Laura Kubatko has acted on the recommendation of the DEI Committee to form a new committee, the SSB Legacy Committee, that will be tasked with creating accessible content about our society’s history (e.g., as a section on our website). The formation of this committee is intended as a way to acknowledge the contributions of past members to the existence of the society and to the field broadly. In this way, the legacy of the society may be understood by our membership more comprehensively than is possible through named awards, and we have the opportunity to celebrate the many people of various backgrounds who have made systematic biology what it is today. [Does this mean that no award should bear a name, for that’s the logical conclusion of the argument they make above, or will they rename awards after members of minority groups?]

Because the award is named in our Constitution, the name can only be changed by a formal amendment to the Constitution. Following the procedure outlined in our Constitution, the SSB Council thus voted in August 2021 to propose an Amendment to the Constitution to be submitted to the SSB Membership for a vote. The Constitution specifies that the proposed Amendment will pass if at least 2/3 of the members vote in favor. This issue will be presented to the membership on the Spring 2022 ballot. The proposed amendment is shown below.

Proposed amendment
Original text:
1) The Ernst Mayr Award in Systematic Biology given for the outstanding paper presented at the Annual Meeting by a student member of the Society or a member who has received the Ph.D. degree within the last 15 months;
New text:
1) The Outstanding Student Presentation Award in Systematic Biology given for the outstanding paper presented at the Annual Meeting by a student member of the Society or a member who has received the Ph.D. degree within the last 15 months.

So, first, if you’re a member of the SSB, you must vote in the Spring 2022 election. If you’re not, lobby your systematist friends to vote.

I’m not even going to be neutral enough to tell you to “vote your conscience”. For unless you want to change science from a way to understand the universe to a misguided and ineffectual way to achieve Social Justice, there is only one rational way to vote: against the defenestration of Mayr. I know that you may be thinking, “Surely more than a third of members will oppose the name change,” but I wouldn’t be so sure about that. After all, more than half the members of the SSB Council voted for this ludicrous proposal.

I end by trying to suss out what statements of Mayr are considered “problematic”. I’ve read a LOT of what he wrote, though I haven’t read his bird work, and I know of nothing that is “problematic.” In cases like this one, “problematic” is a euphemism for “racist”, but Mayr was not a racist, but an egalitarian!

Here’s one example. In 1951 UNESCO issued a statement “The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry,” which analyzes the biology of race and declared no substantive differences among races that would support racism. The UNESCO document was apparently disseminated to biologists and their reactions are given in the report itself. Here’s the take Ronald Fisher, who already has been cancelled, making pretty racist criticisms of the Report:

. . .Darlington, Fisher, Genna and .Coon are frankly opposed to the Statement.

Sir Ronald Fisher has one fundamental objection to the Statement, which, as he himself says, destroys the very spirit of the whole document. He believes that human groups differ profoundly “in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development” and concludes from this that the “practical international problem is that of learning to share the resources of this planet amicably with persons of materially different nature, and that this problem is being obscured by entirely well intentioned efforts to minimize the real differences that exist”.

. . . Fisher’s attitude towards the facts stated in this paragraph is the same as Muller’s and Sturtevant’s, but this is how he puts his objections: “As you ask for remarks and suggestions, there is one that occurs to me, unfortunately of a somewhat fundamental nature, namely that the Statement as it stands appears to draw a distinction between the body and mind of men, which must, I think, prove untenable. It appears to me unmistakable that gene differences which influence the growth or physiological development of an organism will ordinarily pari passu influence the congenital inclinations and capacities of the mind. In fact, I should say that, to vary conclusion (2) on page 5, ‘Available scientific knowledge provides a firm basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development,’ seeing that such groups do differ undoubtedly in a very large number of their genes.”

In contrast, Mayr approved of the UNESCO report and its conclusions. This is a direct quote from page 18:

Mayr also hopes that “the authoritative Statement prepared by Unesco will help to eliminate the pseudo-scientific race conceptions which have been used as excuses for many injustices and even shocking crimes”. “I applaud and wholeheartedly endorse [it],” he writes, adding: “It cannot be emphasized too strongly that all so-called races are variable populations, and that there is often more difference between extreme individuals of one race than between certain individuals of different races. All human races are mixtures of populations and the term “pure race” is an absurdity. The second important point which needs stressing is that genetics plays a very minor part in the cultural characteristics of different peoples. . . . The third point is that equality of opportunity and equality in law do not depend on physical, intellectual and genetic identity. There are striking differences in physical, intellectual and other genetically founded qualities among individuals of even the most homogeneous human population, even among brothers and sisters. No acknowledged ethical principle exists which would permit denial of equal opportunity for reason of such differences to any member of the human species.”

You can’t get more egalitarian and antiracist than that! And this was Mayr’s view on race.  Is this PROBLEMATIC???  Is the SSB willing to die on the mountain of this statement? Why would it not be an honor to get an award named after a man of sound moral views and superb scientific accomplishment?

STEM disciplines are falling all over each other in this genre of performative wokeness. I hope the SSB comes to its senses and does the right thing.

Here’s a rare photo of Mayr in middle age; he’s usually shown as a young man during his New Guinea expedition or as an old man (remember, he lived 100 years).

New York Times profiles a medium who channels Jesus for the benefit of celebrities

November 29, 2021 • 9:30 am

Sweet Ceiling Cat in a chicken basket! As Greg and I have written several times, the New York Times has in the last couple of years become very soft on spirituality, woo, and the occult, especially on astrology. Well, it’s gone extra far this time by publishing a very long profile in its “Style” section of Carissa Schumacher, a medium/spiritualist/channeler from Los Angeles. That’s big publicity!

Schumacher is a full-blown loon, and yet she’s accumulated a stable of wealthy and famous Hollywood-ites who pay her big bucks for “sessions.” Besides channeling Jesus (she’s got a contract to publish three books containing the words of the Son of God), she’ll channel anybody’s relatives—for a fee, of course.

The thing is, the whole article is basically a worshipful piece on Schumacher and her vocal emissions, and the only pushback consists of two quotes from the admirable Susan Gerbic, a columnist for Skeptical Inquirer, experienced debunker, and head of Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia.

Since there are a gazillion mediums in the world, all of them bogus, I fail to see why the paper is highlighting this one, and, in fact, their publicity will surely bring Schumacher a lot more business.

Click to read and weep.

 

The piece begins with a gathering at Schumacher’s estate, where a lot of big names show up to hear the medium channel Jesus (she says “Yeshua” because she think it sounds weird to say “I’m channeling Jesus!”). It’s surprising who’s been duped by this woman, but, as we know, the public has an endless appetite for confirmation that there’s life after death. The dead speaking through Schumacher gives them comfort and reassurance. From the paper:

Last Saturday night, a group gathered at the Flamingo Estate in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles to meet the spiritual adviser Carissa Schumacher.

At the front of an open-air room, a seat awaited Ms. Schumacher under a large floral arch. After guests, including the actresses Jennifer Aniston and Uma Thurman, filled the rows of chairs, others moved to the floor. Andie MacDowell reclined on a rug among a heap of pillows. Ms. Schumacher was supposed to appear at 8:30 p.m. A gospel choir sang while everyone sat around and glanced at Ms. Schumacher’s empty chair and at each other.

Since 2010, Ms. Schumacher has worked as a medium, meaning someone who receives messages from people who have died. She doesn’t have a website and is often booked months in advance. Her prices are another obstacle, with sessions priced at $1,111 per hour. (She likes the synchronicity of the number.)

In late 2019, just as the world was on the precipice of a plague of biblical proportions, Ms. Schumacher said she began channeling Yeshua, a.k.a. Jesus Christ. Transcribed recordings of some of those sessions appear in a new book, “The Freedom Transmissions,” out Nov. 30.

. . . The party was for the book, but it was also a chance for her clients, many of whom hadn’t experienced the Yeshua channeling, to see what it was all about. Maybe she would channel him at the party. No one was quite sure.

Well, nobody’s claimed that stars like McDowell, Thurman, and Aniston were the sharpest knives in the drawer, but there are others who pay the “synchronicity fee” as well, including Brad Pitt and Rooney Mara.  After a long wait, Clarissa shows up:

Ms. Schumacher finally appeared a little after 9:30 p.m. A petite woman of 39, she walked tentatively toward the front of the room, removed her metallic gold heels, and sat cross-legged beneath the giant floral wreath, which now looked like a halo. The wall behind her was covered in photos of rainbows.

“We love you so much!” someone screamed. She put her hands together in prayer and nodded to a few fans around the room. “For those of you that don’t know me, I’m Carissa,” she said. “I knew my whole life that I would be a channel for Yeshua.”

A photo of the session (sadly, the Son of Man refused to be channeled that night). Schumacher, with her white robe, reminds me of another religious huckster in L.A.: Aimee Semple McPherson:

McPherson:

Now how did Sister Carissa come to be the megaphone for Jesus? The NYT explains:

Her naturopathic doctor suggested she meet Danielle Gibbons, who lives in southern Oregon and says she has been channeling the Virgin Mary since 1994. (She has a YouTube channel.) In 2011, Ms. Schumacher attended Ms. Gibbons’s workshop in Los Angeles, and subsequently booked private sessions with her roughly once a year. Ms. Gibbons told me that she didn’t know Ms. Schumacher was a Yeshua channel until much later, in 2019.

Ms. Schumacher said that she spent the next decade preparing her channel for Yeshua. She meditated daily, cut out sugar and caffeine, and limited her diet to five foods: broccoli, cauliflower, turkey, chicken and watermelon. “If someone’s channel is diluted,” she said, “there’s a kind of film or gunk that the energy gets stuck in and can’t push through.”

That’s actually pretty funny, but the NYT presents it without any sarcasm. Perhaps that was their aim, for somehow I don’t think the purpose of this big article was to show that mediums are frauds. It might well be to highlight her bogus book.

What does Jesus say? It turns out that he produces only bromides (surprise!) and doesn’t give specific details about his life. He also has an accent (my emphasis):

Ms. Aniston left that journey early, and the next day Ms. Schumacher said that Yeshua spoke through her for the first time. Those who’ve witnessed it since then say that Ms. Schumacher’s voice and body change. Yeshua’s voice is deeper, more measured, and has a slight British accent.

LOL! I can hear it now: “My dear chaps, you can arrive at God only through me.” And if she’s really channeling Jesus, why isn’t she speaking Hebrew?

There’s more and it’s pretty funny as well, with a toilet metaphor:

When I asked what it’s like to channel Yeshua, Ms. Schumacher said, “It feels like I’m being flushed down a toilet. I go whoosh! And he comes up. I breathe a lot. My body shakes.” On journeys, someone is tasked with holding down her ankles. Coming back into her body is hard, she said. “It’s a little bit like … womp, womp.”

. . . In the fall of 2020, Ms. Schumacher emailed recordings of Yeshua transmissions to her clients. Among them was Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, who was referred to Ms. Schumacher after leaving her longtime job running the literary department at WME. She thought Yeshua’s teachings could be a book and connected Ms. Schumacher with the publisher of Harper One, which will release “The Freedom Transmissions.”

Though there’s some Christian iconography in it — references to the crucifixion, for instance — the rest is a more neutral smorgasbord of divine power surrender, Buddhism, repairing the fragmented self after trauma, and accessing “the God self,” a reference to Carl Jung.

Ms. Rudolph Walsh said that Yeshua’s teachings changed her entire nervous system. “I don’t react to the weather,” she said. “I don’t report the weather. I am the weather. And the weather is always peace.”

I asked Ms. Rudolph Walsh if she believed that Yeshua was truly speaking through Ms. Schumacher. “To me, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “It matters what is being said. But do I personally believe she’s channeling Yeshua? Yes, I do.”

Now perhaps Schumacher really believes that she’s channeling Jesus and the other dead people she speaks for. Perhaps she’s in a self-induced hallucinatory state, but you’d have to be pretty credulous to think that Jesus (if he really existed, and I’m not convinced) would use you as a mouthpiece.

The only two bits of doubt cast on Schumacher, as I said, came from Susan Gerbic:

Susan Gerbic, the founder of Guerrilla Skeptics, a group that conducts sting operations of people she calls “grief vampires,” told me that the invocation of religion was consistent with a psychic’s desire to feel special. “If you are in conversation with dead biblical figures, then that is really special and holds a lot of power,” she said, adding that it also served as a shield against skeptics. “Who’s going to attack someone who’s playing the religion card?”

And this is a gem, especially the part I’ve put in bold:

. . . Later I asked Ms. Gerbic, the psychic skeptic, if she believed there were any legitimate mediums in the world. “I could give you the long answer about how we don’t know all things yet and science does not know everything, but I think you know my answer: It’s all BS,” she wrote in an email. “And the way I know this isn’t because I’ve been doing this for so long, and know many people who have been doing this for so long. But because it is NOT possible to communicate with dead people. They are dead.”

Indeed. They are dead. If you want to test Schumacher as a medium, get someone like the late James Randi to do it. But of course I doubt she’d be tested.

Anyway, Jesus Christ didn’t make a vocal appearance that evening, so Schumacher channeled another person who sings in the Choir Invisible:

Ms. Schumacher decided ultimately that the vibe at the Flamingo Estate wasn’t conducive to channeling Yeshua. (“I am not a go-go-gadget channel,” she told me.) Instead she channeled Kenneth, a guest’s dead father who she said liked fishing and fixing cars. Kenneth’s son, John, wiped his eyes, as did many others in the room. “I’m sorry,” Ms. Schumacher said.

“Don’t be,” John said. “I loved it.”

And if you want to read what Jesus supposedly said, well, Harper Collins, through its imprint Harper One, is releasing the book below: notice that Jesus is listed as the main author! (Does he get most of the royalties?) I have little doubt it’ll sell like hotcakes. Everybody wants to know what Jesus has to say! And two sequels are in the offing.

But I remain curious: why did the New York Times profile this woman? It’s like profiling any kind of hokum: reiki therapy, coffee enemas, reading auras, dowsing, and so on. I can’t help but think that the NYT really thinks there may be something to this, and wanted to get in on the story on the ground floor.  Or do the Woke have some kind of penchant for woo? Not that I’ve noticed, but they do practice a kind of religion.

If you have the dosh, you can contact Carissa here.

It must be the full moon

November 5, 2021 • 8:25 am

Yep, the wackos are out: here’s a comment I got (but didn’t post) on my piece “Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying go unvaccinated for Covid, take and promote Ivermectin instead“. It’s from one Stephanie, who won’t be posting here again:

I have ivermectin and didn’t get it at an animal feed shop. It’s for human beings, prescribed by a human internist that treats Covid patients (a real living MD). He also prescribes it to ease vaccine side-effects. It helped mine, I had my period for months after the Moderna shot, along with neuropathy in my right arm which prevented me from working for 2 weeks. I did not follow up with a second dose and will not until at least third generation vaccines are available.You are a dangerous person and I challenge your view, your vaccine indoctrination. There are safe, healthy options for All and instead of promoting health, an MD’s ability to practice and prescribe, you support a billionaire class who wants you hooked into a booster program. You’re the laughable one, the one that should be shamed but you’re so insecure, you point at Bret and Heather

No control in her assertion of “it helped mine”, of course, and if she listened to Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying she wouldn’t have gotten the shot in the first place. If ivermectin is a “safe and healthy option,” why did she get a jab?

I stand by what I said: there is no convincing evidence that Ivermectin is either a palliative, a cure, or a preventive for Covid 19, much less a reliever of symptoms from the vaccination. There are mixed results from some studies of the drug, but those are almost all retrospective analyses, have pathetically small sample sizes, and many lack real controls.

We will have more definitive data in a couple of months. But regardless of that, we know that the shots are powerfully effective in preventing Covid, and, if you get it anyway, you get a milder case. Faced with the assurance of that result contrasted with our ignorance about Ivermectin, which simply cannot have as powerful a result as the vaccines, you’d simply be dumb to forego up the shots (which Weinstein and Heying have been urging; neither is vaccinated) and take a medicine designed for roundworms and head lice.

It’s not me who’s the dangerous person.

Eric Clapton breaks my heart for the fourth time, bankrolling an anti-vaxer band

October 11, 2021 • 11:30 am

Well, call me stupid, but I thought that Eric Clapton’s musical genius would extend into other areas, too. Thus I was gobsmacked when he became an ardent antivaxer, letting me down three times by opposing antivaccination restrictions, opposing the shot itself (though he got two AstraZeneca jabs), and releasing two anti-vax songs, “This Has Gotta Stop” and “Stand and Deliver,” the latter with Van Morrison.

Now, as Rolling Stone reports (click on screenshot below), Clapton is funding a band, Jam for Freedom. whose sole purpose appears to be to oppose vaccination:

Eric Clapton not only donated more than $1,300 to a GoFundMe posted by a vaccine skeptical music group, but he also lent the “pro-medical choice” band his family’s personal Transporter van to use for touring around the country, Rolling Stone reports. A musician for the group Jam for Freedom, known for songs with lyrics like, “You can stick your poison vaccine up your arse,” told the magazine that when he saw the donation he thought he was being tricked, until he received a text from the 76-year-old singer-songwriter himself. “It was something complimentary, along the lines of, ‘Hey, it’s Eric—great work you’re doing,’” McLaughlin said. Though he declined to say how much, McLaughlin also told the magazine that Clapton gave them more money to buy a new van and said he might play with the group in the future.

Clapton apparently is becoming (or always was, but kept it quiet) a conservative, and maybe even a racist.  There were those comments at a concert in 1976, which I didn’t know about until they surfaced recently. The magazine reports those, too:

In the summer of 1976, Dave Wakeling thought he knew Clapton, too. Wakeling, who’d go on to found the English Beat, one of the U.K.’s pioneering ska bands, was 20 that year, and such a big Clapton fan that he’d once hitchhiked from his Birmingham home to London to see Clapton’s band Blind Faith in Hyde Park.

But when he saw Clapton at the Odeon theater in Birmingham in August 1976, Wakeling was gob-smacked. A clearly inebriated Clapton, who unlike most of his rock brethren hadn’t weighed in on topics like the Vietnam War, began grousing about immigration. The concert was neither filmed nor recorded, but based on published accounts at the time (and Wakeling’s recollection), Clapton began making vile, racist comments from the stage. In remarks he has never denied, he talked about how the influx of immigrants in the U.K. would result in the country “being a colony within 10 years.” He also went on an extended jag about how “foreigners” should leave Great Britain: “Get the wogs out . . . get the coons out.” (Wog, shorthand for golliwog, was a slur against dark-skinned nonwhites.)

“As it went on, it was like, ‘Is this a joke?’ ” Wakeling recalls. “And then it became obvious that it wasn’t. . . . It started to form a sort of murmur throughout the crowd. He kept talking, and the murmurings started to get louder: ‘What did he fucking say again?’ . . . We all got into the foyer after the concert, and it was as loud as the concert: ‘What is he fucking doing? What a cunt!’ ”

When Clapton voiced support onstage for the conservative British flamethrower and fascist Enoch Powell, a prominent anti-immigration politician who had given his polarizing “rivers of blood” speech on the topic in Birmingham in 1968, Wakeling was particularly offended. Thanks to white and black workers toiling together in its factories, Wakeling had sensed that Birmingham had become more integrated in recent years.

Make this breaking my heart for the fifth time.

Clapton later tried to explain away those comments, saying they weren’t really racist, but his excuse isn’t very convincing (read the piece).

Finally, Clapton vowed that he would never play in a venue that required vaccination, and is scheduling his tours according to that dictum:

Clapton recently embarked on a U.S. tour booked in red states despite surging transmission numbers and death rates — and at venues that largely don’t require proof of vaccination. In the process, this Sixties icon, who embraced the sex, drugs, and rock & roll lifestyle as much as anyone in his generation, has drawn praise from conservative pundits. In Austin, he posed for backstage photos with Texas’ anti-vax-mandate Gov. Greg Abbott, known for his attacks on abortion and voting rights. The sight of Clapton in backstage photos with the notorious governor amounted to a deal killer for some: “I just deleted all my Clapton songs,” went one comment on Abbott’s Twitter feed, along with, “A Kid Rock type with better guitar skills. Done with him.”

However, as Rolling Stone reports in a separate article, Clapton broke that vow, too, playing a venue on Sept. 18 that mandated testing or jabs:

He broke that absurd promise by playing Smoothie King, which, according to its website, is following New Orleans regulations that require all ticketholders 12 and above, as well as staff and participants, to either prove they have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine or provide a negative test taken within 72 hours. Moreover, they must wear a mask while not eating or drinking.

Well, fine, though it does show that he isn’t holding to his convictions.

What happened to Clapton? The Rolling Stone piece above is long and detailed, and advances some ideas that you’ll want to read if you’re a Clapton fan.

CNN touts astrology to sell stuff: the “Mercury retrograde” effect

October 2, 2021 • 1:00 pm

Several readers sent me this story from CNN.com about astrology (click on screenshot below). And like me, when they saw it they assumed it was part of the regular CNN news feed, and so were appalled. One reader wrote this:

Woke up this morning to see this story on CNN.com. One of the best examples of astrological nonsense I’ve seen in a while. In a major “news” website, no less. Candles are the cure. Really one long ad for the “cures.” Reads like something in the Onion. 

It is in fact a merchandising piece, but that’s not at all obvious, and it is on CNN.com and looks like a feature piece. I therefore pronounce this piece bullpucky and fault CNN for pushing woo, even if the network is doing it as a disguised advertisement.

Click to read and weep.

If you squint, you’ll see this at the top of the piece:

Enlarged: CNN Underscored is your guide to the everyday products and services that help you live a smarter, simpler and more fulfilling life. The content is created by CNN Underscored. CNN News staff is not involved. When you make a purchase, we receive revenue.

So here’s some of the woo it pushes, and at the bottom of the piece they link to products that can supposedly palliate the effects of the retrograde, like soothing crystals, candles, and blankets. This is hokum, of course; they’re using astrology (and presenting it as accurate and curative) to make money. That’s triply immoral. Fie on CNN!

Here you go:

On Sept. 27, Mercury will go retrograde for the third and final time in 2021. During this period of Mercury retrograde, which ends on Oct. 18, you’ll probably hear a number of people carrying on about how everything is going wrong — and it’s all because of Mercury retrograde.

But what exactly is Mercury retrograde, why are people so afraid of it and is there anything that can be done to avoid its wrath?

What is Mercury retrograde

Jaya Saxena, the author of “Crystal Clear: Reflections on Extraordinary Talismans for Everyday Life,” says, “From an astronomical perspective, Mercury retrograde is an optical illusion. Mercury’s orbit around the sun is shorter than the Earth’s, which means that when Earth passes Mercury in orbit, there is a moment when it appears to move backwards.”

But when it comes to the astrological significance of Mercury retrograde, Saxena explains, “It’s a different story. According to modern, Western astrological traditions, Mercury is the planet that represents communication of all kinds. When it goes retrograde, the theory is that our communications get thrown out of whack.”

Effects of Mercury retrograde

You’ve probably heard warnings about not buying a new computer during Mercury retrograde, or horror stories about dropping a phone in the toilet; electronics gone haywire are typically associated with Mercury retrograde because they’re items we use to facilitate communication. But it’s not just the electronics themselves to look out for, Saxena says. You may find yourself replying all to an email you meant to forward or sending text messages that don’t go through.

But it’s not just electronic communication that’s impacted by Mercury retrograde — all forms of communication can go sideways during this time. “Perhaps you worded something sloppily and now your friend is mad at you, or you forgot to make a point in a meeting you wish you had, or you just feel generally flustered and misunderstood,” Saxena says. She also warns that Mercury retrograde can influence the way we communicate with ourselves, “so you may have a harder time being in touch with your own feelings and motivations.”

If it sounds like Mercury retrograde can and will make everything that could possibly go wrong actually go wrong, well … yes. “Basically,” Saxena says, “anything that involves you having to communicate, which is unfortunately just about everything, can be affected.”

So what’s to be done about this difficult time? While it may be tempting to go inside and lock the door for the duration, that’s not an especially realistic way to cope with Mercury retrograde’s disruptions — try these ideas instead.

In other words, enrich us by buying the products below. Astrology will help you lead a “smarter and more fulfilling life.”

Why is astrology seemingly making a comeback these days in major media like the NYT? I suppose the religious will say that as religion wanes, we need a substitute, and astrology is one of them.