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Webwatch
September 2009
We all went to see Derren Brown a few days ago, very entertaining. He performs the same tricks that were used by spiritualists to con people from their money. All sorts of seemingly impossible feats were demonstrated before our eyes. He is very clear, it is all illusion, based on years of study of how to fool people, all seeded with a few jokes to throw you further off the scent.
One trick he shows is to get a member of the audience to choose a card from a pack, wrap it in aluminium foil and place on the table. Mr. Brown then goes on to tell if the card is red or black, and even to hazard a guess whether it is a low value card or not. He gets it right of course and earns a round of applause, all good fun. He then went on explain how he learnt the trick from a Russian lady, and then showed us how to do it ourselves, but not before explaining how NASA in the USA had wasted millions of tax dollars on this "mind reading". He makes no bones about, even large scale respected organisations can be conned and made a fool of, the key being the bait laid by the idea of Russia and its then connotations with a communist take-over of the world. Magicians call this "misdirection" and he is a master of that, making you thick a certain way then being surprised it turned out differently. video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6282159641861799839.
Ben Goldacre runs an interesting website called Bad Science at www.badscience.net. He had a long but successful legal tussle with Mathias Rath. On www.cancercontrolsociety.com/bio2002/rath.html it says Rath has ".. proven the correlation between vitamin deficiency and cardiovascular disease and cancer.". He was an associate of double Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling who championed vitamin C to prevent cancer. It must have come as a double shock when his wife died of cancer, but Pauling went to his grave still promoting the idea, dying of prostate cancer on August 19, 1994. Rath continued with the idea but faced a number of challenges, many ending up in very expensive court cases. Ben Goldacre took him on, the link in his site about the court case is far too long to print here, but you can find it by putting Matthias Rath in his search on badscience.net.
What has all this to do with Derren Brown? Well he and Ben Goldacre come from the same camp, exposing bad science and misdirection wherever they find it. A good example is on www.quackometer.net/blog/2008/09/matthias-rath-charlatan.html, where they explain the misdirection used, namely "… the inherent distrust we have of pharmaceutical companies and then makes the leap that their drugs are dangerous and ineffective and that his own 'cures' are the answer.". People looking one way do not see what is coming from the other.
On sites like www.life-enthusiast.com/index/Articles/Rath, Rath agues that it is an issue of freedom to take whatever remedies you choose. It is interesting to see he was awarded the Bulwark of Liberty Award by the American Preventive Medical Association. Their website should be at www.apma.net/ but all attempts to view it lead to www.healthfreedom.net, a political website for the US Republican Party. They claim that "Big Pharma" is manipulating the opinion of governments and the public just to sell their products. But Dr. Rath sells his own. Did you see that coming? You probably did but many do not.
Happy Surfing.
Howard