It appears that censure is an objective of certain people in this chatroom.
I received a phony notice from sympatico to try to
suppress my postings here. It had spelling misteaks and erroneous
info. I am disappointed in you, but not surprised.
Here is a self portrait of one of the people who hang here and encourage
open intellectual debate.......
Health fraud:
This goes beyond scepticism into the area where real harm is done. Put
simply, "alternative medicine" is neither medicine nor an alternative. The
Internet seems riddled with liars and thieves offering guaranteed cures for
everything from hangnails to AIDS, all using "traditional" or "natural" or
"alternative" methods and potions. It would be bad enough if these vermin
just emptied their victims' wallets and gave them false hopes, but there are
people who are actively campaigning to kill and maim children. The most
depressing and offensive site I have ever seen on the Internet belonged to
an organisation which wants to stop people vaccinating their children. I
would not provide a link to a paedophile site, and I will not provide a link
to this child-abuse site either. For a good look at health fraud, see the
Quackwatch site, or you can see some more links on my Favourites page. By
the way, when the Chinese swimming team were in Australia for the 1998 World
Championships, the drugs they brought with them were not the traditional
crushed beetles, bird's droppings and herbs, but plain old made-in-a-factory
human growth hormone. Even the most traditional of people know what works
when they really need it.
Multi-level marketing:
The newspapers carry stories about thieves like Christopher Skase who
defraud shareholders, but an even greater fraud is committed in lounge rooms
across the nation each night as conmen claim that unlimited wealth can be
gained through pyramid selling schemes. Of course they don't call them
"pyramid schemes" because the law defines such schemes and lawyers have been
paid to make sure these scams don't fit the legal definition. Someone once
told me that anybody could sign up 5 people per month; if each of those 5
also signed up 5 per month and the thing continued, in the 10th month
48,828,125 people would be added to my downline. This is three times the
entire population of Australia. When I asked why the oldest MLM operation in
Australia had only 80,000 people in the pyramid (sorry, network) after 25
years, I was given some claptrap answer. If it works, it takes 41 weeks to
saturate Australia and eight weeks later the entire population of the USA
has to be added. Sure, people are making money, but they aren't those coming
in at the bottom. You can read more of my opinions on this by clicking here.
I wrote an article for the local newspaper poking a bit of fun at the
pyramidiots, and the editor received some savage phone calls in response.
Funnily enough, none of the complainers bothered to ring me directly.
Perhaps they didn't want to talk to a negative loser.