No, sorry, it doesn't work. It really doesn't work.

Not alternative medicine, although that doesn't work, either. What really, really doesn't work is self-regulation.

Viz, a body sets itself up to regulate practitioners of quackery Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It makes grandiose pronouncements regarding what it will require of those who want to receive a "quality mark" (things like not making false or misleading statements in advertising, training practitioners in what they can and cannot treat, etc.), and eventually petitions to become a member of a larger body, the Professional Standards Authority. But since there's money (in fact, profit) involved for those making the claims, providing treatment, and promoting patently absurd and physically impossible regimens of care, this voluntary oversight group appears to do essentially nothing. Where is this travesty taking place? Somewhere in the undeveloped world, where superstition rules and patients prefer to see local witch doctors? Well, sort of. It's in the UK. (Of course, this could never happen in the US.)

Everybody's friend, whether they know it or not, Stephen Barrett, M.D. , reports on the inactivities of the UK's Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) and the various beefs it is receiving (and apparently ignoring) about its members, people who practice a whole range of black arts, from aromatherapy to yoga.

One group beefing about CNHC and its gang of forty thieves members is The Nightingale Collaboration. The front page of their website lists some of the more interesting examples of outright lying, for example an acupuncturist who lists 80 conditions that her art can treat (yet again, acupuncture has been shown to be ineffective and its resurgence in popularity traced to a hoax perpetrated on the journalist James Reston, in 1971, when he was traveling in China with then-President Nixon. Reston observed the technique being used on another patient (which physicians later admitted had been given large doses of sedatives beforehand), and Reston then had acupuncture himself during a procedure. Can you say "placebo"? I knew you could.) His article, "Now about my operation in Peking," published in the New York Times, set off a wave of interest and miraculously, an industry grew up. The fact that for many years, no license, no education, and no sense of responsibility were required to practice the technique could, of course, have had no influence on its growth.)

Another practitioner advertised "It is vitally important never to lose sight of the fact that any kind of cancer can be healed in a split second, regardless of how far advanced it is or how many areas of the body are affected... For energetic healing it is unimportant where the cancer has manifested or how many parts of the body have been affected. Once the client is embracing the healing process fully, all cancer vanishes, for it no longer has any reason to exist within the person's physique..."

To see why this sort of thing is important, you have to remember that this isn't someone's personal opinion, mentioned in conversation. It isn't from an anonymous posting to a blog. It's from an advertisement, intended to draw customers and convince them to make payments. It's fraud.

Nor does the community of quackery just focus on those dying of a serious disease. Here's a quote from another CNHC member: "Breast Enlargement... (No, don't laugh - this really works!)... The earliest report I could find on the successful use of hypnosis to increase breast size ..."

Go ahead, laugh.

Anyway, I realize this is preaching to the choir. (At least I hope I am.) My real point is to flack for Dr. Barrett, whose newsletter and plethora of websites are full of such lighthearted fun as this. Give him a try.

You learn something every day

Did you know that Michigan has a state senator named Hoon-Yung Hopgood? I didn't. Even though I conduct regular electronic and drone-based surveillance of most of southeastern Michigan, I'd never heard of him or her. This serious lapse in intelligence gathering will be the subject of an official inquiry, I assure you.

A pity, really

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Update 2013 06 11: The artillery bombardment has demolished the whole south set of buildings now, leaving the northern block still standing. The sappers are pushing forward their approach trenches steadily, with an eye to running a mine under the remaining curtain wall. Trebuchets had been flinging dead woodchucks into the citadel for several days, but this tactic was suspended when deserters from the garrison revealed that they'd been making a tasty stew of 'em. The Duke of Alba was unavailable for comment, but AnnArbor.com reported rumors that Don John of Austria (that bastard!) was coming up the Huron with a fleet of war galleys and canoes.

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Now that the demolition of the Georgetown Mall is finally underway, I'll have nothing to whine about (unless, of course, they run out of money and have to quit partway through, leaving a vast mound of rubble; but that won't happen, will it?).

Instead, I'll have to wait until it's down and has been sitting there for months without any apparent progress on building the pipe dream mixed use development that has been pitched to Council. How do I know this will be the case? Well, the word on the street is that the developer had so much trouble even getting funding in place to tear the old stuff down, his chances of getting money to build new stuff are ... let's just say, poor. Yeah, that's a good word for it. Poor.

Anyway, here are some photos I took this morning. Demolition is at least colorful if not especially aesthetic.

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Update: Ed from Vacuum sent me this link about the Georgetown Developer's other fiasco.

A strange way of speaking

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who narrowly defeated Sarah Palin on the short-lived reality show, "Babbling with the Stars", is not going to run for re-election when her term expires in 2016. She offers as a reason this strange statement:

"The law limits anyone from serving as president of the United States for more than eight years. And in my opinion, well eight years is also long enough for an individual to serve as a representative for a specific congressional district."

This veiled threat hint that she might be considering a run for the Presidency again was discounted by many pundits, since the law also limits presidential candidates to those with an IQ greater than 37. However, the P word kept cropping up in her statements:

"(Her decision) was not in any way influenced by" concerns about her re-election prospects, nor by the "recent inquiries into the activities of my former presidential campaign or my former presidential staff."

Of course, she doesn't have any "former presidential staff", since she never had a snowball's chance in hell of winning in the primaries, let alone in a national election. And she only won in her district by a very small margin, defeating a Democratic candidate who says he's going to run again. Her reference to staff is apparently about investigations into campaign finance abuses.

Anyway, until she changes her mind (which is a pretty safe bet), we'll have to look elsewhere for the architype of a far-right loonie. Fortunately, Donald Trump has just spent a million bucks to determine what states he'd carry if he ran in 2016. The results of that research were not released, surprisingly enough. Wonder why?

Oh, and here's a better-written, less blatantly biased article on the subject.

How many people do you know ...

... who meet this description?

"... persistent and pervasive elevated (euphoric) or irritable mood, as well as thoughts and behaviors that are consistent with such a mood state. ... extremely energetic, talkative, confident, and assertive. They may have a flight of ideas and feel creative."

Like every single sales rep I've ever had to deal with. Certain kinds of consultants. People who have high-touch jobs, customer-facing positions, celebrity chefs ... and people who creep into positions of authority and then find themselves in trouble generated by their way of approaching the universe. People, perhaps, like Wayne County Circuit Judge Wade McCree.

Physicians and those who play them on TV call this set of behaviors hypomania, and a doc who treated Judge McCree ("Ain't no shame in my game!") says he thinks this condition may be present. The Judge is one of many Michigan officials who seem to have difficulties keeping their pants zipped, their pictures off Twitter, and their financial situations straight. But he's the first one I've heard of to claim that a mental condition that makes him act like an Oracle salesman is to blame.

Here's an article; judge (haw, haw) for yourself if McCree is a victim of a mental condition with a name or without one.

Ironically enough ...

Our old pal, Ed Vielmetti, ongoing champion of all things Internet, appears in print this month, in the AA Observer. Patrick Dunn leads off an article on blogs and blogging with a Profile of Ed and the
Vacuum blog he writes.

Six bloody years

On the off chance that anyone cares, this month is the sixth anniversary of this blog. In that time, it's been viewed (gasp) 10,479 times. That's 1750 hits, more or less, a year. Man, we're burnin' up the net.

Oh, and the guy in the next office reminds me that the sequel to Many Believable Lies is in the pipeline. This one's gonna be called Clash by Night, and he really, really hopes to have it out on Amazon by the end of June. He says it's gonna have steampunk mayhem, more civic corruption, a climactic event in the middle of the Ann Arbor Art Fair, a budding romance, and -- more doggie bits! Who reads this stuff, anyway?

Is there a "red line" for political cartoonists?

Let me say that although Barack Obama is not, in my personal opinion, the greatest President we've ever had (for the record, that would be FDR), he's so much better than the two mindless idiots who ran against him and the mindless idiot who preceded him that there was never any question about who I'd support. I don't object to people criticizing him, though, when deserved and when conducted with either factual analysis or wit.

Likewise, although I don't always agree with him, I usually think Pat Oliphant is one of our better political cartoonists.

But his recent bit, showing Obama with none other than Richard Nixon, is over the top. Equating somebody with Nixon is not much more a) inflammatory and b) irresponsible than connecting him or her with Hitler. It's Internet-blog-commenter stuff. Oliphant was around for the Nixon years, and he should know better.

Frankly, if the White House did sic the IRS on the TeaBaggers, well, my left brain says "Oh, dear. That's not very good." But my right brain whispers to me that I'd have done much the same thing, except that it might have been Seal Team Six, not the IRS, that I'd have unleashed. This is why, as I've said over and over again, I will never run for office. The conflict between doing the right thing and the thing that feels right would kill me.

I know you'll be as shocked as I was

The Detroit Emergency Financial Manager says that things are lot worse than anyone thought. Especially those people who claimed that Detroit was turning itself around and didn't need no stinkin' Financial Manager. Astonishing.

Not the fake ad

If you read The Ann Arbor Observer and like to search for the fake ads they run every month, here's a tip. It isn't the one advertising a book called Many Believable Lies, written by some hack named McConnell. That one's real.