For those of you who watched the latest television special by Derren Brown, Derren Brown Investigates: The Man Who Contacts the Dead, this might be of some interest. For those who haven’t, please feel free to either immerse yourself in the scenario or else simply to avert your gaze and twiddle your thumbs for the next few moments.

The show, which aired on Channel 4 at 10pm on Wednesday of this week (you can watch it here on 40D) featured the self-styled psychic medium Joe Power. Derren approached the show from a sceptical perspective, which means that he suspended his opinion the subject of psychic mediumship until his investigation was finished and he was able to draw a conclusion based on a convergence of the available evidence.

Joe Power, however, seems to have taken umbrage to this and made a recent post on his website, which you can view here. In the post, he criticises Brown’s sceptical approach, apparently misunderstanding the meaning of the term, and accuses him of using foul play and coercion in an attempt to publicly defame him.

I composed a quick guestbook entry on Joe’s website, the content of which is moderated before posting. The entry in question suspiciously has not yet manifested on the website, which seems odd since others have been able to post quite freely since my attempt. For fear that it might never see the light of day and be condemned to lay lifeless on the cavernous floor of my laptop hard drive I have decided to reproduce the email here. You can read it in full by clicking here

I genuinely am curious as to what his reply might be and welcome any explanation that he might be able to provide in regards to my questions.

Feel free to peruse it at your leisure.

This is a great talk by Sam Harris, albeit old.

Here it is.

Whilst gently perusing the clinical pages of a certain Magazine written especially for New Scientists, I happened to chance upon the most compelling of articles. Amongst the latest auto-erotica on Darwinism, which no one but the most heinous, mustachioed, cat-stroking scientific types would deem noteworthy reading material, I found myself squinting at a piece written on a rather engorged group campaigning against allowing the inefficacy of the homeopathic method to creep into medicine. Their plan was to have a mass overdose of the so called “alternative” remedies, followed by a physical examination, on a specific date simply to prove that the whole matter is a rather large load of your mother’s best bologna sausage. In fact, you would probably receive more nutritional supplementation from devouring a large loaf of sausage meat than throwing the homeo-bollocks into your system. Anyway, overdose they did and guess what? Go on, have a little guess.

The experiment yielded very much the same sort of results you would expect to find in any objective and scientific test. Homeopathy does not cure illness, nor does it cause any. It left everyone precisely as they were. If that’s what a health care product is supposed to achieve then I would advise you all to start bottling air and selling it under the guise of being practitioner in Aereopathy. You might even like to devise some sort of theory based around the first piece of unfounded hocus-wankery that strikes you as quasi-intellectual.

Whilst I could indeed bore you, dear reader, with the usual bout of, “homeopathy would simply become medicine if it were proved anything other than as or less effective than a placebo”, I won’t. I am simply going to provide the link to the website of the campaign, which is rather extensive in its educational content, in the hope that you might read it and enrich yourself no end by realising that “alternative” remedies are for idiots who have a degree in business whilst medicine is championed by the refined, tested and proved-to-be-effective-on-a-regular-basis community known as science. Doctors might well, if they are lucky, have a degree in what stuff does stuff when you put it into your body and would therefore be a little more well intellectually-situated to make an objective judgement on your welfare than the money grabbing, prick-tits who prefer to thrust a sugar pill, dabbed with piss water, under your strangely unprotesting tongue.

If you believe that homeopathy, “works for some,” then CLICK HERE and learn yourself a thing or two.

If you don’t, then click it anyway and join the rest of us in laughing at the complete idiots who do.

Recently rumours have been circulating in magazines and news articles about people who are being cured of their chronic fatigue syndrome (or M.E) by a fantastic new treatment, known as the Lightning Process by Phil Parker. The final straw that spurred me on to making this post was noticing a recent a BBC news segment, featuring the daughter of some jumped-up celebrity – no doubt with a penchant for New Age remedies and biting tree bark, or whatever these hippies like to do. She, like a few others, claimed that her post-viral fatigue (which these hippy-hoo-ha types always enjoy misrepresenting as M.E) was cured in a matter of hours by this wondrous method. The Lightning Process can, they say, render them completely fit and well after a ten minute session with a trained Lightning Process practitioner. It is, they continue to ramble, based on  an exciting and new technique called NLP.

Phil Parker himself claims to be a graduate of osteopathy and cranial osteopathy. He also pedals that he has training in applied kinesiology. He confidently asserts that he is a guru in NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming – which is, suspiciously, a registered trademark).

The problem is that I know precisely what NLP is, having researched the subject for a number of years. It is a crude falsification of psychotherapy, which makes use of its own brand of pseudoscientific jargon, designed to baffle the unwitting customer (yes, people pay for this bullshit) into believing that it has a foundation in tested and approved science. I also know that the rest of these complicated nouns are designed to appear as scientific fields, with their Greek derivations of “logos” tagged surreptitiously onto the end. However, they all remain ridiculous descriptors of nothing more than Voodoo-pseudo-chunga-dunga-hubba-chububba-witchcraft. Much like homeopathy, these other practices have never been proven to work or, in fact, proven not to work respectively by science.

Phil Parker doesn’t even seem to mind that the pseudosciences that he claims to be a master of aren’t even suited to remedying a bum-rash, let alone a complex physical syndrome like CFS. Chronic fatigue, contrary to the expert opinion of our world media, is a physical condition. It is not, as country-bumpkin types enjoy sneering, ‘all in your head’. It has physiological causation and there is an actual academic debate, based on medical science, as to its source happening right now between leading American research universities and our own British ones. The focus of those concerned with helping people and curing them of this debilitating ailment should be placed firmly on this fact, rather than allowing our media to pander to the underhanded, scheming money grabbers who have a tendency to play on people’s sense of wish fulfilment.

Having suffered with chronic fatigue syndrome for over five years, I have spoken to medical doctors and specialist CFS/ME clinics at length. I have spoken at conferences for the medical community and the educational community. Both myself and others have all raised our curiosities, before now, to doctors and psychologists (not psychiatrists) about the Phil Parker Lightning Process, perhaps out of that same sense of wish fulfilment. I would love to sit in a chair for ten minutes, be told that my illness was a result of my own overactive imagination and be sent home with my life whole and intact. Sadly this was not to be the case. Every legitimate doctor that I mentioned the Lightning Process to actually laughed. Of course the medical community have examined the Lightning Process and concluded that it was probably less effective than popping a stuffed toy up your bottom. I suppose that the old adage, “ask a stupid question and receive only stupid answers,” is appropriate in this case. Of course having someone chat with you isn’t going to cure a physiological illness. The world simply doesn’t work that way.

Now, I was entertaining the idea of writing a full-length article on the workings (or shortcomings, as is the case) of the Lightning Process, but I noticed that the website, ‘The Skeptic’s Dictionary’ has completed the task better than I could. Therefore, I would delight in redirecting you to that very same article:

CLICK HERE

Hopefully this will clear up any deluded ideas that you might currently possess about CFS/ME and indeed the Lightning Process itself.

Happy reading.

I find surprising the amount of commonly held misconceptions there are about evolution by natural selection. Popular misconception all too often leads to misinformed discourse. I offer the anecdote of a discussion I once had with a college philosophy teacher who, when teaching the basic principles of biological materialism and Darwinism, asserted that natural selection was an idea founded on a principle he described as ‘survival of the fittest’. Whilst one can make the intellectual leap in using the term ‘fit’ in an archaic context, it ultimately ends up confusing modern people who are simply seeking to gain a grasp on Darwin’s powerful ideas.

Within this one misnomer there exists a library of discrepancies with Darwin’s original phrasing, providing loopholes which tend to usher in unwarranted criticism. The first of which is the assumption that Darwin himself coined the misleading term. Darwin never used ‘survival of the fittest’ to describe the process of evolution by natural selection, as popular culture, fueled by a host of BBC documentaries, would have you imagine. In fact, the rather disgusting little piss-term was first used by one Herbert Spencer in Principles of Biology some half a decade after the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859). When one actually reads Darwin’s original text, it becomes apparent that ‘survival of the fittest’ is not a tautology, but a grave misinterpretation. Let’s examine Darwin’s own words on exactly the same subject (I have highlighted the important sections in bold type):

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

It seems uncontroversial to state that this makes perfectly clear Darwin’s intention to actively dissuade a ‘survival of the fittest’ type of interpretation of his work. He asserts that neither strength nor intelligence are the fundamental characteristics of a species well inclined for survival. Rather, both of these are resulting properties of adaptation. It might seem intuitive to think of an array of characteristics like strength, intelligence, speed and size as crucial to the survival of species and, for many examples, they are. However, when one considers the examples of species such as ants or the crane fly, it becomes apparent that there isn’t a characteristic in the animal kingdom which can’t be outmatched by a member of another species. Put simply, where one species excels others might fail.

Other examples include a hypothetical fight between a lion and a bear. Since the lion has always relied heavily on its speed and upper body strength to bring down antelope, it has never had any biological necessity for a particularly strong skull. In this sense the lion has been completely successful in its evolution, but it soon becomes apparent that it would not necessarily fair well if it was forced into locations anew. Consequently, if a lion were to ever come into contact with a grizzly bear of the forest it would likely have its head caved with a single strike. This is because the lion has adapted its attributes based on its surroundings, rather than simply evolving specific ones. If the individuals of a species cannot be successful in their versatility then they are likely to perish. Perhaps if the lion’s ancestors had been moved to a different part of the world by the continental drifts we might look upon a completely different animal. It might not even exist today. We cannot predict with any degree of certainty though since, being completely absent of consciousness, evolution has no foresight.

This notion of biological adaptation is central to Darwin’s theory. Herbert Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest’ not only undermines the power of natural selection as a general theory, but also grossly misleads and prevents a wide understanding of the topic. It can tend to encumber people with unfounded and poorly researched criticism. Unless one wishes to read On the Origin of Species in the same sense that they might interpret a metaphor, Darwin could not have been clearer about his meaning. Natural selection is not survival of the fittest, it is survival of those that adapt to their ever changing surroundings.

I seem to have gathered a rather loyal following in Sweden by following the simple formula of keeping their television and film industry well paid.

Friends, I have moved to a broader stage. Thanks to my associates at The Little Movement Productions, The MindBox of Mark Brewer is no longer shackled within the confines of the WordPress.com boundaries! I have secured my own hosting and my own domain name. THEY SHALL NEVER TAKE IT FROM ME…. You know… Until the account expires and shit.

All that is left for me to do is shout this cryptic message, “HAIL SKITLER!”

I decided to experiment with some tapping on the guitar. I wanted to play some chords and then tap a melody over the top of it. Woop!