Apathy Sketchpad

Theos, the self-appointed ‘public theology think-tank’, whatever precisely a ‘think-tank’ actually is, have done another survey. Their last one, you may recall, reached such eminently plausible conclusions as ‘38% of Jews believe in the virgin birth of Christ’ and ‘36% of people of no religion celebrate Christmas as a religious festival’. This one says that 39% of Britons (including 50% of Londoners) believe in ghosts. The margins of error aren’t quoted, but you can work them out and they’re about 39%±2% and 50%±5%. It also says that 22% (±2%) of Britons believe in astrology.

Seriously? You want me to believe that half the population of London actually think that see-through dead people float through the city rattling people’s drawers? I’m sorry, but that simply isn’t plausible to me. I know people are easily led and a bit gullible. I accept that. But I thought Theos said that 34% of people believe in Jesus and 33% say they’re not sure. You can’t simultaneously accept Christianity and believe in ghosts, and that only leaves 32%. Okay, so there are error margins on this but I don’t for a second accept that all atheists believe in ghosts — because I’m one and I don’t. Someone would have taken a photograph by now. I don’t think there’s anything that exists that hasn’t been photographed, aside perhaps from the Higgs Boson.

The director of Theos, Paul Wooley, said

The extent of belief will probably surprise people, but the finding is consistent with other research we have undertaken.

It’s consistent in that they all report implausibly high belief in ridiculous ideas, yes. Then he said

The results indicate that people have a very diverse and unorthodox set of beliefs.

…which I thought very charitable to the respondents.

I think what Theos are increasingly discovering is that surveys can’t be trusted. They are repeatedly finding that a sizable fraction of the population will say yes to anything you care to ask them. I’m quite prepared to believe that London is an unusually credulous city, but given that the 2001 survey tells me that 1.4% of its population is Jedi, I’m tempted to think it might also be a city that doesn’t poll well.

And astrology? Really? Surely by now everyone in the world knows that astrology columns are just written by whoever happens to be passing at the time, with no thought or reference to any source of knowledge, just like the science reporting. I don’t believe that 22% of the population think that the stars and planets control their lives. I don’t accept that a fifth of the people I see in the street really believe that the arbitrary shapes drawn in the sky by convention dictate their fortune.

Are they counting ‘I suppose there might be something in it’ as a yes? Are they excluding ‘I don’t know’ responses from the results? Did they phone round houses in the middle of the day? We don’t know, because Theos’ press release doesn’t say. But any of those seems more likely than 4 million Londoners believing in ghosts. Nobody believes in ghosts. It’s a lunatic fringe belief, like crop circles or fairies.

This is a long rambling post dissecting the arguments of one Tom Vizzini with regards to swine flu. It may or may not be of interest to you, but I had to get this out of my head so that I can sleep, and to that end I’ve put it here. Read it if you want.

Andrew,

I have implied nothing. You just don’t seem to be able to read.

Nice. That’s class, right there, isn’t it? That was the response when I accused Vizzini of “[implying] that swine flu is a media-invented scare story like wifi or MMR or whatever”. Now obviously there are two sides to every story, and where one person reads clear implication another might read baseless inference, so I shall paste in the opening of Vizzini’s blogpost and let you be the judge:

Hi folks,

I am sick….sick of the swine flu. I have never seen so much hype over something so stupid.

Now I’d have said that that fairly clearly implies that swine flu is ’stupid’. A stupid thing to worry about. A silly little disease that poses no threat. Obviously I’m reading between the lines somewhat here, and you can’t really get all that from those two and a half sentences, so here’s a bit more:

The excuses have already begun. “Even if the swine virus doesn’t prove as potent as authorities first feared, that doesn’t mean the U.S. and World Health Organization overreacted in racing to prevent a pandemic, or worldwide spread, of a virus never before seen.”

Uh….yes it does. All these ‘experts’ are going to have egg on their face and now they are trying to justify scaring the crap out of your for no good reason.

photo credit: ■ Guerry

You see? His point, so he claims, is that people who wear facemasks because they’re scared of swine flu are stupid. I’ll come to that in a minute, but those people are not the same people as work for the WHO or the CDC. He’s veered off onto a tangent here and is mocking the epidemiology experts who have been working to prevent a H1N1 pandemic. That, to me, is not the action of a man who believes there is a risk of widespread infection. That is the action of a man who thinks we should let it run its course and see how many people die. He’s clearly betting on ‘not many’, and deriding people who disagree. That is an attempt to entirely debunk swine flu as a potential pandemic, and it’s simply too early to do that. Ben Goldacre refused to debunk it three times in the time it took him to write an article about how often he’s been asked to debunk it.

He may or may not have meant to imply it, but I think that he did. And given that Vizzini’s post and comments are riddled with non-standard punctuation and typos (to the point where he misspells ‘IQ’), and give the general impression that they were rushed off just as fast as he can type, it seems likely that I’ve read it more carefully than he wrote it and therefore probably the failure is on his end. Certainly he doesn’t use language in the most nuanced way I’ve ever seen. Here, for example, is a selection of his ripostes to my criticism (my emphasis):

You mean someone was so stupid that the nest [sic] they could do was make fun of a typo? Bet they were wearing a mask! … You just don’t seem to be able to read. … Run around terrified if you want to. … A mask is a very visible IQ test at this point. To me it is very much the same as people who pick a typo out of an article and use it to invalidate the article. Andrew….you failed that test. When you have to use a typo to make a point then you have run out of anything intelligent to offer. … Frankly Andrew you suck at debate. If points such as spelling are not relevant then don’t mention them. It makes you appear desperate and ill informed. … Just another example of your tendency to not be able to focus on the topic. I always find it funny that someone like you tosses out insults but then is so fragile when they get tossed back at you. Your mentioning a typo was arrogant and….stupid. If you can’t handle it then learn how to have civil disagreements without acting like a twit. … Stupid people tend not to be able to think for themselves. You have said nothing to contradict that assertion.

That’s right, he acts as if I’m wearing a mask. He literally cannot distinguish ‘I consider there is a chance of a pandemic in the future’ from ‘OH GOD OH GOD I’M GOING TO DIE WHERE IS MY FACEMASK?’. I have, for the record, never insulted him. I have criticised his arguments, and he seems incapable of distinguishing that from mindlessly abusing him, which, if I’m generous, explains his argument style. (Okay, maybe now I’ve insulted him.) For the record, here is my first comment:

That guy’s massively missed the point. Sure, wearing masks now is dumb, but the fact that 1000 people are sick is a worry because the disease might BECOME pandemic. He conflates the media whipping up a profitable panic with the WHO giving out expert advice, then has a go at them for taking measures to prevent a pandemic because they might work and then he can say ‘look, see, there was nothing to worry about’.

Also, he misspelt ‘IQ’.

You can see how I clearly relied on that one typo to invalidate his argument. Clearly there’s no way that could be a throwaway comment, a joke if you will, finding humour in an unfortunately placed transposition error.

But enough of such frivolity. The main thrust of his argument, he tells me, is this:

If you own a business and someone shows up with a mask on….fire them. They are too dumb to work for you. They have no common sense. In a way this is an QI test [see?] for your company.

…

It is stupid. The people in masks are stupid. … The masks are a visible sign of how stupid they are. … If you own a business and one of your employees shows up in a mask…find a reason to get rid of them. They are too stupid for whatever job you hired them for.

You see how he doesn’t toss out insults or come across as arrogant at all. But still, is he right? Certainly with the number of cases of swine flu so much lower than the number of cases of regular seasonal flu, and given that facemasks don’t actually work all that well, wearing them is a bit stupid. (Well, unless you wore them before swine flu. That’s fair enough. The tube is gross.) But his claim is not ‘it is a stupid thing to do’. It is ‘the people who do it are stupid’. As I said to him,

The media, the tabloids particularly, love to scare people, because scared people buy tabloid newspapers — and they’ve got very good at it, largely by refusing to be hampered by inconvenient details such as facts. I know that. You know that. Not everyone knows that. I mean, I think it’s stupid to use Microsoft Word as an HTML editor, but I appreciate that some people don’t know better and that doesn’t make them stupid. I think it’s pretty stupid to imagine that God exists, but I certainly don’t think all religious people are stupid.

For the record, his response to this was the phrase ‘just another excuse for stupid people’ followed by the last six sentences of the torrent of abuse I quoted earlier. You see how I’m ‘[tossing] out insults’ there, using inflammatory phrases like ‘that doesn’t make them stupid’ and ‘I certainly don’t think [they're] stupid’.

I just think that if you say ‘people are stupid’ and leave it at that, it’s defeatist and misanthropic, condescending and unhelpful. If you engage with them you can change their minds. If you see the bigger picture you can see where the weaknesses are that we can fix and improve matters. If you just write off humanity as too thick to survive then you become a small part of the problem. His solution is to make them all unemployed. That’s what we need, a lot of uneducated people with no money. That will definitely solve both swine flu and the credit crunch. I want to think it’s meant in jest and he’s actually more progressive than that, but I’m really not convinced.

I’ll be interested to see if Vizzini replies to this.

Because, you know, the Pope never makes me cross.

First of all was the story of Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the Archbishop of Recife’s decision to excommunicate a woman who helped her daughter get an abortion. The daughter was nine. She needed an abortion because her Catholic stepfather raped her. The rapist was not excommunicated. The Vatican supported all of this, so the only way these actions make any sense is if the Vatican considers abortion worse than raping a nine-year-old girl. And that nearly makes sense, except that the girl would probably have died in childbirth, so even if you consider her twin fœtuses ‘people’ you still have to be pretty warped to expect her to die for the crime of being raped. (Warped, or Muslim.)

After that, the Vatican calmed down a little and celebrated International Women’s Day, by — I know, this has to be gold, doesn’t it? — by publishing an article asking the question “What in the 20th century did most to liberate Western women?” and reaching the rather brilliant conclusion that it was probably the invention of the washing machine. Not the right to work. Not women’s suffrage. Definitely a machine that makes cleaning clothes (which clearly is Women’s Work) easier. I mean, even if that’s pragmatically true (which it isn’t) don’t say so right after you’ve okayed raping small girls.

It’s lucky the Pope isn’t at all utterly terrifying.
photo credit: openDemocracy

After that piece of light-hearted batshit whimsy, the Pope decided to refocus his efforts on Catholicism’s core competency: ruining innocent people’s lives with arbitrary and idiotic dogma. This time, it’s Africa’s turn. Speaking about the AIDS epidemic there, the Pope himself, not a lackey this time, said “the distribution of condoms… aggravates the problems”. The Telegraph have found themselves a priest to defend him — and let’s mention now that I’m only inferring he’s a priest from his photo. Nowhere do they bother to actually mention that he works for the Pope, because that might be a bit too much like declaring one’s interests for the mainstream media. Their priest, George Pitcher, rehashes the same old argument I’ve heard over and over again: “that the Church’s historic teaching that chastity outside marriage and fidelity within it would prevent the spread of killer diseases such as Aids”. And this is true, but alas irrelevant, because nobody is criticising that teaching. (At least, I’m not. At the moment.) What we are criticising is the Pope’s claim that distributing condoms will make the AIDS epidemic worse. This claim is demonstrably false. It turns out that if you grow up and go with the facts instead of just making shit up, you can actually make a difference and save some lives.

The problem I have with the Pope’s speech is not that he advocated abstinence: it is that he specifically lied about something that we know works. Even if nobody acts on his advice, if they believe the epidemiological claims that he makes then they will make bad decisions and people will die.

I have just been hilariously banned from commenting on the homeopathy blog ‘homeopathy4health’ after this discussion. Why?

Andrew’s comments are no longer allowed on this blog. This is because he has a tendency to write opinions based on logic and not from experience or facts. He is a programmer by profession.

Dammit, I do have a tendancy to write opinions based on logic. Oh, she really nailed me there. ‘Zing’, I should think, and probably even ‘oh, snap’. And so forth. Feel free to visualise Jon Stewart-style gesturing if it helps.

Goodbye, then, anonymous homeopath. Live long and prosper.

This has been kicking around my drafts folder for ages. Not sure why I never posted it, but here it is now anyway.

Suppose you got a massive bucket of bricks that weighed more than all but the fattest bastard. Clearly it is a bad thing to weigh more than it. Say then that every year you removed a brick, until it weighed the same as someone merely fairly chubby. It is clearly still bad to weigh more than the bucket of bricks. It is still true that those heavier than it die younger than those lighter. Only now, loads more people are heavier than it — primarily because it’s so much lighter than it used to be.

You now understand logic better than The Christian Institute:

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children. The report, compiled by researchers at the University of Essex, says that 44 per cent of babies are now born to unmarried parents. Cohabitees are estimated to make up three-quarters of those parents.

Well, technically, but hold on…

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children.

What? The study does no such thing. It says that co-habiting parents are more likely to split up than married ones (a fact which has many interesting causes, none of which involve Jesus), that children whose parents split up are worse off than those whose parents stay together, and that more children are being born out of wedlock.

Well yes, but unmarried couples are staying together longer than they used to: because the point at which the average couple marry — the number of bricks in the bucket — is changing. It’s not an illusory problem, and I’d hate to imply that it is, but the simplistic spin put on it by the Christian Institute (”The Christian Institute exists for the furtherance and promotion of the Christian religion in the United Kingdom”, so no agenda there) is just pathetic. To support that conclusion, you want a large cohort study, with a group of children of married parents and a matched group of unmarried ones — with similar incomes, social class, inteligence, location, and so forth, as any of those and other factors could affect odds of break-up and children’s welfare. That wasn’t even hinted at in any account of the report I can find. (I don’t think a RCT where the participants are unaware whether they’re legally wed would be particularly useful, but it would certainly be funny.)

And remember: the CI is a charity. Every time someone donates to them, the income tax paid on that is handed to the CI. So you funded this article. And so did I. And I’m cross about that, because it’s like everything I hate most rolled into one.

Watch this video. It features the most amazing argument you will ever see:

You may know already that I’m a fan of Ben Goldacre, but it’s not him. I found his style of agument quite conservative and traditional: people have been trying to win arguments by pointing out the gaping holes in their opponents’ ideas for centuries. Ancient people used evidence to draw conclusions. There’s nothing new there.

No, his opponent, Dr Sigman, is the genius here. I have, in retrospect, seen his argument elsewhere, too, but he has formalised it further than most. Here it is in a nutshell:

1. We disagree and are talking.
2. Therefore, There Is A Debate.
3. Therefore, the cautionary principle applies.
4. Therefore, whatever I dislike should be banned.

Fairly recently I read this article on the Daily Kos, about a Powerpoint presentation being shown to the US Air Force. It’s pushing religion, obviously — it’s written by the chaplain. I still really have no idea what chaplains are for. I think our university has one and I have no idea what, if anything, he does. But the fact that a chaplain wrote a presentation pushing religion is not remarkable or necessarily bad. What is wrong with this one is that it’s pushing religion — in fact, it’s pushing creationism — as a way of fighting suicide. (Because, you know, nobody religious has ever killed themselves and if you think they have then you must have been watching the lying News or something.)

That’s just not on. Apart from the fact that creationism is anti-science enough without trying to trump psychology as well as biology, geology and astrophysics, this kind of thing is displacing real therapy that can actually prevent these deaths. But the hell with that — why bother preventing deaths if they can be used to promote an ideology?

An obvious question that may have entered your brain by now is “what on Earth does creationism have to do with suicide prevention?” and the answer is of course “nothing”, so a better question is “what does Chaplain Biscotti think creationism has to do with suicide prevention?”. Well. Apparently he has identified a Problem:

• In the last two years, completed suicides have escalated throughout the Air Force
• …
• The Air Force did not use spirituality as part of their suicide prevention briefing until 2005

It seems that he read that and thought that the solution was to add more spirituality. I cannot fathom how even the most religiously retarded mind could reach that conclusion from that evidence. So what’s his solution?

Dr. Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life,  provides a powerful model for Suicide Prevention, developing leaders, and making troops combat ready and effective.

No, it provides a pack of bullshit. (I haven’t read it, but I can easily surmise it’s a load of rubbish from the fact that Rick Warren wrote it.) After that are a series of laughably inept slides that are reproduced in the Kos article so I won’t bother here. Suffice to say that atheism (specifically, humanism) is equated with selfishness and then The Dreaded Communism, to the point where Darwin is inexplicably listed as one of the leaders of the USSR. It also uses the story of Pat Tillman, an atheist (as far as we know) who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, to push the idea of faith in general, including faith in oneself. That’s probably basically good advice, were it not displacing real therapy and attached to the rest of this pro-Christianity propaganda.

Chaplain Biscotti is not the Crackpot of the Month. That honour falls to those in secular roles above him, who allow and promote this, who push religion both as a way of reducing suicide and in general. I’m starting with Rod Bishop who seems to have compiled the presentation that contained Biscotti’s slides. Beyond that it seems to be so systemic as to make naming names as pointless as it is impossible.

Luckily the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is suing the US Military over this. How that lawsuit will go is unclear. I have no idea what the rules are on such things, not that that has anything to do with the result of any lawsuit with religion anywhere near it.

[BPSDB]

A couple of hours ago, the anonymous quack who calls herself homeopathy4health posted an article entitled “James Randi avoids homeopathic challenge for $1 million prize” and, in true cowardly fashion, immediately disabled user comments. She links to, and characteristically copy-pastes most of, a page called “the facts about an ingenious homeopathic experiment that was not completed due to the “tricks” of Mr. James Randi” apparently written by someone called George Vithoulkas, who had taken up Randi’s $1m challenge. (Randi offers a million dollar prize to anyone who can prove something supernatural, a category in which he includes many alternative ‘therapies’ such as homeopathy.)

Neither is fun to read. Quacks do love to go on, possibly because simply saying a lot of things is an effective way to stop sceptics from being able to counter them all — it takes a second to say ‘miasmas exist’ without a reference but it takes a good five minutes to properly explain why they don’t. Throw in a stock ‘reference’ and a response might take an hour to craft. Of course, you can just say ‘prove it’ but that won’t convince anyone who doesn’t already have a healthy respect for science. It also doesn’t help that the English is somewhat broken. Possibly it is a second language. (In the quote below I have refrained from adding ‘[sic]‘ after errors, as it would be appended to every other sentence and just look like Vithoulkas had been at the sherry.)

Apparently, Randi fell ill and the challenge had to be postponed, by which time a change of management meant the centre would not be willing to participate. I can sympathise with this — the research unit I work for has this kind of problem all the time. Almost exactly this has happened at least once. That’s one of the problems, unfortunately, with doing proper science: everything has to be planned so meticulously that the slightest detail can throw it out and cause long delays. Vithoulkas claims that this was a trick to avoid ever having the experiment:

In 7.4.2006 Mr. Gindis wrote to Mr. Randi in order to signal to him that the homeopathic team was ready to start… But instead Randi suspended all activities of the experiment attributing it to his supposedly state of health!

Mr. Randi knew very well that this period was crucial for us to start the experiment and we had made this urgency explicit by sending several e-mails urging them that it was necessary to go ahead immediately. But Mr. Randi needed …six months “to recover” denying to assign a collaborator.

James Randi is 80 years old. Is it really that hard to believe he might be ill?

Vithoulkas and his team refused to accept this change to the schedule and have decided to do the experiment without Randi, which Randi.org quite accurately described as a withdrawal from the challenge. Randi points out that as his foundation is the one offering a million dollar prize, he gets to set the terms. Vithoulkas has decided that this is unfair and then, brilliantly, written Randi a retraction for him to post. He hasn’t. It seems to me that as a homeopath Vithoulkas is unfamiliar with the problems faced by real scientists doing actual clinical trials and is presumably used to ploughing on in an ad-hoc fashion and knocking the whole ’study’ out in a week.  I can see how in that case Doing It Right might look like stalling.

Still, whoever is right, I presume that since homeopathy4health is now in the business of chastising sceptics who she feels are shirking from a challenge, she will be immediately getting six bottled remedies and negotiating with Andy Lewis to find a trusted third party so she can participate in his far easier, lower-stakes challenge.

Otherwise frankly she’s fooling nobody but herself (and that’s only because herself is so very credulous).

Recently, I have been reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science. The book, predictably, covers much of the same ground as his Guardian column of the same name, but deeper, and in logical order: chapter one covers very simple claims made by cranks, and shows the curious reader how to test them at home. This is very much a play-along-at-home kind of a book (for doubters, or readers who just like that sort of thing). The following chapters each (mostly) examine the claims, methods and tactics of another form of deception or pseudoscience, each a bit more subtle than the last, and gives the reader the mental tools to examine them at every stage. It builds into a good understanding of trial design — by the end of the book you should be spotting some things before they’re flagged in the text. (That’s a good feeling. I like books that make me feel smart.)

I can’t personally vouch for this teaching: I had much of it drummed into me when I started my PhD (because it’s important), but it’s clearly expressed and illustrated with a range of examples somewhere between lavish and obsessive. The examples also show how universal the methods are: the chapter on Homeopathy also explains about good experimental methods, overuse of antibiotics, superstition, detox programmes, acupuncture, and meta-analysis and its role in assessing the effectiveness of steroids. It’s a structure I like a lot: interestingly varied without seeming like a collection of unconnented anecdotes, and with a strong theme to each chapter and a sense of progression through the book.

The book features chapters themed around the ideas used by Gillian McKeith and Patrick Holford, which discusses their own various publications. McKeith’s, he says,

have an air of ‘referenciness’, with nice little superscript numbers … but when you follow the numbers, and check the references, it’s shocking how often they aren’t what she claimed them to be in the main body of the text

and of Holford’s,

If Professor Patrick Holford is a man of science, and an academic, then we should treat him as one, with a scrupulously straight bat.

I heartily agree. I think that is, in part, why Goldacre’s book, as well as telling you things, shows you experiments and references you can use to check it all yourself (although the references are ferreted away in an appendix where they belong, rather than gaudily paraded in the body text, looking authoritative but basically just getting in the way). I think this is also because the book strongly agrues against the depiction of science as “didactic truth statements from… arbitrary, unelected authority figures”, and that would look pretty silly if presented with no evidence. (Although Goldacre makes a point of never claiming any authority: he doesn’t put “Dr” on the front cover — he doesn’t even have a capital ‘G’.) Transparency is the key to good science, a topic touched upon every time a quack mentioned in the book refuses to publish their research methods.

Holford’s book is also of interest, because Goldacre picks apart his reference list in great detail. Not out of malice or to make fun of him, but because as we know,

If Professor Patrick Holford is a man of science, and an academic, then we should treat him as one, with a scrupulously straight bat.

Okay. Let’s do that.

Goldacre’s book has fourteen pages of notes and references (at least the first edition does). I selected one from each page at random, and checked that it said what he says it said: 2 I couldn’t read, 1 was a note only, the other 11 checked out ane way or another, so that’s basically a 100% hit rate. I didn’t critique the referenced articles, mostly because I don’t have the time or inclination, but none of the research says anything very controversial anyway. Anyone who has read chapter 12 will realise that I am biased here, but that’s why I’m being transparent so you can check up on me too if you like: I’ve put the list of references I looked up, and a brief verdict on each, after the fold.

The other main theme of the book is the problems with ‘dumbing-down’ (a depressingly autological phrase) of the world of science and health: miracle cures, medicalised syndromes for everything, reports of conclusions rather than evidence, and so on. I think this was my favourite passage on that theme:

Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. I can barely understand most of the sports section. In the literature pull-out, there are five-page-long essays which I find completely impenetrable, where the more Russian novelists you can rope in the cleverer everybody thinks you are. I do not complain about this: I envy it.

I’d love to hear what someone with no scientific training thought of this book. But I expect they would learn a lot about the nature of evidence and the mental traps that make it so, acquire a lot of useless trivia about the proponents of pseudoscientific bullshit, learn to spot future nonsense, and have a good laugh along the way. I rate that as worth the price — not least because if you pay attention then the book will pay for itself the first time you don’t buy a pack of useless pills.

Since we’re talking transparency, the author declares that he received his copy of Bad Science free from the publishers and that, not being what you’d call a professional critic, the novelty of this kind of thing hasn’t worn off even a bit.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago, I had an irritating bout of hiccoughs. I managed, it seemed, to get rid of them by breathing only about half-way in for a short while. The next time I had hiccoughs I tried it again and it didn’t work. The time after that it also didn’t work. I dismissed my hypothesis as false. That is the difference between me and Andy Kadir-Buxton of Hatfield.

(This post is mostly quotes, for which I make no apology because the easiest way to mock this kind of nut-job is simply to hand him sufficient rope.)

The ‘Kadir-Buxton Method’ is a treatment for mental-health problems which he invented “decades ago”:

The procedure stuns and resets the brain of the patient, so that the patient returns to a normal condition. The Kadir-Buxton Method is done by making a fist of both hands, and striking both ears of the patient atexactly the same time–

Do not do this. It is very dangerous.

–and pressure with the soft part of the inner hand which is where the thumb joins the hand. The arrow in Figure 1 shows this point for your ease of use.

…

At this point I would like to explain the difference between a stun and a punch. With the Kadir-Buxton Method, a patient standing on one leg whilst holding a rose would still be standing on one leg and holding a rose when they were cured. With a punch, the patient would be lying prone on the floor, and could well have dropped the rose. And just to add insult to injury, they would still be mentally ill. Try it for yourselves if you do not believe me.

Oh, yes, this guy’s proper crazy. Because you see, he doesn’t just cure mental health issues…

My method of unblocking fallopian tubes should be taken up by the NHS. It would increase the success rate of fertility treatment drastically, and also cut down on more expensive treatments.

He’s keen on NHS adoption. He’s even petitioning the Prime Minister to ear-box mental patients.

Many years ago I came up with the idea of feeding breast milk to old people who had suffered from immune system collapse. I got the idea when I found an obscure reference to Ayurvedic practitioners… My method was successful, the most famous person who was treated for it was the Queen Mother, then in her seventies, who went on to live for another twenty years or so.

Having cured mental illness, infertility and old age, all these people will need clean electricity:

Thus a 50% cut in Carbon emissions is achievable with the use of Buxton Geothermal Turbine Generators.

That’s not totally crazy, but this is:

The Kadir-Buxton Jump Start (formerly Buxton Jump Start) … is so called because when it is used on a [dead] patient the [now living] patient immediately sits up with a start.

After that it starts to get really strange:

Primary Menstrual Cramps can be a debilitating problem for some 10% of women. … Orgasm from masturbation has been found to relieve the painful symptoms of menstrual cramps. … In order to do this one simply has to clench and then relax the vagina repeatedly for five minutes. With this method no one need know of the discomfort being suffered, and the pain soon goes. … Do not try this whilst driving or operating heavy machinery.

No shit?

I had been instructing women in the Hands Free method of controlling Primary Menstrual Cramps since I was a school boy.

…Is that allowed?

The Buxton Handclap Method of delivering babies that minimises birth trauma to both mother and baby is used in various Third World countries, and according to one statistic quoted in ‘New Scientist’ would lead to an improvement in IQ of 15 points over natural child birth, and thus minimise intellectual impairment caused by difficult child birth.

Of course, if you don’t want to have children at all, he can help with that, too:

In the 1980s I fended off an unprovoked attack. … I gave the [now unconscious] person a bruising slap round the buttocks. When the attacker came to it was said that the experience was even better than sex. I knew at once I was on to another invention. Whilst paralysed… the sensation of pain is replaced by super enhanced pleasure. As Governments around the world have been looking for a safe alternative to sex this appears to be it.

Specifically, David Blunkett is looking for that. Although he does say “it is not an alternative to contraception as the sexual act is also far more fun”. I’m inclined to agree.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that he reads the Daily Express, on whose website he makes up yet more stuff he’s never defined:

The best way to redistribute wealth is to end mental illness. This would free up £100 billion a year in the UK alone. The Kadir-Buxton Method cures the mentally ill in just thirty seconds and a local practice nurse can do it. 

We then use the five Buxton Coefficients of Unemployment at a local level to create jobs for them, and suddenly we have ridden out the economic crisis and can look forward to another four years of Gordon Brown. Go for it Gordon.

I’m sure that you, like me, want to know how one man can achieve such pre-eminence in so many diverse fields. Well, Andy Kadir-Buxton is willing to share his amazing secret:

IQ can be increased slightly by the educational system. It is only slight because most education revolves around memorising facts, which increases eidetic memory rather than leaning logic which increases IQ. … An IQ of over 150 brings with it the bonus of being able to invent which can be economially useful.

I always tell people that the best way of learning logic is to study and analyse the character Mr Spock in ‘Star Trek.’

So now you know. All those hours of watching Star Trek were increasing your IQ all along. Who knew?

[BPSDB]