Freak industrial accident: Midget caught inside Egg-whisk

Some of these case studies come from Electronic Gem Therapist Michael Kelly; some are from The Third Policeman. See if you can tell which is which!

--------------------------------------------------------

certain enzymes reading well above the normal at 167. His Assemblage Point was 10cm to the right in the anxious location and a shadow was observed in the depressed location on top of the liver. A radiometric scan of his liver revealed it to be 2 degrees hotter than his spleen. He received Bliss treatment and emerald and sapphire to his liver on five separate occasions before having his liver enzymes re-checked at 84

People menaced by arrows:
probably by Gauls*

MacCruiskeen eyed his book keenly.
‘Ten point five,’ he said.
‘Ten point five,’ said the Sergeant. ‘And what was the reading on the beam?’
‘Five point three.’
‘And how much on the lever?’
‘Two point three.’
‘Two point three is high,’ said the Sergeant.

It's 11 o'clock. Do you know 
where your Assemblage Point is?

Chris received sapphire at 1.6hz for one hour on two separate occasions.

[R.T.] received emerald, diamond and yellow sapphire at 3.6 Hz with a blue filter to both his knees for 30 minutes every week over a 14 week period.

‘I take it, then,’ I said to old Mathers, ‘that when you say you can tell the length of life, so to speak, from the colour of your shirt, you mean that you can tell roughly whether you will be long-lived or short-lived?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘But if you use your intelligence you can make a very accurate forecast. Naturally some colours are better than others. Some of them, like purple or maroon, are very bad and always mean an early grave. Pink, however, is excellent, and there is a lot to be said for certain shades of green and blue. The prevalence of such colours at birth, however, usually connote a wind that brings bad weather—thunder and lightning, perhaps—and there might be difficulties such, for instance, as getting a woman to come in time. As you know, most good things in life are associated with certain disadvantages.’

For some reason, Gem Therapy no longer features in the buffet of no-cutting-edges Healing Modalities offered by the St Benedicts holistic Health Care centre [40 St. Benedicts St, Auckland] -- one can only suppose that the gemstones wore out their colours -- although therapist Michael Kelly retains the name "Vibronic Health" for his gmail address and his company name. We rely upon the mystic wonders of the Wayback Machine for access.

In the first step of his healing journey, Kelly "was initiated into the Sufi tradition and studied Psychology, Philosophy and Mysticism". In 2004 he received his training in "Dynamic Radiometric Thermal Diagnostics" and "Dielectric Resonance Management Procedures" from Dr Jon Whale. In 2005 he learned Biological Terrain Management ("utilizing analysis of Saliva and Urine for health assessment and intervention recommendations"), and in 2009 he "completed four years training in Western Biomedicine and three years training in Acupuncture, at the Auckland College of Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine." He has munged together the best bits from these diverse techniques into his own eclectic, syncretic practice... or even 'synclectic'... a word I invented just now which combines the best bits of both.

Biological Terrain managed by Carl Warner

Unauthorised use of NLM logo, but
out-of-date logo so no-one cares

Alert readers will recall that as well as offering hypnotherapeutic and landlordly skills at 40 St Benedicts St, Kelly offers 'practical guidance' in the use of GcMAF... a cancer-curing wonder drug most often encountered in crowd-sourcing situations where dying people appeal to the kindness of strangers to help cover its costs. The St Benedicts site provides a list of GcMAF-prescribing doctors -- some with quite unusual qualifications -- while Kelly offers the "Swiss Protocol" (6 to 12 weeks of $3000-per-week GcMAF yogurt, injections, suppositories, inhalation and applied-directly-to-the-forehead) through his company ImmunoBiotech, based at the same address.

Yes, I promised Another Kiwi and tigris that there would be no more GcMAF-blogging. Yet I admit that I am powerless over my addiction to GcMAF sites, that my life has become unmanageable. The topic drags me back in, much in the manner of playing Wolfenstein 3D where you know that if you click on enough panels there will at least one more secret door or easter-egg apart from the ones you have already found.

One such site caught my eye due to the high level of precision to which its momentum is known, leading to a complete lack of information about its location and the use of a .biz domain rather than a country. In a non-localised, distributed, cyberspatial way it links to Switzerland... to David Noakes' Guernsey-based ImmunoBiotech supplier of blood-extract GcMAF*... and to Naturalsolutions.nz (another instantiation of 40 St Benedicts St) for all your magic yoghurt needs. On its "buy GcMAF" page, the site refers the eager reader to NZ ImmunoBiotech, with a caveat that "New Zealand medical doctors cannot advertise they treat with GcMAF" (to return the favour it recycles images from St Benedicts).

A Whois inquiry shows the GcMAF.biz domain to be registered to Patrick Arthur of Muehlebachstr 206, CH-8008 Zürich, who can be reached through the e-address "websystems4u@gmail.com".

The same Patrick Arthur (with the same details) used to run "tissuesupport.co". Until that site folded last year, it was St Benedicts' recommended supplier of DCA, the previous Wonder Cancer Cure that Doctors Won't Tell You About (until it recently lost its cancer-curativity and fell into desuetude). It also sold MSM or Methylsulfonylmethane, which is a popular Health Supplement on account of the naturalnesss implied by its name.

So we knock at a few Domain-info inquiries... timidly, half-expecting the secret panel to slide open and reveal Mecha-Hitler behind. What a relief to find that the other person who registers domains at Muehlebachstr 206, Zürich, with the "websystems4u@gmail.com", is Patrick A. Kelly. Who does not have minigun arms. The Riddled legal advisory team of Trahison and Clerisy (solicitors and commissioners for oaths) insisted that I be as explicit as possible about this evidence of non-hitlertude.

Not PAK

Like Michael Kelly, Patrick travelled the world and sat at the feet of spiritual masters -- Indian Yogins, Chinese Daoists and Middle Eastern Gnostics -- and drank deep of different founts of spiritual wisdom as one drinks of the blushful hippocrene and the Fountain of Girl.*** Then he settled in Zürich and syncretised or eclecticated all those wisdom traditions into an all-encompassing World Wide Way.

Synclectic WWW symbol

Ecretic symbol

The practical expression of the World Wide Way is 9 Clouds Tai Chi. Do not be despondent if if you wish to avail yourself of its teachings but you are not Swiss-resident, for it is a franchise, with dojos in China, and one in Auckland... at 40 St Benedicts St.

I would not be surprised if Patrick A. the meditation guru and Patrick Arthur the distributor of DCA and GcMAF were the same person. But at the deepest level, are we not all one person?

----------------------------------------------------------

‘Was there a fall?’ he asked.
‘A light fall at five-thirty.’
‘Five-thirty is rather late if the fall was a light one,’ he said.‘Did you put charcoal adroitly in the vent?’
‘I did,’ said MacCruiskeen.
‘How much?’
‘Seven pounds.’
‘I would say eight,’ said the Sergeant.
‘Seven was satisfactory enough,’ MacCruiskeen said, ‘if you recollect that the reading on the beam has been falling for the past four days. I tried the shuttle but there was no trace of play or looseness in it.’
‘I would still say eight for safety-first,’ said the Sergeant, ‘but if the shuttle is tight, there can be no need for timorous anxiety.’

‘Six point nine six three circulating,’ MacCruiskeen was saying.
‘High,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Very high. There must be a ground heat. Tell me about the fall.’
‘A medium fall at midnight and no lumps.’
The Sergeant laughed and shook his head.
‘No lumps indeed,’ he chuckled, ‘there will be hell to pay tomorrow on the lever if it is true there is a ground heat.’
MacCruiskeen got up suddenly from his chair.
‘I will give her half a hundredweight of charcoal,’ he announced.

Moar biological terrain

* "What's sagittis molesworth what case come along boy -- sagitta sagitta sagittam first declension -- with arows by with or from arows. The gauls are atacking the ditches with arows -- telisque -- telisque, molesworth?"

** UPDATE #1. Mr Noakes is under a lot of stress these days,  on account of regulatory-body inquiries into his blood-sourced GcMAF enrichment activities, and did not handle himself well in a recent BBC interview. In retrospect it may have been a mistake for him to have shifted to Guernsey as his base of operations. The local paper are not his biggest fans.

Now Guernsey is just a wee chunk of land just off the French coast, but the in-breds have their own establishment squirearchy, and their own language (a variety of Norman French), and the squirearchy will not be having with parvenus and nouveau-riche and arrivistes -- assuming that Norman French has terms for these concepts! -- turning up in their bailiwick and making a lot of noise. Especially if the noise might call attention to the main industry of Guernsey, i.e. being a tax haven. So the attention of authorities was somehow directed to Noakes.

*** Fountain of Girl is one of the few curative properties not attributed to GcMAF.

Worst 'Robot B-9' costume EVAH

Don Driver, New Zealand's leading exponent of the artistic medium of flexy plastic tubing, died in 2011.

But in a sense he lives on, as long as his admirers are constructing improvised shrines in his honour.

How many friends have we over there? The border guards fight unconvincingly

Dear Frontiers Editorial staff
Thank you for the recent invitation to review the manuscript [XXXXXXX]. I have regretfully declined it on the grounds of my total ignorance of the field of cultural psychology, just as I have regretfully declined your eight previous invitations to review manuscripts in the field of cultural psychology.

Choosing a Reviewer

I am compelled to wonder, when researchers in cultural psychology send you a manuscript, do they know that you are going to send it out for a vision scientist to decide whether it merits publication? More to the point, if I send you a manuscript on cross-cultural colour linguistics or facial-expression perception or form-and-hue interactions in V1 processing, are you going to solicit feedback from a cultural psychologist?

So many choices!

The Frontiers Open-Access publishing company makes much of its distributed decision-making process, which (for instance) reduces the centralised role of the Editor-in-Chief of each journal. Thus the assignment of reviewers to manuscripts devolves to the pullulating hordes of Associate Editors, and from there to the intuition of authors that particular experts might be appropriate to judge their work (and the self-report of reviewers that they might be appropriate to judge specific authors), all made impersonal and impartial by concealing the process beneath Markram's Algorithmic Sauce.

This certainly has the advantage that papers such as Bradstreet et al. (2014) which might never have passed the strait gateway of more conventionally-controlled journals, have found their way into the public domain to enhance the gaiety of nations. It also allows the publishers to bypass Editors completely through the guest-editored "Special Issue" system (which to a jaundiced onlooker might closely resemble a form of multi-level marketing), resulting in the recent loss of editors en masse. However, from my perspective it has the disadvantage that I am repeatedly spammed with these spurious invitations. Perhaps Henry Markram could be called away from his day job of pissing away EU neuroscience research funds and alienating EU neuroscientists, and invest some time in adjusting his special distributed-reviewing algorithms so that they work in a halfway competent fashion?

I am given to understand that when I first agreed to look at a manuscript for the Frontiers stable, you created an entry in your reviewer database for me... which evidently lists my specialty as "cultural psychologist". I am now expected to grapple with a counter-intuitive morass of fugliness masquerading as an "interface" and edit this entry to reflect my actual areas of expertise -- without payment for my time -- rather than the editorial staff performing this task on the basis of my previous reviewing assignments and my published CV, as part of the job they are paid for.

I have a better idea, or at least one which involves less effort for me, which is that you stop asking me to review manuscripts.

Love, Smut

UPDATE: Thanks, fish

In vitro, in vivo The revolution's begun

A 2006 paper in Cancer, let me show you it:

See Fig 2 below. Each column contains cultures of a different line of human prostate cell -- normal (PrEC), and three less-to-more invasive lines of prostate cancer. Each row shows different samples that have been fixed and stained with monoclonal antibodies to depict the level of expression of three separate components in a novel cytokine pathway.

Clearly the plan was that Sheldrake's Morphogenetic Field would guide the proliferation of the cells as they teem and pullulate in their petri dishes, inducing the same clusters to recur until a repeating pattern formed that could be used as wallpaper. Of course you could obtain the same effect with Photoshop but that would lack the challenge.

There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down

This came to the notice of Retraction Watch readers thanks to a sharp-eyed pseudonymous commenter. The fourth author of the paper, Anil Potti, enjoys a kind of celebrity status at Retraction Watch on account of his aggressively lawyered-up response to questions of research probity and requests for original data.

The degree of recurrence from one cell-culture to the next is most easily dramatised by turning one panel into a photographic negative, rotating it through 180° if necessary, and superimposing it on the other with 50% transparency, so that corresponding pixels will cancel out if they are identical.

And then things escalated at RW and at PubPeer until we wound up with a colour-coded tequila hangover:

Petrie dishes (UCL Museums, London)

In each combination of panels there are sections which do not match, and do not cancel, as if the separate panels were themselves photomosaics. Thus the experiment can only be considered a partial success and the jobs of wallcovering designers remain secure! Chen &c should have borrowed the Morphogenic Field Flux Intensifier!

I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.

The Yeast is Read

So were the editors of Nature interested in publishing an opinion piece about the legal ramifications of splicing the genes for psilocybin synthesis into Tinea pedis fungi, to produce a hallucinogenic variety of athletes' foot? WERE THEY BOGROLL. The suggestion met with the editorial cold shoulder. Followed in quick succession by the editorial tepid ankle, and then the editorial knee to the groin.

This is despite Nature's recent decision to grant space for a couple of Political Science lecturers to chin-stroke about using yeasts to synthesise opiates, which is going to happen Real Soon Now. Different researchers have engineered yeasts which perform separate stages of the metabolic pathway of banging together a molecule of morphine, which means that combining all the stages in a single home-brew-kit is only a matter of detail, right?

Such are the awesome Political Science powers of extrapolation and hypothesisation that questions of 'concentration' and 'purity' evaporate in a subjunctive cloud of "Let's Pretend", with the simple word "feasible" exfolatiating into such predictions as

users would need to drink only 1–2 millilitres of the liquid to obtain a standard prescribed dose

It is not clear whether the Nature editors couldn't be arsed contacting anyone with actual expertise in biosynthesis to opine on the practicalities, or whether they reached out but failed to receive sufficiently hair-on-fire responses. How could they possibly have predicted that lazy churnalists would skip over hedging qualifiers like "feasible" and "in principle", and pebble-dash the story with an extra layer of hysteria stucco? -- coming up with headlines like

Home-brewed heroin? Scientists create yeast that can make sugar into opiates

The rules of the Let's Pretend game allowed the authors to hypothesise that this in-principle opiate production will be undetectable and the pressure cookers bioreactors will be untraceable, meanwhile stipulating that criminal syndicates and the Government Revenue Men will lack any advances in their own capacity for detecting and tracing, and what then of your drug regulations? Then they realised that it was 2.30 a.m. and they had the munchies, so they sent the intern out to the all-night takeaway for burgers.

I am concerned by their lack of faith in my hypothetical dowsing-based detection technology.

The Law of Nominal Determinism is a Harsh Mistress

Some lessons I have learned from reading about the Institute in Basic Life Principles:

1. Avoid any organisation offering counselling for sexual abusers and sexual-abuse victims founded by someone called "Gothard".

2. Avoid organisations where the main advice to sexual-abuse victims is "It was your fault for tempting him. Feel repentance and allow Christ into you."

3. Avoid sexual-morality-enforcement organisations which are essentially job-creation schemes for the founder's family, especially if the founder's brother was eventually sacked for treating its secretaries as his personal harem.

4. Avoid counselling / sexual-morality-enforcement organisations if the founder's name frequently occurs in connection with words like "sexually grooming".

5. "Gothard". Ha.

Must be your eyes up on Mars But it seems like the headlights from the cars

Mars, ancient Mars. Planet of mystery. Planet of MBA degrees, cuff-links, 360° reviews and 6-Sigma consultancies.

We are disappoint. This is not the Mars we were promised, all red and purple like Bruce Pennington cover art, where the corners of the ruins are rounded by millennia of sand-storms, and the weak light from a distant sun sinks without trace in the black water that runs low in the immemorial canals.

Carse walked beside the still black waters in their ancient channel, cut in the dead sea-bottom. He watched the dry wind shake the torches that never went out and listened to the broken music of the harps that were never stilled. Lean lithe men and women passed him in the shadowy streets, silent as cats except for the chime and whisper of the tiny bells the women wear, a sound as delicate as rain, distillate of all the sweet wickedness of the world.

Nevertheless the Business Secrets of Martians are an incontestable fact, and here are Manuel Arulmani and Victor Ranjitham Hema Latha to explain them:

The human population lived in MARS planet in prehistoric time shall be called as SUPER MANAGERS with super wisdom. They were considered as great astronomers and experts in management of various planets and in the space in overcoming the prehistoric severe climate conditions occurred due to misalignment of plan-ets. They had only three fundamental principles of management called AKKIE PRINCIPLES or AKKIE CODE.

[Emphases not mine, possibly those of Akkie Managers]. But wait, there's more!

The main reason for failure of objective shall be considered as “deviation to prehistoric standard Akkie principles”. Hence “TRANSFORMATION” is required in all types of business in all organizations. Transformation shall mean reset to Akkie principles. Authors focuse that Akkie principles shall be considered as the most fundamental principles (Ref. [2]). It is hypothesized that the prehistorical population has already lived in MARS planet. They shall be considered as Akkie population. The Akkie population shall also be considered as black population. The principles of modern management shall be transformed from the fundamental principles of prehistoric Akkie population called as Akkie principles, Akkie management (Ref. [2-4]).

[Thanks Jeffrey Beall @ scholarlyoa]

Arulmani and Hema Latha are an industrious couple, having recently published no fewer than 74 papers, where "published" is a term of art which here takes the meaning "paid some academic jizz-mop of a journal to turn into a PDF". Another eleventy-dozen papers were squeezed out through various imprints of the egregious Marsland Press, sometimes sustaining entire issues of "Cancer Biology", but these do not appear in Arulmani's own list; it may be that they chose the publisher on the basis of its name.

[Thanks Sylvie Coyaud @ Ocasapiens]

The authors' industry is not matched by originality, for all the papers are permutations of a small number of claims (self-plagiarism is not an issue when one's preferred publishing outlets define "peer review" as "close inspection of the cheque"). It is invidious to pick out specific entries from the list but nevertheless I call your attention to

Great Obelisks [before sand]

#24 PYRAMIDS ARE PREHISTORIC RF ANTENNA?! and
#25 HUMAN IS A ROAM FREE CELL PHONE?! and
#18 Barack Obama is Tamil Based Indian? and
#50 “E-LANKA” THE TAMIL CONTINENT?

The Prehistoric Tamil Mars Code features regularly... the primordial form of writing, far more efficient than all the later writing systems into which it degenerated, in that it requires only a single glyph, conveying millions of different meanings.

Also the Primal Winged Human form, and what appears to be an early Underground map. Albeit one which cannot be found in the pages of the Metronomicon, Abdul al-Hazmat's blasphemous Book of Binding of the Timetables.

"What happens when Dravidian racial-supremacy theories merge with business administration and Steiner's Anthroposophy and barking insanity?" asked absolutely no-one, but now we are looking at the answer. The Arulmani-Hema Latha oeuvre belongs to the literature of Dravidian / Tamil racial superiority. There is quite a lot of it out there, identifying the Harappan / Indus Valley Culture as Proto-Dravidian and crediting it as the source of all civilisation everywhere in the world. Money to fund racial-superiority publications sloshes over from the Tamil Nadu state budget (where Tamil-ascendant mythic archeology was official textbook doctrine) and from private supremacist benefactors. Since the funders could not give two tugs on a dead dingo's dick for the quality of publications, author / fantasists enjoy the kind of job security that right-wing pundits would envy, while the income stream for mockademic bottom feeders is equally reliable.

This genre usually invokes the lost continent of Lemuria / Mu -- the heart of the Dravidian Empire, destroyed by floods or vulcanism -- to explain why Tamils, despite their superiority, are not in fact masters of the world (although “Barack Obama is Tamil Based Indian“). Riddled readers have previously encountered another pair of similarly-themed and vanity-published ‘scientists’, Ravikumar Kurup A. and Parameswara Achutha Kurup.

Arulmani and Hema Latha take the geometric logic one step further by identifying the lost continent as Mars. The reason why Mars is off in space now, rather than still part of Earth’s crust, is the expanding universe. Also Red Shift.

We were promised Clark Ashton

Smith's Mars, where intelligent plants from another dimension conscript local minions to extend their vegetable empire to Earth, where tentacled abominations dwell within abyssal depths and enslave new arrivals by sucking out their eyeballs, where brain-digesting zombifying pancakes infest the Vaults of Yoh-Vombis.

All those activities come under the heading of "fundamental Akkie principles of management".

Competition

Oh noes! There is mayoral competition for mah porcini patch!

Mrs Spat, why are you not out there guarding them?

The liberals at the dinner party were rendered speechless by my quip

They are so embarrassed that they are all wearing scramble suits to conceal their identities.

Dentistry not just theft, also sexual assault

A Wellington man accused of pulling out women’s teeth told a girlfriend he liked “gummy women” and said she was more beautiful when she was not wearing her dentures, his trial has been told.

Wait, what? Perhaps he said "L.A. Woman" and she misheard. It is an easy mistake to make, especially after playing the Clash's "Gums of Brixton" over and over all morning.

This woman, who also has had her name suppressed, said Hansen pulled four of her teeth out with pliers when they were in a relationship. 

WTF? Did the library pixies secretly switch my reality with a new John Waters movie to see if I'd notice the difference?

It is established fact that dentists are all wannabe surrealist writers, and possibly vice versa, but amateur dentists are another kettle of red herrings and a mare's nest of worms:

The first woman to testify against Hansen said that in the early 1990s he pulled out six of her bottom teeth with pliers and an oily rag when they had moved to the back seat of his car to have sex.

I know from weird foreplay, but that is a new one on me, as Lemmy said after counting his moles. The guy cherished his fantasies of toothless ladies but he preferred conducting actual tooth-puller cosplay himself to maintain tumescence and hasten the moment of happy release. This is an unfamiliar paraphilia with no name to be found in the usual catalogs of fetish.

Hansen's defense was that all tooth removal was by consent and that he was not in a position to dominate his partners, it is not as if they were indentured. Fortunately he was convicted on several charges (although acquitted on others)... this has spared us the unedifying spectacle of censorious conservatives prating on about the toothlessness of current legislation.

At Riddled we do not judge, and we take no position on aberrant sex. Although "standing up" is right out on account of the possibility that it might lead to dancing.