You're very clever, young man, but it's greater fleas and lesser fleas, all the way down

"Tell us more about GcMAF!" said absolutely no-one. But at Riddled we are steadfast in our determination to bring you nothing but the freshest, artisanal, hand-curated loons. Also I am in thrall to the power of Ira Dei the Dragon-onna-string and it compels me to blog about GcMAF, the panaceal glycoprotein extracted from human blood, requiring 100 lives to fill one bottle of Abrasax youth serum NO WAIT that was in "Jupiter Ascending".

Extraction process:
Requires large still

What makes GcMAF so irresistable is the way it encapsulates the whole world of predatory health grifting in microcosm. Which is to say, in macrocosm. Like the alchemists' elixir vitae, it is a panacea; but there is no formula, and no definition, and no chemical test to verify its presence in a product you might buy on-line. Thus it is hard to find a alt-health scammer who is not trying to put his own spin on the magical protein as a point of difference from the competition. A drug by the name of World without End WHOOPS the old problem is back with lyrics bleeding through from the Radio Riddled classic-rock broadcast, we really need better shielding around the cryopods.


Just look at these two websites. On the left, one touts GcMAF to Asian consumers. One could easily believe it to be a subsidiary or an authorised distributor of the FirstImmune youth-serum product featured on the right. Alas, the Asian site has merely cloned the FirstImmune web design and where they are sourcing their magical blood extract remains a matter for speculation. Here at Riddled Investigative Journalism we grieve to report backstabbing, chicanery and sharp practice in the skeezy health-grifting sector but we do not resile from our melancholy duty.

Close inspection reveals the GcMAF.asia site* to be owned by Infiniti Biomed, with agents in Singapore and Bangkok, which are the new Tijuana.



Even more obsessive closer attention uncovers an entire pullulating ecosystem of websites, connected secondarily by the details of who registered which domain. There is a stem sell, asitwere, Regenex Holdings (Thailand Ltd.), primordial and pluripotent and undifferentiated, potentially immortal as long as it remains unspecialised and based on Cayman Islands. Regenex sloughs other companies from its flanks in the manner of Abhoth or a Skwirl-shuggoth; these subdivide and differentiate, becoming increasingly specialised in stem-cell scammery / "aesthetic surgery" / "medical tourism" (or in "integrative cancer therapy" in the case of the Veritas Life cancer clinics in Bangkok).

Regenex spawned Regenerasia and Regentec, and then Global Stem Cells Group and Verita Healthcare and the Verita Life cancer clinic, and Global Medical Training Network which offers training for nurses for the stem-sell sector (on the theory that even if the stem-sell scammery money teat dries up there is still money to be made from people who aspire to a career in stem-sell scammery).

The primary connection among these companies is the presence of Richard DeAndrea as Medical Director of Infiniti Biomed and Medical Director of Regenetec and Medical Director of Stem Cells Thailand (a.k.a. Global Stem Cell Network) and Medical Director of Global Medical Services Group (which is now Verita Medical Services) and Medical Director at Verita Life Integrative & Regenerative Bio-Enhancement Center, because what better qualification could one ask for in one's oncologist than a Doctorate of Naturopathy? Before all that he was Holistic Health Director at TRIA Integrative Wellness Center; before relocating his operations from San Francisco to Bangkok he was noted for his alternative AIDS cures, Oxygen Bar and 21-Day Detox-related activities.**

We can only conclude that detoxes and stem cells don't work any more which is why the necessity for Gc-MAF, rather than its high profile. It may be that the Stars are In Alignment and a CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN scenario is just around the non-Euclidean corner.

In related news,

• Classical homeopathy rarely works anymore.
• Amalgam and root canal removal is still beneficial.
• Cavitation surgery can still be big but is no longer a miracle.
• Simple things that worked 30 years ago no longer work well.

However, Electromagnetic Smog still remains an issue so don't throw away those tinfoil hats Faraday Cages quite yet. We learn all of this from Dietrich Klinghardt, inventor of homeopathic GcMAF. This is all non-classical and quantum so perhaps it will save you when the old gods return and sweep our cities back into hell SODDING B.Ö.C. LYRICS. Dr Klinghardt has been the recipient of Respectful Insolence, but you should also look at his eccentric magisterium of thought, come back when you've finished. The power of Ira Dei the Dragon-onna-string compels you.

"But wait," the reader asks. "Wasn't 'homeopathic GcMAF' a specialty of Trevor Banks and Lesley Hutchings, a.k.a. www.gcmafresearch.com?"

Sadly, there is a gnawing suspicion that not all of Trevor and Lesley's ideas are original to them, and not all their activities are entirely above-board. The Wayback Machine, for instance, contains a no-longer-extant website in which Trevor was offering "second generation GcMAF" to his customers, using the Japanese process, made in his own

sterile cell processing facility using this new and improved 2nd generation method which is 10-20 times more concentrated and is more active and stable than other GcMAF that is currently available

-- so much better than the product available from FirstImmune! This was back when FirstImmune was warning people against the Japanese 2nd-Gen product, as an untested and overpriced product of unknown provenance, conceivably the work of scammers. And when Trevor and Lesley were working for FirstImmune as Marketing Manager and intertube shill. It is the ingratitude and disloyalty that hurt.

A hypertrophied sense of duty obliges me to mention Jeremy Ayres (Doctor of Naturopathy), who was buying the FirstImmune product and re-selling it as his own --

Our GcMAF batches have been put through 9 tests, including 2 sterility, three activity/potency, we make time lapse videos of all live cancer cells being destroyed in three days.

-- while presenting his beach-house on sunny tropical out-of-jurisdiction Barbados as a partner to the FirstImmune cancer clinic in Switzerland.***

We have several clinic options available. For stage 3-4 conditions (or other terminal diagnosed conditions) it is best to go to the residential clinic in Switzerland.

Readers are already familiar with Dr Jeff Bradstreet, tireless autism grifter (if the first five remedies he sells you make no difference, do not despair, he has a sixth!). Bradstreet was sourcing the already high-diluted nanograms-per-dose GcMAF from FirstImmune, watering it down by another factor of 10 because Homeopathy!, and prescribing it to his patients along with a natural-chelator brain-enhancing jellyfish extract (I am not making this up). Earlier this year he decided to pretend that the association never happened and scrubbed his promotional website of all promises of GcMAF-related miraculous cures.

Alas, the Wayback Machine never forgets, and the FDA were not fooled. They interviewed Bradstreet, and seized records from his clinic, and he shot himself. Leaving his family so impoverished that his brother has been reduced to appealing to public donations for $25000, which will be spent on an independent investigation of Bradstreet's death. It would be VERY WRONG to go to the GoFundMe page (or to TruthNutNews) and leave a comment arguing that Bradstreet's attempts to detoxify his site show that he was BEING PRESSURED and AFRAID OF RETRIBUTION.

BONUS ALTERNATIVE TITLE:

Poison's in my bloodstream, poison's in my pride

I'm after rebellion, I'll settle for lies

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

* Also promoted in antisocial media or whatever the kids are calling it:
https://gcmaftreatment.wordpress.com/
http://cancer-treatment-gcmaf-in-thailand.blogspot.com/
https://plus.google.com/108302404590144750198/posts

** Further information can be found at the self-penned modestly-titled blog "Dr. Richard DeAndrea continues to make great advances in stem cell therapy". Connoisseurs of fulsomery will also appreciate DeAndrea's Whackyweedia entry, which is more fulsome than Johnny Cash at Fulsome Prison, and did not survive the critical attention of the Whackyweedia moderators.

*** Now closed on account of its illegality and of patient deaths.

If I had known the Abyss looked like that, I would never have stared into it

thx Boing-Boing

Also just look at all these adorable little sloth parasites about to hatch from infected tissue:

This rhetorical question was brought to you by the Riddled Rhetor Service

Giant floating stone heads. Does the world need a sequel to Zardoz?

OF COURSE IT DOES.
Also too.

It transpires that a "suppository" is not the room in one's house devoted to inventing weird hypotheses, assumptions and stipulations. We regret the error

Oh how frustrating. The library pixies appear to have commandeered the baroque fountain in the courtyard of stately Riddled Manor, and have converted tigris' shoe collection into small galleys, which they are rowing around in the water and ramming each other while emitting shrill squeals of inhuman glee.

We had planned to drain the fountain, fill it with milk, and ferment Healthy Probiotic Yogurt, such as all the cool kids are making these days. Although Evangeline van Holsterin -- head barmaid at the Old Entomologist -- was skeptical about the prospects of forcing yoghurt through the handpumps, and rebuffed Another Kiwi and I with a variation on her usual riposte "You are both loonies". Anyway, the plan is on temporary hiatus.

Now available from Riddled Labs:
Self-fermenting dairy animals

What prompted this, Uncle Smut? Have there been recent developments in the world of Magic Yogurt?

Not really. Dairy-fermentation impresario Marco Ruggiero continues to promote and sell his probiotic products through his company Silver Spring Sagl,¹ while selflessly continuing his research into health issues which will be improved by the immune-system-boosting mammalian glycoprotein GcMAF it contains.² He might save effort and finish with a shorter list if he focussed on researching health issues which it does not improve, but I digress.

There has been airing of skepticism from people who looked in vain for the chemical in question:

"For example, one doctor set up a company in Guernsey Island that markets containers allegedly containing the material. We bought one of his containers, and couldn’t find the molecule in it. We’re keeping our distance from these people."

It is possible that Uri Yogev (the Efranat CEO being cited) could not find the Glycosolated Polypeptide Formerly Known as GcMAF because it was going by a different name at the time. It is also known as S-MAF, MAF314 and "Vitamin D binding protein" or VDBP. Personally I am suspicious when a chemical changes its name... an honest chemical with nothing to hide has no need for aliases or noms-du-beurre.

More dramatic, however, was the interruption to supply, with one UK purveyor falling an innocent victim of the regulatory crackdown on the injectable GcMAF provided by David Noakes and his company First Immune. Trevor Banks and Lesley Hutchings, of GcMAFresearch.com,³ report:

Because of this association to the product known as gcmaf, MAFActive has been raided, stock taken and they have interrupted the supply lines and the banking facilities. The MHRA want to close the MAFActive brand.

[...]

We have been more than careful in not making any health claims for these products, but there is feedback and customer comments in various places on the www. However, our stance is that we cannot be responsible for the content of any other website, nor is it our jurisdiction to stifle the free speech of other people in a social media setting.§

MAFActive™ is a registered trademark of the company Cytoinnovations Ltd. The Google Machine reveals that Cytoinnovations is owned by Trevor Banks, currently the company's sole director, although previous directors include Lesley Hutchings and a Lynda Thyer. Trevor and Lesley also share ownership of the company VDBP Ltd. Anyway, motivated perhaps by a sudden desire to keep kosher, Trevor and Lesley want to distance their persecuted Dairy of Anne Frank from Noakes' blood-extract operation:

In fairness, the CEO of the company was making some outrageous and unsubstantiated claims and was ripe for being investigated by the MHRA because he was breaking so many of the rules. He was claiming an inordinate amount of cures and supplying injectable products that were not only unapproved by the authorities, but lacking any evidence of efficacy. He prevented free speech on social media about his products via gagging orders. His company has been alleged to fabricate results and testimonies, and so abuse the trust of the public in a time of their most vulnerable. This would be considered by the MHRA to be making profits on entirely unsubstantiated and created evidence, at the expense of the health and wellbeing of the public. It is not surprising that he was the subject of an enforcement raid.

Silly Uncle Smut. You used the 'Anne Frank's Dairy' joke last time. Have you been smoking dried leeches again?

Now I've forgotten what I was ranting about.

Blood / dairy rivalry. Kosher. Calenture fritillary hatstand.

Ah yes, the hostility, it is hard to credit. For Lesley Hutchings used to work for Noakes, trawling the Interlattice for any comment threads mentioning cancer or autism and spamming them with GcMAF advertisements:

I work part time as customer follow up for First Immune GcMAF and also monitor the web for mentions of GcMAF

While Trevor filled a similar informative role on patient support-group fora.

But alas, the schism is corroborated by an outside source in the ME/CFS community:

We go through Dr. Bradstreet to get pre-filled syringes of gcmaf or Goleic. He orders from David Noakes' company in the UK.

[...]

David Noakes has a competitor, Lesley Banks Hutchings, who used to work with Noakes. Perhaps many of you know this. Lesley started her own business. I am not sure if one of the products some of you are referring to on here is Lesley's product, MAFactive. Lesley gets the gcmaf for her spray from the lab in Switzerland. Bradstreet purchased his gcmaf and Goleic from Noakes, because he has seen the best results from that gcmaf. Hutchings is basically usmg children who have autism in order to gain backing for her product. These are my words. She sells MAFactive as long as the parents participte via surveys or something.

There is a lot of hatred between the 2 companies. Dr. B has told me that MAF active is not safe, and yet Hutchings' company seems to be able to continue sellimg her product, while Noakes has been shut down. I am no fan of David Noakes. I do not post on this site very much, but some of my posts have been about Noakes. I hope that there has been no "foul play" from Hutchings' company in this matter. I am not alluding to that being a possibility. But, when there is so much hatred between Hutchings and Noakes, one has to wonder.

And Lynda Thyer, briefly a director of Trevor's company, again had previously worked for Noakes and then for his garage home-brewery / extraction plant 'Macro Innovations'. IS THERE NO LOYALTY? NO HONOUR?

Will the regulatory barriers affect New Zealand consumers?

I am confident that local purveyors will cope with demand for Bravo Probiotic Suppositories.

Evolution has provided us with cells in the intestines, ready to absorb the GcMAF when it is administered in this form. One could follow the suppositories with a black-coffee enema and perhaps some orange juice, but that is not my idea of a continental breakfast.

Fortunately, if the supply of molecules of GcMAF runs short, there is always Homeopathy to magnify their potency.

Homeopathic MAF Grade C Sugar Tablets
Produced by Helios Homeopathy in the UK, each bottle contains approximately 30 grade C homeopathic sugar pills to be dissolved under the tongue.

Sublingual S-MAF Atomizer
Each atomizer contains 5.0ml of solution of which 7.5% is Sodium Chloride (NaCl) and 800ng of S-MAF (Macrophage Activating Factor). Each spray contains approximately 30 nanograms of MAF. One atomizer contains enough S-MAF for one to two months, depending on the frequency of administration.

Sublingual S-MAF Drops
One sublingual dropper contains 800ng of S-MAF (Macrophage Activating Factor) in 5ml sterile saline solution. Each drop contains approximately 30 nanograms of S-MAF. One dropper contains enough sublingual drops for one to two months, depending on the frequency of administration.

We wish you well!
Lesley & Trevor

Not to forget MAFActive Protein Enriched Massage Cream. According to the MAFActive Cream Homeopathic Research Initiative

MAFActive Cream has been produced by a leading UK Homeopathic Pharmacy and contains VDBP at 6x dilutions.

But now I am confused. Mafactive.com advises us that the cream is

Vitamin D binding protein in a base of natural oils and waxes. This contains no preservatives, so should be kept in the fridge and used within 8 weeks of receipt. Used as a massage cream to stimulate the lymphatic regions of the face and neck, this may help to reduce puffiness and give the skin a glowing complexion.
Ingredients: Purified water, almond oil, emulsifying wax, borax, glycoprotein.

Please make up your mind. As a would-be informed consumer, I like to know whether or not there is any active ingredient before I rub the lotion on my skin.

I am always worried that excessive dilution of the active ingredient will result in a homeopathic overdose.

UPDATE: now available from the Riddled Gifte Shoppe, our own brand of protein-enriched massage cream to give the skin a glowing complexion, "Liniment of Gratified Desire".

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

¹ Ruggiero and his co-owner Fulvia Gianetta Allio also own Les Alpes, which is not a Northern English stand-up comedian from the 1980s; we regret the error. It is in fact a Swiss-based company which burnishes its pastoral credibility by operating out of a New Zealand mailbox (for a while Ruggiero's website was presenting itself as a Swiss branch of that mailbox).

² The discovery that bacteria fermenting in milk obligingly create an immune-system-boosting mammalian glycoprotein was revealed to a conference in 2011.

³ Also of MAFActive.com and MAFActive.eu. And CytoInnovations.com, and 1stProEngineering, which supplies a time-saving preparation of MAF ready-mixed with colloidal silver.

Trevor further compiles a "Healingautismblog.com" website, which is a lovingly hand-curated mixture of hoaxy street-sweepings and reports from Jeff Bradstreet's self-promotion site, focussing on advertisements for GcMAF and its autism-curing properties... advertorials which Bradstreet more recently scrubbed from his own site after Noakes started giving snake-oil a bad rep. The same material is mirrored at the site VDBP.info.

Connoisseurs of the Banks-Hutchings oeuvre might also enjoy the Nagalese Blood Test site, to find whether or not you need GcMAF; GcMAF Autism; Healing Cancer Today; and Natural Truth, their home-grown attempt to challenge Natural News.

§ "We can make no health claims for this product, as it is not a medicinal product but simply a food supplement containing vitamin D binding protein. However, we can publish comments received from users."

Bad luck, Skippy

Kangaroos are not considered to be legitimate service / sensory-assistance animals.

An excess of scruples and qualms prevents me from living my intended career as a cad, so I need this assistance marsupial which makes me a vicarious bounder.

The Bantam Menace

Q.: What do you call an angry giant mutant hoverboard-riding chicken that's chasing Ann Althouse?  
A.: Leia.

'Nirvana Cabal'... Electrosynth-Klezmer band name, or next novel in the Laundry series?

In my day, when we felt inspired to run a one-dimensional cellular automaton that would simulate how pigment cells switch on and off in the growing shell lip of Conus textile and C. geographus molluscs, to paint the shells with mountain ranges, we had to program in Fortran on DEC mainframes and accordion-fold lineprint paper. The way God intended. We didn't have your new-fangled "spreadsheets" [kids today, their good fortune, they are not cognizant of it].

With a slightly more complicated cell neighbourhood and switching rule -- Rule 34 110 in Wolfram's catalog -- the diagonal stripes decorating the shells would cancel or cross when they meet in a way that is Turing-complete, i.e. the shells would be universal computers. Sorry, Evolution, you missed a golden opportunity there. Go home -- it's time to let the professional Mad Scientists have a chance.

While we are revising the genes of Conus shells we need to do something about their venom. They secrete a blend of simple peptide conotoxins which target multiple neurotransmitter pathways to anesthetise and tranquilise their victims. The blend varies from species to species, and within each species, their genes reshuffling to come up with new neurotoxins each season. As any fule kno, Olivera and Cruz (2001) introduced the term "nirvana cabal":

Yet there are surprisingly few records of recreational use! Pet cone-shells are not yet a hipster / druggie accoutrement. Perhaps it is the lack of a standard, predictable dose; perhaps it is the high fatality rate after cone-shell envenomation.

Conchopharmacologists have been promising the immanent arrival of medically-useful conotoxins, Just Around the Next Corner, for a couple of decades now, but so far the only one approved is synthetic ω-conotoxin as a painkiller... one with limited applications (because it must be injected directly into the eyeball spinal fluid to mitigate its disturbing side-effects). Go home, Evolution, you are not meeting the needs of today's sophisticated cone-venom abusers.

If truth were known, researchers only continue to analyse and catalog the different conotoxins because it gives them an excuse to 'milk' the molluscs into condoms:

...which is great to talk about when people ask what you do for a job.

UPDATE: Must belatedly recognise B⁴'s journalistic priority in cone-shell toxicology and taxonomy.

The Bantam of the Opera

No history of the use of poultry in warfare would be complete without a reference to the BLUE PEACOCK nuclear landmine, and to the chicken-powered heating scheme that the boffins came up with when it was pointed out to them that British-made steam-radio trigger circuitry was probably not up to the rigours of a European winter.

The chickens would be sealed inside the casing, with a supply of food and water; they would remain alive for a week or so. Their body heat would, it seems, have been sufficient to keep the mine's components at a working temperature.

Why a seven-tonne 10-kiloton nuclear landmine? To save Germany from Soviet invasion by rendering large parts of it uninhabitable with fallout.

Supposedly the mines were never deployed, and BLUE PEACOCK was cancelled in 1958 when Whitehall realised that German popular opinion would not look kindly upon a British plan to turn their country into a radioactive buffer zone vapourise fluffy little chickens. But they would say that... even if they'd just lost track of the secret locations. Where chickens have been buried, mutating, for the last half-century... competing for a restricted food supply... breeding for ever-greater ferocity and intelligence.

One can only hope that the chooks do not join forces with the Canaries in the Coal Mines, who have been breeding down there, and will one day find their way back to the surface -- flightless, blind, and very very angry.

Apparently kitty photographs make people go "Squeee"

He's a pedigreed aristocrat who can trace his ancestry to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule... she's a street-wise feral with no known parentage.Yet they found each other!

These were taken back in April-May 2009 when Doodle and Mrs Spat were first pinky-promising to be BFFs.

The hot chocolate drink ration is to be increased to 25 grams per week

Back at the Old Entomologist Korova Milkbar...

A customer is not happy with the Moloko Plus. Too much palm-oil and vellocet, not enough drencrom and synthemesc. My droogs, this is no way to sharpen up and make ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence!

It happened because our corporate overlords changed the recipe of a popular milk-sweetening product... or more precisely, Nestle decided it was cheaper to stop production of a specifically New Zild formulation of the stuff, and simply ship the generic Australasian recipe. Turned out that customers did notice the difference.

This general ingratitude angered the Penes de Milo who responded with an angry threat to dissolve the consumer base and appoint a new one. The extra sugar and palm-oil and the removal of that nasty unnatural "vanilla" taste apparently make the product healthier; the changes are "meeting the demands of consumers" which is why they hadn't been announced; and anyway they "haven't affected the flavour", so the consumption units should get used to the new unchanged flavour because there is no intention of "changing the recipe back".

Then the Mountain Gods of Borneo joined in by shaking the mountains to show their wrath at the recipe change, although the Malaysian government misunderstood the message and blamed it on naked tourists instead.

This was going to segue into another rant about Ruggiero and his magic cancer-curing yoghurt but TL;DW.

Terror Cotta

November 2009:

Ends badly (as it always does).

In your burning tight leather you're a firebomb

The plan is worthy of Baldrick in its cunningness. The falcon is wearing false boobies so the crew of the U-boat will be distracted by the view through the periscope and will not notice the explosive-laden toy boat it is towing just below.

Just when you thought you were safe from the bats carrying fire-bombs.

Out of countenance (the Unreasoning Mask)

Courtesy of Xeni @ boingboing, here are some people who were in too much of a hurry in the morning and forgot to put their masks on.

The rules of society often seem unreasonable. What difference should it make, whether or not you have your mask in place? But over the years I have learned that there is nothing be gained by arguing the point with someone else's prejudices, and it is easier simply to wear the sodding mask and just blend in.

Updated with BONUS FACE.