The Touch of Undying #2

Stockpiles of Stupid were running low again so we dispatched teams of ninja ethnologists to conduct fieldwork among distant primitive tribes in the Bumblefuck Archipelago and record their creation myths and magical-thinking ritualistic worldviews, before they are spoiled by exposure to civilisation and rationality.

What they brought back was this report from Alcorcón, Spain, where the media had fallen for an alluring line of bullshit-and-blarney from a team of Dutch and Spanish monorail salemen... all about the state-of-the-aunt no-cutting-edge Research Hospital devoted to Integrative Healing and Traditional Chinese Medicine that would soon bring patients flooding into Alcorcón, thanks to a €30-million gift from the Chinese Gubblement, coming Real Soon Now to repay the bridging loans. Never mind the delicate allusions to the material signs of commitment that the host city should show to secure that gift [this project will be selected on bases of infra structure and readiness to take the step to establish a new concept of healthcare...]; just look at the CGI!

Now small towns succumbing to richly-embroidered blandishments does not normally fall within the purview of the Riddled School of Unconventional Ethics and Fishnet-Stocking Museum, but it turned out to be purviewable after all, so bear with me. The pages at the "China Europe Business Development Services" website provide not only glossy architecture-porn CGI, but also documentation of the TCM hospital story-line, lavish with circumstantial detail.



But then the city's embittered political dissidents applied due diligence:

On December 29 the municipal government of Alcorcón announced an agreement for the Chinese government to invest 300 million euros to build an "International Health Center", which combined Traditional Chinese Medicine with Western medicine, on a plot of 60,000 meters square in the South Ensanche neighborhood of our municipality.

...

None of this seems to have to do with the International Health Center announced by the City Council of Alcorcón. The promoter company, China Europe Business Development Services (CEBDS), seems to be more dedicated to the promotion of "natural therapies" of Chinese origin and not in the scientific development of drugs from the experiences of the TCM, nor with the medicine Western, as the company reflects on its own website, its interest in Spain is due to the permissiveness of our legislation with the sale and dissemination of Western-origin pseudoscientific therapies such as homeopathy.
And is that despite having been announced as an investment by the Chinese government, is this private company, chaired by the Dutchman Robert De Vos, who would be in charge of the investment. In addition, although "China Europe Business Development Services" does seem to have several advisors of Chinese origin, it does not have any member of the Chinese government among its directors. According to its own website, its Executive Director is the Brazilian Alexandre Ferreira Lopes, and its Director for Business Development, the Spanish David Martinez Hinojosa.

...and the webpages discovered an urgent appointment elsewhere, and in the manner of leprechaun gold or Macavity the Cat they were no longer there, proving impossible to archive (on account of the fictive, irreal nature of the Chinese invstors), leaving only screen-grabs.

It is not entirely clear whom CEBDS are targeting with their offers to facilitate mutually-lucrative links between Euro and Chinese business leaders. The vanished and surviving pages at the CEBDS website worked hard to foster the impression that CEBDS's officers enjoy the confidence and purchasable access to the highest echelons of the Chinese kleptocracy, but I am not convinced.

CEBDS CEO Robert de Vos used to have a LinkedIn page, designed to reel in Europeans with a general lure of "there are many scams going on and this is your chance to grab your share of the moneyswirl". Combined with a fatalistic / upside-of-defeatism sense of "Europe is finished, the future is China; CEBDS is your chance to welcome our new overlords while they are still recruiting collaborators". All punctuated with freshly-coined Confucian aphograms and epirisms (and even the other way around), and permeated with the odour of joss-sticks and honourable high-mindedness, which is to say not intended for the eyes of actual Chinese businesspersons.

Alas, that entry too has gone down the memory hole, so you will have to take my word for it. Instead, here is another vanished page from the CEBDS site:



The crux is at the bottom:*Immortalis Klotho"!

Immortalis Klotho, readers will recall, is the latest wonder-drug from the ever-inventive Dr Marco Ruggiero, who has dazzled us for centuries with his wondrous creations. Coming in quick succession after GcMAF, Magic Yoghurt, Rerum®,** and perhaps a few more that I forgot. It lengthens life-expectancy beyond the bounds of today, by causing relativistic time-dilation effects at the level of cellular DNA, perhaps by boring the base-pairs in such tedious degree that time seems to pass more slowly for them (a similar effect might explain how Ruggiero seems to have dazzled us for centuries). Dr Ruggiero has published repeatedly on time-dilation and quantum neurology, and likes to cite the Old Testament as science literature to prove that the original Biblical-Patriarch longevity was not unreasonable for Immortalis customers to expect. For the marketing and distribution of this new product, he teamed up with "Sacha" Stone - failed rock-star, wannabee New Age Messiah, and broad-spectrum grifter.

Now we turn to the Immortalis Testimonials page (recently closed to public scrutiny, but attempts to archive it were less unsuccessful). Most of the testifying entities are anonymised, or are V14GR4 spam-bots who attained sentience but have not yet left traceable on-line footprints. But wait, who are these individuals ‘Robert de Vos’ and ‘David M[artinez]’, offering their independent and disinterested testimony from CEBDS?

De Vos is black-haired in his photographs, though he credits Immortalis with restoring his pelage to its original blondity. It is unclear what arrangement between Ruggiero and the CEBDS monorail Alcorcónmen inspired the latter to become Immortalis pimps, but one is heartened to find them providing full service.

[H/t Dora for all the leads]

* Another crux at the bottom, c/o Man Ray.

** In other news: Rerum® (“The Stuff”) is now obsolete and de-recommended! For another quantum leap occurred in immune-support therapy, and another good new thing has hied into view, with a brutally-kerned logo that could easily be mistaken for that of a designer bottled-water brand . Coming real soon! One struggles to curb one’s anticipation!

Of course Rerum® had already accrued imitators and competitors for the moneys of the credulous born-sucker-demographic clientele (I am SHOCKED SHOCKED to encounter this lack of solidarity within the medscam industry), so its abandonment was only a matter of time.

So far, ‘Imuno’ is purveyed only through ‘Naturalsolutions.nz’, operating out of the basement of Michael Kelly’s new-age / Alt-Med cash-extraction facility and pantechnicon of modalities at St Benedict’s Road (Auckland, NZ). His other business activities have inspired us with admiration and hilarity. Details of who registered the primary website ‘imuno.biz’ are veiled behind an anonymising service,

though not very effectively, for it is hosted on an IP address that is quite selective about the other websites it hosts. That is to say, the evidence points to Michael Kelly as the main instigator and producer of Imuno®.

In the past Mr Kelly has been creative in his attributions, and it is possible that the alleged role of Ruggiero in this new product is purely his own invention. We should not be too quick to conclude that Ruggiero is trying to backstab Heinz Reinwald (Swiss impresario of Alt-Med bafflegab placebos), who seems to control production and distribution of the now-deprecated Rerum®. And perhaps takes an excessive share of the profits.

As always, it is the high calibre of the individuals one thereby encounters that bring me back again and again to Ruggiero’s cosplay version of medical research.