The starry wisdom Owned by the Baron And he’s got the cure [Carpe Diem edition]

Glymino? Glycolush? Glycovive? Glycoshyne? Are these really someone's well-considered choices for brandnames; or are they car marques from an alternative time-line, or the outputs of a neural network that has been trained on a list of small towns in Ontario and Saskatchewan? HA HA this is a trick question. These strange words come to us from the fertile glymagination of Darren Fleming, so they might as well be the work of a bot.

Fleming is arguably the world's worst conman, but fortunately he gravitated to the field of alt-med scams where standards are so low that even an absolute cockwomble can prosper. He first came to our attention, here at the Riddled Research Laboratory and Academy of Milking-Shed Innovation, by reverse-engineering Magic Yoghurt. All announced through a spray of March 2014 press releases and a portfolio of websites like GcMAF4all.com and gcmafproducts.com. That is, he promised to find a coalition of yeast and bacteria which would not just curdle milk into yoghurt, but also transform the traces of the glycolated peptide VDBP in milk into the deglycolated and all-curative analog "GcMAF"... different from the secret microbe blends advertised as Bravo Yoghurt and MAF314 and MAF878. This would break the monopoly of the House Harkonnen usurpers, weaken the influence of the Bene Gesserit witches while keeping the Spacing Guild on-side, and THE SPICE WOULD FLOW in hitherto undreamed-of quantities.

Darren's entrepreneurial zeal commended him to Trevor and Lesley Banks, breakaway members of the original protein-alchemy cartel, who invited him onto the distribution list as the Australian rep of their GcMAF-fortified products. They may also have been glympressed by the string of 5-star accolades he had awarded himself in his persona as "Dr Fleming" at his 'World Naturopathy Clinic'. Or his activities on a support-group bulletin board: asking cancer patients about their alt-med experiences, while promising his own composite cancer-vanquishing Fleming Protocol and offering unsolicited advice about other therapies they could profitably try.* Or perhaps by his volunteer co-grifting at the "Cancer & Natural Therapy Foundation". I have seen horror movies like that, and the only way this Fleming character could be made any creepier is by dressing him in the make-up and livery of a clown.

Cancer & Natural Therapy Foundation

There was in fact a website for the World Naturopathy Clinic, originally erected around the stolen identities of two Ayurvedic conmen in India. From 2012 to 2013 it evolved into an entire fantasy world of curative promises, decades of experience, detailed accounts of what clients could expect at a consultation, and plans for Australia-wide expansion, all without ever providing a physical address for those consultations: instead apologising for the lack of open appointment slots in the foreseeable future. This was either a weird conceptual art project (mixed with the urge to be taken seriously as a Medical Professional without the bother of training), or the least-functional grift EVAH.

LinkedIn and curing cancer in China

Many of the social-network sites where Mr Fleming composed his alternative biographies - rich with qualifications and accomplishments - have prolapsed into desuetude, CHIZ CHIZ. I especially miss his Alibaba entry, which boasted of Trumpian deal-making skills and project management around high-end golf-club and holiday resorts. But fortunately, like the Dude and like Earth, his 'Baron's Club' abides in the Wayback Machine...

Holiday resort

a kind of cigars- and poker-chip-infused on-line wet-dream, offered to sign up suckers who might pay for an entrée to the billionaire lifestyle. Russian arrivistes were specifically targeted by an entry in the VK Faceborg clone.

No no no, you should visit The Club yourself, I cannot describe the level of aspirational grandeur it attains. The goal appears to be a cheap Ashley-Madison knock-off, offering a social portal in which hoi polloi could rub shoulders and other body parts with an exclusive invite-only elite... so the promises of hot-totty-matchmaking are interlarded with Vegas High-Roller life-style signifiers of cigars and scotch and poker chips and private jets, all with the understated refinement of Donald Trump filming an advertisement for Lynx. When the Baron's Club emerged on FB in the course of June 2013, it could already boast of a two-decade history of wild success, so who am I to doubt that membership ever exceeded 1? There is aspirational talk of a luxury cruise liner for the club members, private islands, buying French chateaux. The most charitable interpretation is that the brashness is carefully cultivated to appeal to parvenu Moscovite oligarchs.

I hasten to add that Darren was not a complete fantasist, content to settle for grandiose dreams of a career as a scoundrel, for his email addresses were used to set up an entire virtual shopping-mall of credit-card-phishing sites in the guise of illegal-pharmaceutical outlets.

Now one of those e-addresses togethersearch@hotmail.com also featured in Darren's Global Fundraising Network, a kind of charity broker. The company's website has lapsed but it lingers on in small-business community listings. Community-minded on-line shoppers would be directed towards participating webstores, with assurances that some of their money would go to support signed-up charities.

The main beneficiary being 'La Trinite Church' -- a tax-exemption-claiming entity, previously trading as Fleming Couriers, staff consisting of Darren Fleming (secretary). You get the picture. What keeps me coming back to the GcMAF phenomenon is the delightful nature of the characters encountered there, and by that criterion Fleming comes under the Riddled rubric, also within the Riddled auspices, or for short, the rausbrices.

Subsequent snapshots of the gcmafproducts.com webstore find Darren stocking the Banks' 'MAFactive' lifestyle accoutrements for a time, moving on to his own-brand no-frills colostrum-infused congelations coming Real Soon Now. Meanwhile showing all the conviction of a dude in a metro-station subway selling Genuine Gucci Merchandise spread out on a trestle table, as he hawked a series of short-lived, MAF-themed nasal sprays and suchlike, none of them likely to have ever existed outside of Photoshop.

In the wider Looniverse, "GcMAF" had meanwhile undergone an apotheosis and become a Worship Word in alt-med-consuming circles, losing its original biochemical meaning and coming to signify one's acceptance of a whole system of anti-Big Pharma values. So it did not matter when Yamamoto's papers were retracted for fraud, and Yamamoto's enzymatic process for deglycolating VDBP into GcMAF vanished in a puff of reality (i.e. the process supposedly performed by microbes during the fermentation of Magic Yoghurt). The persons making and distributing GlycoPlus unguents just shrugged, and dropped the pretense that their colostrum cow-squeezings had undergone any molecular transformation or contained actual magic molecules.

NRG = Energy, is joke

This is the context in which Darren's glyconic glychors -- Glycolush, Glycovive, Glymino and mustn't forget Glycoshyne -- could be a thing. For they are the current glyncarnations of his colostrum scammocopoeia. I earlier doubted that they would ever get past the 'Coming Soon!" conceptual stage and I feel so foolish now. In fact there is even a US distributor, Natural ReGenesis! (some June Lee who is new on the scene). Truly the student has surpassed the master.

On the topic of GlycoPlus, the brief careers of the Australian distributors is of note. Anni Diamond the Cancer Diva... Lucy Corrigan the Tasmaniac Lyme lady... one by one they pop up, staking out websites and FaceBorg support groups to lure in users, only to vanish from the scene again, as if into unmarked graves. Perhaps Darren is only posing as a hopeless bumblefuck, while he disposes of his rivals with a combination of canny business practice and ruthless midnight assassination.

But wait, it transpires that a new Australian shopfront has opened for the GlycoPlus product (under its Pacific title of GcMAFplus), in Brisbane! The Quantum Healing Centre is one of those all-in-one New Age Chambers, where the whole chromatic-light-healing spectrum of pissant woo practitioners have come together under one roof as if drawn by the attraction of Crank Magnetism, so you can have your aura read, your chakras balanced, and your bank-account detoxified without breaking a sweat. Someone should insure their lives, or warn them to watch their backs, whichever seems easier more lucrative.

* "If your wife is only on radiation and not chemotherapy I would only recommend that she uses Arginine 20 to 30 grams taken 30 to 60 minutes before each radiation session. This can help the radiation generate more free radicals due to enhanced blood flow the the cancer tumor as well as other benefits."