Wednesday Weirdness Roundup

Courtesy of Nexus magazine

Nexus magazine, as I’ve mentioned before, is cover-to-cover batshit insanity on crack. It recycles the craziest of the crazy “alternative health” and conspiracy memes, everything from the health benefits of drinking your own piss to reasons why the moon is probably hollow. The American edition is a bi-monthly edited by Duncan M. Roads, and it’s every bit as nutty as the original UK publication [correction: Australian publication]. You literally can’t get past a single page without laughing, cringing, or giving up on the future of mankind. The only good thing I can say about it is that while Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer were sold out at my local bookstore, this rag was still on the shelf. There’s still hope for humanity, folks.
Anyway, since I’m still in de-vacationing mode, I figured I’ll let Nexus do my work for me this Wednesday. Seriously, there’s enough material in the March/April issue for about 50 Weirdness Roundups.

The hilarity begins on the very first page, in the editor’s intro. Roads basically admits that most of the catastrophic and UFO Rapture scenarios of the past four decades have been b.s., which should make subscribers wonder why the hell they’re reading this magazine. He writes, “I still cannot quite believe that it is 2010 and that the world hasn’t been through all the catastrophic planetary changes that were predicted…It seems that nothing has really changed, except the speed at which such ideas and rumours are communicated, thanks to the Internet.” Exactly, Mr. Roads. Exactly.

Letters to the Editor:

These two pages were so funny/sad I spit out my coffee a few times. Actual quote:
“I made two websites, one about giants and one about six-fingered hands. I am getting responses…”
Then there’s Jim Oglesby of Florida, who claims that while he was working on launch support at Cape Canaveral in the ’60s, aliens contacted him. (According to an editor’s note, you’ll be seeing that story again in a future issue.)
Another reader argues that bee deaths are being caused not by pesticides nor infection, as many scientists strongly suspect, but by “agribacteria” [sic] used as the gene transfer vector in GM crops. Chemtrails are also killing off a lot of bees and wasps, though the man can’t or won’t identify what’s actually in these things or why he’s confident they’re connected to insect deaths. He saw some funky contrails, then he saw fewer wasps. That’s evidence aplenty for him.

Articles:

Global warming is fake, the Norway Spiral was not a missile but a manifestation of HAARP, lightning strikes can do funky things to your brain, yadda yadda yadda. The weirdest article is an examination of the Black-Eyed Kids phenomonenon, which began as a blatant and rather stupid online hoax by a Texas reporter named Brian Bethel back in ’98. He claimed that two adolescent boys with no white in their eyes approached his car and demanded to be given a ride somewhere. Like vampires of yore, they apparently had to be invited into a space in order to enter, and they gave off a subtle aura of menace when Bethel refused. The article goes into crazy specific detail about these BEKs, which have been regularly encountered since – guess when? – 1998. I think it goes without saying there aren’t any photos accompanying this article.
The creepiest thing about BEKs is not the kids themselves, but adults’ reported reactions to them. Like Bethel’s kids, all BEKs give off an aura of not-niceness, without being directly threatening in any way. They weigh about 80 lbs, but grown people are terrified just to be around them.
When a little black-eyed girl knocked at the side door of a Missouri woman’s house and said she needed help, the woman was so overwhelmed by the girl’s eyes and “adult vocabulary” that she slammed the door in her face. Perhaps the girl was unusually bright and had just been strangled, but never mind. If you get a bad vibe from a 7-year-old, it’s perfectly acceptable to leave them to die on your doorstep. That’s rational.
Other people are certain the BEKs are aliens, or demons, or demonic aliens. Christian writer and possible alien abductee Guy Malone says the kids have a “probable satanic source…probably demonic- or fallen-angel-related”. One man is convinced that a little girl in his family is possessed, because her eyes go black when she abuses animals or other children. No one else in the family seems to notice, he reports. A Toronto mother states, “My first encounter with an alien was at my daughter’s school”.
The article notes that there are numerous physical causes for enlarged pupils, but the writer then goes on to ignore them all completely, as if to say, “Screw that Occam shit – Omen kids are way more fun.”

“Cures”

90% of Nexus is unintentionally hilarious conspiranoid dreck, but it does have a very dark side: the plethora of bizarre disease cures that are recommended, uncritically discussed, and advertised. By page 5 of this issue you’re already reading a glowing review of a book titled Cancer is NOT a Disease – It’s a Survival Mechanism by Andreas Moritz. On the same page, Dr. Viera Scheibner is adamant that vaccines cause cancer via simian viruses (more on that topic later). The very next page informs us that an HIV cure developed by U.S. hematologist Gero Hutter is being ignored (even though, admittedly, his cure has only been tested on a single subject), and a page after that we learn of a “simple” MS cure discovered by Dr. Paolo Zamboni (while promising, his results are far from conclusive at this point).
The numerous health warnings are equally distressing:

• “Mammogram tests can cause breast cancer.” (p. 8)
• “Increasing scientific evidence for the existence of an infectious cancer-causing microbe emerged through the 20th century, but was routinely rejected by the medical establishment”. (p. 37) The hunt for cancer-causing microbes was the life mission of many scientists in the last century, notably Robert Gallo (the unacknowledged co-discoverer of the cause of AIDS). If any of these dogged scientists had actually found a human cancer virus, it would have been a red letter day for oncology, cancer research, and the pharmaceutical industry. But it never happened. No discoveries were suppressed. It just. Didn’t. Happen.

There’s also a heavy focus on alternate germ theories and outright rejection of germ theory. A lot of Nexus writers and readers are very enamored of some dude named Bechamp, the poor man’s Pasteur. He argued that pathogens are created by diseases and that all diseases originate in cell mutation; hence, germ theory is bunk.
Later on there’s a full-page ad for The Hidden Story of Cancer, and a feature article on something called “aerotoxic syndrome“. This might be a legit concern, but this article and others cited in the Wikipedia entry are wildly alarmist. Then there’s an ad (written by editor Roads himself, who actually misspells his own name) for a “therapeutic ionizer” that will increase your oxygen levels with negative ions to prevent most sicknesses, including travel diarrhea.

Maybe I should’ve bought a copy of Hello or Teen People instead of Nexus. They’re far more intelligent, and just as informative. Oh, and they won’t lead very many readers to preventable deaths.