You may remember how, almost in passing as part of a longer post, I mentioned how much cranks can't stand critics of theirs who write under a pseudonym and try to out them at every opportunity. Indeed, one of the biggest cranks of all, J.B. Handley, the man whose mantra used to be that autism is nothing more than a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning but who is now backpedaling furiously to blame "live viruses" and "toxic loads," tried to do just that the other day in the comments of this post (as if I'd let that happen on my own blog).
Not all outing is always bad. Kevin Leitch, in fact, has done a little outing of his own while discussing the recent makeover of the Generation Rescue website. In this case, Kev "outs" one Clarence House, and it looks as though ol' J.B. has been royally punk'd.
I suppose I could just look at this as karmic payback for J.B.'s cybersquatting the oracknows.com domain. I'll have to thank Kev--and Clarence, too.
I'd be surprised if any other of the "testimonials" are completely fake, but it wouldn't surprise me at all for these reports to be full of unintentional euphemisms described by parents wearing rose-colored glasses. All parents do this to a certain extent, to not do that would seem a bit detached or sterile imo.
Having said that, the site, created by people dedicated to litigation and supporting certain woo salesmen, is being used to disseminate "information" to potential clients of the lawyers and bathtub chemists. That is a problem.
Orac:
Turnabout is definitely fair play, I'm game.
I think Kevin's point is that children improve without biomedical intervention.
If you go to our site, you can see Kevin's testimonial and decide for yourself, see Megan under Aged 6.
Bartholomew, what you state is simple untrue. As the parent of an autistic child yourself, I have no problem with you disagreeing with our POV. But, you can't possibly think your position has any truth behind it. Let me be more specific:
You wrote:
"created by people dedicated to litigation"
I say:
The site was created by two people, my wife and I. Can you cite a single example of our dedication to litigation? We are not vaccine litigants, nor have we ever been. And, we have never filed a lawsuit anywhere on anything related to autism. Why do you feel the need to misrepresent our motivations?
You write:
"being used to disseminate "information" to potential clients of the lawyers and bathtub chemists"
I say:
What in the world are you talking about? What lawyers? How are we doing that? Do you have any evidence? I'm here to categoriacally deny that your characterizations of the motivations of our site are 100% false and I encourage you to put forth your evidence to make such claims.
While I am not a fan of litigation and have no plans to do so here, I thought this definition may help you in considering how you write about us in the future:
"In law, defamation is the communication of a statement that makes a false claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may harm the reputation of an individual, business, product, group, government or nation. Most jurisdictions allow legal actions, civil and/or criminal, to deter various kinds of defamation and retaliate against criticism."
JB Handley
Generation Rescue
JB Handley
"...that may harm the reputation of an individual, business, product, group, government or nation."
JB, in order for Bart's comments to become actionable, you need demonstrate that his comments harmed you. Frankly, they sounded like a character upgrade to me. You should thank him.
I see websites as being viewed as some sort of an online community by a lot of people; a place where you can get in contact with people, people like rescue angels. If rescue angels are litigants and actively promote the website, some might conclude that looks like an online community made by litigants to some degree.
Wow Mr. Handley, Bart was being so nice to you and you respond by threatening to sue him? Bart coulda called you a name like weasel or fool. I don't think those would be actionable either because they are true. Your little website supports those who are trying to sue and saying had their kid not been vaxxed with a vaccine containing thimerasol their kid would be OK. The litiganst love you and your site. The quack medicos love you and your site. Reasonable people think you are a jerk and a fool. Have you tried craniosacral therpy on your son yet. I hear it has cured thousands of autistic kids.
Chill out, Handley, your drawers are showing.
Maybe you ought to do a telephone interview and get some "hard numbers" of GR fans that are involved with the Omnibus, that are Amy's yeast extract consumers, Gary's yeast extract consumers, Bradsweet's exorcisms and silver seal pills, Butter's urine injections and stink lotion, megadoses of magnesium and vits E and A. Need one go on?
John Best is a litigant and he's part of your organization as a Rescue Angel for the state of New Hampshire, as noted on your site. That will start for your challenge to "cite a single example of our dedication to litigation".
I guess your problem is that people can actually see through your games. It must burn that people have actually listened to what you've said and yet shake their head incredulously as they walk away.
Just try and live up to some basal code of character: admit that autism does not equal mercury poisoning. Admit that every freaking point that you've spewed out about autism being a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning is complete bullshit. You do that and I promise not to make fun the next time you chelate Best prior to attempting to impregnate him.
Heraldblog: no doubt, I thought I was going to be labeled a Handleyphile for my original comment about most of his testimonials probably not being fake.
anon - thanks for emailing me about Handley's rant.
Handley Fan, The website supports sane parents who are trying to help children. Litigation that some people may rightly be involved with is a separate matter. Reasonable people think that those who try to get in the way of helping poisoned children are jackasses. The site provides information that helps parents rectify the malpractice of quacks who injected babies with mercury without knowing how much mercury they were shooting into those babies.
"The site was created by two people, my wife and I. Can you cite a single example of our dedication to litigation? We are not vaccine litigants, nor have we ever been."
Fine, Handley, fine. Then remove all "Rescue Angels" who are involved in litigation from your site now.
Outing is one of the major resources of the scoundrels who lack facts to back up their claims. It reeks right up there with conspiracies and phony medical scams.
Let's face it...HANDLEy cannot HANDLE facts.
Actually it seems to me that Kev may have gotten punked.
Actually it seems to me that Kev may have gotten punked.
I really need to get around to doing a Doggerel entry on "mercury" and "toxins" sometime.
1. Everything is poisonous. It's a matter of dose. The dose of thimerosal in vaccines is not dangerous, and the fact that the removal of thimerosal hasn't caused a massive decrease, or even, to my knowledge, a slight kink in autism numbers adds to that.
2. Thimerosal is not mercury, for the same reason water is not explosive hydrogen gas and table salt is not the green poisonous gas chlorine. Take 6th grade physical science and/or stop spin doctoring.
3. What alchemical process could thimerosal possibly do to cause autism, and how would chelating undo it? I would think that would require a catalytic reaction of some kind, instead of the standard one-way. Until someone comes up with a viable hypothesis (and preferably stick to it for more than a week), it's pretty much sorcery to me.
4. Even if you don't understand how it works, surely someone must have the numbers to show that something is going on, and so far I haven't seen it: Just sloppily gathered and cherry-picked anecdotes.
JB wrote
I'm here to categoriacally deny that your characterizations of the motivations of our site are 100% false.
So you deny that BC's claims are false? In other words you agree with BC? I think that you should categoriacally(sic) get yourself a meaning checker as well as a spell checker.
Did John Bestard just misspell his own name? Well it is a rather complicated word and they did go and put the A right next to the S.
If they uncritically post "testimonials" from vaccine ligitants (as they apparrently posted Kev's testimonial), then they are allowing the site to be produced by vaccine ligitants.
If they uncritically post "testimonials" from vaccine ligitants (as they apparrently posted Kev's testimonial), then they are allowing the site to be produced by vaccine ligitants.
If they uncritically post "testimonials" from vaccine ligitants (as they apparrently posted Kev's testimonial), then they are allowing the site to be produced by vaccine ligitants.
sorry for the multiple posts, for some reason it didn't seem to be taking them so I tried and tried again.
How did Kevin Leitch get punk'd common one?
The website supports sane parents who are trying to help children.
For centuries, perfectly sane people thought the best way to treat diseases was to bleed the aflicted individual. It was supposed to get the bad stuff out of their system. Sounds like needless chelation. Not much more successful, either.
The website supports sane parents who are trying to help children. Sane, yes, but ignorant through no fault of their own; and driven by desperation and the comfort of 'certainty' to fall in line behind unsubstantiated paranoid quackery.
Generation Rescue and DAN! have yet to define a neuropathological defect common to all autistic children, nor a mechanism by which thimerosal-bound (or any other form of) mercury would cause such a defect (and only such a defect), nor a mechanism by which chelation of heavy metals would repair the defect (dead neurons are dead neurons; pulling mercury out of them will not resurrect them). Unless they would like to propose a mechanism whereby thimerosal or mercury complexes interfere with synaptic transmission, perhaps; in which case the onus is on them to come up with an experiment to test this hypothesis.
I think (based on her comments elsewhere) that Sue believes Brad's posting of my early blog posts on his site constitutes being punk'd. Not sure how being as I encouraged him to do this very thing in late 2005. If I'm wrong I'm sure Sue will clarify.
"I think Kevin's point is that children improve without biomedical intervention."
Yes and no. As I clearly stated in 'Clarences' testimonial, we do use biomedical interventions and always have. These have definitely made a differences to Megan's health.
What getting that testimonial on your site showed was:
1) All kids 'improve', or to put it another way - develop.
2) Biomedical intervention doesn't intervene in terms of curing/reversing autism
3) You're really desperate for testimonials. Despite your claims to me of thousands of recovered kids, the testimonials on your own site detail that between 5 -7% of them actually lose their diagnosis. This is not much higher than could be expected by what Bernard Rimland called 'spontaneous recovery' and certainly very much less higher than the claimed rates for either ABA or Son-Rise.
So how many rescue dangels are vaccine litigants anyway?
I have not like Generation Rescue for a long time. "...that may harm the reputation of an individual, business, product, group, government or nation." it works both ways. Where was that Generation rescue Angel when the 5 year old boy died in PA due to chelating? That's where malpractice comes into play. You can be sued if you're advising to parents on a medical bases and have no medical back ground in order to legally do this. I can see where this would interfere more so with Generation Rescue than any comments said here.