What you may have is an awkward imbalance of a close personal relationship and an ideological divide. This situation gets thrown on me all the time, when I meet someone, or someone introduces me and has told them what I do, I’ll sometimes get “Oh, you’re that cynical person I’ve heard about.” This is, of course, both wrong and insulting. I’ve gotten this so many times that I’ve learned to just swallow it. But nevertheless, the awkward divide exists, and the best way to handle an awkward situation is to openly acknowledge it.
The wording here is to difficult to get right, but at an opportune moment, you might want to say something like “Hey, I know you’re really into your thing, you know I’m really into consumer protection, so we have a disagreement. If you ever want to talk about it, I’m happy to; but I don’t want it to be a problem, and I’m fine with just acknowledging we have a disagreement and leaving it at that.” The wording that’s hard is declaring your own position. Consumer protection, critical thinking, things that are proven; you want to make your point but you don’t want to choose weasel words that sound insulting.
From that point, you can follow the Do Nothing strategy and introduce articles that you know you’ll both appreciate. This method just fast tracks it somewhat, in that the door is wide open to discuss your friend’s particular sacred cow at any time. But unless there’s an imminent risk of harm, I tend to always let the friend bring it up, and I never try to drive the wedge or create a conflict myself.
It’s perhaps ironic that those of us who want to provide actual help, instead of magical or imaginary help, are usually considered the bad guys, and we’re the ones who have to tread lightly. But that’s the reality of the situation, and we should take extra care to insure that our influence is a positive one.
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Ainsworth, P. Understanding Depression. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. 117-120.
Bowen, D., Strickler, S. A Good Friend For Bad Times. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004. 34-67.
Driscoll, W., Kempf, D., Broda-Bahm, K. Argument and Audience: Presenting Debates in Public Settings. Westborough: IDEA, 2004. 185-186.
Golanty, E., Edlin, G. Health and Wellness. Sudbury: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2007. 71-73.
Hammer, E., Dunn, D., Weiten, W. Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century. Florence: Cengage Learning, 2008. 250-251.
Johnson Institute. Training Families To Do a Successful Intervention. Minneapolis: Johnson Institute-QVS, Inc., 1996. 14-42.
Ketcham, K. Teens Under the Influence: The Truth About Kids, Alcohol, and Other Drugs. New York: Random House, Inc., 2008. 17-19.
10. MARTIAL ARTS MAGIC
Some call it Bullshido: Martial arts tricks like touchless attacks and the Touch of Death.
In dojos all around the world, martial arts masters practice mysterious forms of attack. They can kill or render an attacker unconscious with a single touch, or sometimes, with no touch at all. The dim mak and kyusho jitsu are just some of the secret techniques reserved only for the masters, that are jealously guarded, and will not be taught to just anyone. Some call these techniques bullshido.
Bullshido is, obviously, a joke term which mocks made-up or exaggerated martial arts claims. Bullshido comes in many forms. The touch of death and the knockout without touching are just a few of the most popular, originally made famous by the stories telling this is how Bruce Lee was killed (in fact he died of cerebral edema after a dinner party, possibly due to a drug interaction). Bullshido also encompasses newly invented martial arts techniques by self-described masters who market themselves as the founders; schools claiming to be too exclusive to let just anyone in (sometimes called McDojos); and claims by instructors of having been taught by various great masters, the missing documentation of which is sometimes explained as being sacred or hidden away in a remote Asian temple.
The many various forms of bullshido have long been criticized by legitimate martial arts practitioners, and dismissed merely as marketing claims intended to attract students to a particular school where one of these supposed masters teaches. Bullshido practitioners shoot back that such naysayers are merely crying sour grapes because they have not yet learned the secret techniques, or achieved the special level.
The most famous of example of bullshido, which you’ve no doubt seen several times over the past couple of years, involves instructors who claim to have developed a technique of rendering an attacker senseless without actually touching him. The volunteer attackers are always the instructor’s students in these videos. They’ll charge at him one after the other, and as he punches or swipes at the air, they’ll often dramatically fly back as if struck by a train. Every time an outsider volunteers to receive the touchless attack, the instructor either fails with some excuse, or refuses on the grounds that it would be too dangerous.
Harry Cameron is a martial arts instructor who goes by the moniker “The Human Stun Gun”. Danielle Serino, a reporter on Fox Chicago’s prime time news, decided to check out his claim on her segment Does It Work, Danielle? She watched him knock out some of his students by, basically, what amounted to little more than going up to them and shouting Boo! Danielle got suited up and volunteered to have the Human Stun Gun knock her out without touching her. He refused, saying it would be too dangerous for her, even though she went to the trouble and expense of having a team of paramedics standing by. However he was willing to actually punch her on the side of the head. Even that didn’t have any real effect except to tick her off.
Danielle decided to give him the opportunity to prove his ability on someone he wouldn’t be afraid of hurting, namely, a group of jiu-jitsu athletes from another gym who were not his students. His touchless attacks had no effect on any of them. Predictably, he had an explanation handy: Natural athletes like these students learn to “translate the energy” and are not affected by it. I guess Cameron’s own students are not as enlightened. One red flag waving over Cameron’s head is that he says he was instructed by George Dillman, often cited as one of the great pillars of bullshido.
There’s also a famous YouTube video you may have seen where an elderly martial arts master, Kiai Master Ryukerin, does the same thing to a room full of his students, easily sending them all tumbling with waves of his hand. He offered $5000 to any modern Mixed Martial Arts athlete who could beat him. One guy took him up on it, and in front of Japanese TV cameras, casually beat the poor old guy to a pulp. It’s actually a little sad, and hard to watch. Did Ryukerin actually believe that he had this power? Was it a mass delusion shared between him and his students, or was it all part of the show, and Ryukerin hoped that his actual martial arts skills would defeat the MMA guy? The only thing we know for sure is that his touchless attack failed.
But history, especially recent history, is full of people who claim to have this ability, and are happy to demonstrate it so long as the conditions are under their own control. A Russian martial art called Systema SpetsNaz claims the same touchless knockout, as do most others. An American who called himself Count Dante was one of the prototypical bullshido practitioners, and spawned an entire subculture through ads in the back of comic books offering the “World’s Deadliest Fighting Secrets”.
The touchless attack is universally claimed to work by disrupting the victim’s qi. Qi is a hypothetical energy field, the body’s life force, which flows through hypothetical channels called meridians and was first postulated in prescientific ancient times to explain why people are alive and inanimate objects are not. Qi has no describable or detectable properties, and the only evidence that it might exist is the anecdotal claims of believers who say they can sense it. Yet even they cannot describe it, and cannot detect it under controlled conditions. So while we can’t state that qi does not exist, we can state that its existence has not been demonstrated.
So if we can’t prove that a touchless attack is real, what about the dim mak, the so-called “touch of death”? There are two varieties of this. The first is a sin
gle sharp blow, and the second is a simple touch or series of touches, as often dramatized in movies.
The single sharp blow is well established to be real, and I’m not even talking about things like a piano falling on you. People can absolutely be killed with a single blow. It’s rare and it requires just the right circumstances, but it happens. One way is commotio cordis, which is a blunt force blow to the chest, which need not be severe enough to cause any physiological damage; but if it happens just right it can stop the heart. It’s usually seen with baseballs, hockey pucks, bullet strikes to bulletproof vests, or even martial arts blows. No bullshido here: Punch someone in the heart just right and you can actually kill them.
The carotid artery in your neck is another vulnerable spot, but it requires damage to the artery that causes a stroke. There are many hoax videos on the Internet showing a master knocking out a student with a quick, light chop to the side of the neck. These are sometimes rationalized with the claim that even such an extremely brief interruption to the blood flow to the brain produces unconsciousness. This is false. If it were true, you could do it to yourself. Due to the potential for lethal damage to the artery walls, I don’t recommend experimentation.
In boxing they speak of punching someone on the temple as “the button”: Hit someone just so, on the button, for an immediate knockout. This is simply a concussion caused by a sudden shock to the head, crushing the brain against the inside of the skull. Contrary to popular belief, the temple is no better or worse a target for concussion than any other point on the skull (except the jaw, which can move and thus absorbs part of the energy of the blow). Aside from concussion, the temple is a dangerous place to be struck, but not because there are any special nerves there. The skull at that point is quite thin and fragile, and right under it is the middle meningeal artery. If it’s ruptured, the hemorrhaging is very dangerous, and quite likely fatal. No touch or blow to the temple that does not break the skull or cause a concussion is likely to be especially harmful.
The ability to disable, paralyze, kill, or render a person unconscious with touches or a series of touches to special nerve points on the body, often referred to as acupuncture or acupressure points, is also completely fictitious. Nerves do not serve this function. As has been proven time and time again in clinical trials, acupuncture using traditional acupuncture points produces results no better than random points on the body. By any reasonable analysis, this means acupuncture points, as they are traditionally defined, do not exist. There is nothing special or unusual about the nerves or other anatomical features at socalled acupuncture points, and no clinical effect can be demonstrated by using them. Thus, by extension, any martial arts attack that claims acupuncture points as its foundation is based on a false premise.
There are certainly spots on the human body that are vulnerable to injury or that produce sharp pain if struck. The family jewels are one obvious such place. The nose is another. There are various techniques for damaging knee or elbow ligaments with relatively little effort. Various spots on the body produce involuntary reflexes if struck properly, making it possible to force the victim to release a grip or move their body in a certain way. But there’s nothing magical about any of these, and they don’t depend on the existence of a magical energy field. Nearly all martial arts call such places on the body as these “pressure points”. But many martial arts expand the use of this term to include mythical points along qi meridians. So while some pressure points are real, others are hypothetical. An experienced bullshido practitioner can certainly give me a series of light blows, even touches, and probably leave me in great pain, possibly even disabled to some degree. He’s going to have to actually injure me to do so. What he can’t do in reality is what you see in the YouTube videos with his students: Make a series of touches where each, individually, produces no injury; but in conjunction they constitute a disabling attack through manipulation of qi. This is the heart of bullshido.
Understand and appreciate what martial arts really are and what they can really do. There is science behind why it works; unfortunately it’s the prescientific pseudoscientific explanations that are most often repeated. Be aware that martial arts’ ancient traditions make them rife with pseudoscience; a fact that continues to be exploited by con artists and clever marketers looking to separate you from your money.
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Brett, K. The Way of the Martial Artist. Stafford: Donohue Group, Inc., 2008. 75-76.
Gengenbach, M., Hyde, T. Conservative Management of Sports Injuries. Sudbury: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2007. 313-316.
Kelly, M. “Fact or Fiction: Medical Science Examines Dim Mak and its Infamous Death Touch.” Black Belt. 21 Sep. 2002, Volume 40, Number 9: 79-82.
Maron, B., Gohman, T., Kyle, S., Estes M., Link, M. “Clinical Profile and Spectrum of Commotio Cordis.” Journal of the American Medical Association. 6 Mar. 2002, Volume 287, Number 9: 1142-1146.
Serino, Danielle. “‘The Human Stun Gun’ Investigation.” WFLD. Fox Television Stations, Inc., 4 Mar. 2006. Web. 19 Jan. 2010.
Thomas, T. Bruce Lee, Fighting Spirit: A Biography. San Antonio: Frog Books, 1994. 224-225.
Thompson, P. Exercise and Sports Cardiology. New York: McGraw-Hill Professional, 2001. 249-252.
11. THE BELL ISLAND BOOM
Was the cause of this shattering boom in Newfoundland natural, or a test of a superweapon?
In this chapter, we’re going to go back in time about a third of a century to 1978, when something strange happened on remote Bell Island in Newfoundland. It was a quiet community, some fishermen and scattered families on small farms and in a smattering of hamlets. It was the last place on Earth you’d expect to be rocked by a sudden, shattering explosion. But it wasn’t just an explosion. On what should have been a sleepy Sunday morning, electrical appliances on the island burst apart. Animals fell over dead. Buildings were rent asunder. Though the explosion was the loudest anyone there had ever heard, it seemed to have no precise epicenter. To this day, the cause remains unknown, but hypotheses and conspiracy theories abound. The Bell Island Boom has become, to some people, proof of government tests of secret superweapons.
Newfoundland is a large island off the east coast of Canada, and within Conception Bay at its eastern end is Bell Island. It’s a pretty small island, only about 9 kilometers long and 3 kilometers wide. The significant part of its history began in the 1890’s when rich iron deposits were discovered and mining began. Tiny Bell Island actually became one of the world’s major producers of iron ore, and even saw action in World War II when it was attacked by a German submarine. The mine prospered until the 1960’s when pressure from cheaper competition finally forced a closure. Bell Island is low lying with its highest point only a hair above 100 meters, so its deep mines were almost entirely below sea level, requiring constant pumping to keep the water out. So while it was productive, it was always expensive and dangerous. Since the mines closed, they have been filled with water. The island is now laced with tunnels and entrances and passages that lead to underground lakes marking the top of the water table. It’s now a site of interest to cave diving adventurers.
Bell Island
With its mine closed and its small economy in shambles, the communities on Bell Island had been largely emptied out for more than a decade when the Bell Island Boom struck on Sunday, April 2, 1978. Without warning, a sudden BANG rocked the island, like a giant electric shock. By some reports, it was heard as far as 100 kilometers away. There was extensive damage to electrical wiring. One property, that of the Bickford family, reported physical damage to their buildings. There were holes in the roof; their television set and fuse boxes actually exploded; and the roof of their chicken coop was destroyed and five chickens inside were killed. Near the shed were two or three holes in the snow that looked like some buried explosives had gone off. Digging in these holes found nothing of interest.
And then the strangest of the stories began tri
ckling in. The Bickford’s young grandson reported a hovering ball of light after the blast. One woman on Newfoundland reported a beam of light slanting up into the sky from Bell Island. And several people on the island said they heard a ringing, like a tone, just before the boom struck.
A 2004 documentary film called The Invisible Machine postulated that the Bell Island Boom was a test of an electromagnetic pulse weapon. This particular theory was deeply flawed, and depended upon a hypothesized beam weapon being attracted to the iron ore from Bell Island’s old mines. These filmmakers were apparently pretty confused to think that natural iron ore is a terrifically powerful magnet, which of course it’s not. Although iron is magnetic and can be magnetized, natural iron ore has its molecules jumbled in every direction and rarely happens to have a significant magnetic field, certainly not strong enough to divert or attract a particle beam.
Fueling the fires of conspiracy theories about weapons testing was the mysterious presence of John Warren and Robert Freyman from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (then called the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) in New Mexico, who happened to show up right after the boom struck. To many, this was confirmation enough that the Bell Island Boom was indeed a weapons test.
But to understand what the boom really was, we first have to understand the context in which it took place. For about four months before the boom struck, the entire eastern seaboard had been plagued by a series of unexplained booms. Beginning in late 1977 and fading out in mid 1978, some 600 of these socalled “Mystery Booms” left reporters and the public scratching their heads from South Carolina up to Canada. The same conspiracy theories surrounding the Bell Island Boom had been proposed to explain the Mystery Booms. Everything from tests of some kind of superweapon by the United States or the Soviet Union, to an atmospheric doomsday device inspired by Nikola Tesla, or even a massive nuclear device like Convair’s proposed Sky Scorcher.
Skeptoid 4: Astronauts, Aliens, and Ape-Men Page 7