Good news from South Africa

Excellent news from South Africa (for a change).

See http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN351191.html
and http://www.tac.org.za/community/node/2348

The loathsome Matthias Rath and his colleague David Rasnick have been banned from conducting their ridicuous trials of vitamins on HIV positive patients and from advertising their worthless products. Instead perhaps the people of South Africa can gain access to the ARVs they so desperately need and deserve?

Curse update...

In the article below I challenged the amazing Lord Jaffa to curse me:

Give it your best, see if you can have some noticeable effect on me. Don’t try to bring about something generic like bad luck or a difficult week or killing me, make it something obvious and unlikely to happen by chance. Make me go bald. Turn my skin blue. Make all the flowers in my garden die overnight. If you have just a fraction of the powers you claim then any of those will be easy.

Bad news. I still have my hair, nothing's blue and my flowers are thriving!

Curse me if you dare - Botswana Guardian

Readers of local newspapers will perhaps have come across a strange advertisement from the so-called Lord Jaffa. His ad offers a range of paranormal services that can help us with our problems and he claims “no problem too big”. He offers “genuine talisman” (shouldn’t that be talismen?), occult books and can tell our fortunes. He can also teach us yoga, astral projection and “mystic science”. Wow, impressive, don’t you think?

For now I’m going to ignore the fact that fortune telling is ILLEGAL in Botswana. Someone else can tell him that.

Usually I think of all these psychic frauds as being rather old-fashioned and out of date but this guy has ventured into the information age and has his own web site and fascinating it is too. Take a look for yourself at www.lordjaffa.com. Go on, take a look and see if you can keep a straight face.

The web site explains how well-travelled and educated this crook is and his various memberships of august professional bodies such as the Associate Union of Mystics, the Universal School of Mysticism and the Illuminated Path Society. That last one isn’t very impressive, I’ve got one of those in my garden.

My reaction was a mixture of things. First was genuine amusement. How have I lived without his “Witchcraft Expeller Bath Mixture”, “Pow-Wow, Long Lust Good Luck Medicine” or his “Peaceful Home Oil” which offers protection from “Robbers and buglers”?

Then I got angry. Really very angry. Fuming, smoke coming out of the ears, swearing angry. This charlatan, this fraud, this crook offers a whole page of remedies to real medical problems. For R350 you get a cure for measles. For R500 you get his remedy for hypertension. For another R500 you get a malaria cure. For R550 you get “Kali Seeds” which apparently are “for treatment of cancer and prevention of cancer spread”. Near the end of the list is the scandalous, outrageous, criminal offer of a R750 treatment for AIDS.

I’ve said this before but if just one person stops taking their real medicine because of this man’s ridiculous products then he will have blood on his hands.

So I invite him to do two things. Firstly, Mr Jaffa, if you have genuinely scientific evidence that your products work, you think it is legal to market them in Botswana and you think that my comments are unreasonable then sue me for defamation. The Guardian will give you my contact details.

Secondly, if you really have the powers you claim then curse me. Give it your best, see if you can have some noticeable effect on me. Don’t try to bring about something generic like bad luck or a difficult week or killing me, make it something obvious and unlikely to happen by chance. Make me go bald. Turn my skin blue. Make all the flowers in my garden die overnight. If you have just a fraction of the powers you claim then any of those will be easy.

Of course if you can’t, we can just assume that you are what we all think you are.