ASA smackdown on homeopathy advertising

In an adjudication published today, the Advertising Standards Authority(ASA) effectively killed all advertising on homeopathy. This statement from the adjudication pretty much covers it:

We told the Society of Homeopaths not to discourage essential treatment for conditions for which medical supervision should be sought, including offering specific advice on or treatment for such conditions. We also told them not to make health claims for homeopathy unless they held sufficiently robust evidence of efficacy.

This has come about, in part, by a campaign led by the Nightingale Collaboration that encouraged supporters to submit ASA complaints about claims made on homeopathy websites. Briefly, the ASA sent letters to homeopaths offering guidance on advertising homeopathy service. They also decided to investigate further two 'master' complaints in order to precedent for future cases. These are the two adjudications published today.

What this now means is that homeopath's must live up to their responsibilities and abide by the CAP Code, ASA Guidances and rulings. And they must stop claiming that homeopathy is effective for any medical condition.

It's worth noting that nothing here prevents anyone from practicing or earning a living from homeopathy; nothing prevents anyone from buying homeopathic 'remedies' if that's what they want to do. It is only about ensuring that homeopath's abide by the same rules that all other advertisers must do.

It Always Comes Back To Lobster.

Apparently, the US government doesn't know how many federal laws exist.

For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.
If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

I Am Calling You From Windows

I've been sort of waiting for a call like I received yesterday. I've heard about them, and even know a few people who've been taken in by them, but until now I've never experienced them myself. And whilst I would have loved the opportunity to bait the caller a little, I was supposed to be working from home and couldn't give them as much time as I would've liked.

The call was from a woman with an Indian (Asian?) accent telling me that she was calling from Windows about a lot of 'Critical Errors' they were seeing on their server from my computer. Right away it's clearly a scam - an unknown company is seeing errors on my computer how? And which computer? On my network there could be up to 20 devices connected at any time, about 6 of these are what would be commonly referred to as 'computers'. So despite the huge temptation, I only asked them which windows they were talking about, double- or single- glazed and then proceeded to inform them that they couldn't be seeing any windows errors as my computer didn't use Windows.

The modus operandi of these scammers, is to get you to fire up the Windows Event Log viewer (where there will be a number of errors, but mostly normal under every day running of a Windows PC), prove to you that you can't delete this error (hmm, it's a log file) and then inform you that they are caused by un-deletable viruses which only they can remove. They'll use a remote-control service such as TeamViewer and get you to give them control of your PC. And, of course, they're not doing this for free.

Will We Ever Learn?

This kind of sums it up for me.  It's both beautiful and horrific at the same time, but most definitely worth a read. Here is just a taster...

I know what it is like to lose someone you love, and it's a pain so great that I can't imagine reaching out to cause that pain in anyone else; what killers must do is blind themselves to the enormity of their act and wall themselves off from the empathy that all human beings should have. They also must bury that portion of their mind that can sympathize with their victims in an avalanche of pretexts, these excuses that later apologists will call "nuance", or "shades of gray", or "complications". And they will dredge up the familiar roll call of empty ghosts to water down the evil of what is done. They will call it God. Country. Honor. Justice. Revenge. The priests and the mullahs and the politicians and the generals are experts at softening the contrast and blurring the edges and persuading one person that that other person over there, so much like you in every way that matters, deserves to have everything important extinguished and brutalized and disregarded.