Having some custom home finish skills from what seems now like a previous lifetime ago, a glorified painter, a master of a caulk gun, a glazer of windows, and an airless paint sprayer gunslinger, is an old skillset that has managed to stay with me. I get a phone call every once in a while for a job. I don’t advertise, I have plenty to keep up with already at home, but I will take a job now and then just to earn a little extra dough.

I had a job some time back, a huge house that the couple had saved up to build. It was their dream home, and it was massive. I was thrilled to be a part of helping someone achieve their dreams and I poured my soul into the work I did there. But… it should be known they are devout x-ians. Which isn’t so unusual in these parts, but that affliction often avails itself to other oddities.

The lower level of this house is 3000 sq ft, by itself. The upper level another 2000 sq ft or so, plus a large basement. When I got there the walls/ceilings had been painted, there was a coat of paint on the trim, but it was thin, so my job was to caulk it all up and put the finishing pizzaz to it. Well, I was there for a while. This is a big house and I’m working solo, they had 9 ft ceilings, 2 large staircases, a window transom over every major doorway, and more doors to do than I can remember, it took a while. So as it worked out I was there through the Thanksgiving holiday. They have a lot of family, who all came to visit, and I was privvy to some hair raising conversations.

I already knew they were hyper religious, which isn’t that unusal here, but I soon became aware the grandkids were all homeschooled. I was like “wow!” I didn’t know they were that religious. Now I know that home schooling isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but far too often it is because people want their kids to believe that the Flinstones was a documentary. They use materials from the likes of AIG to teach the kiddies that man coexisted with dinosaurs, and other nonsense such as a 6000 year old earth and how everything in the bible is 100% factual. How this B.S. is legal at all is beyond me, but it is a fine example of people living in some sort of an alternate reality.

Enter Essential Oils. The lady there was big into the essential oil thing, she is apparently one of the higher up distributors, as she goes to out of state meetings a lot, and seems well versed in essentail oil quackery. Quackery? I’m afraid so. The claims made by those distributing essential oils read like any other quack category as they claim to cure almost every malady known to science and they also rely on bashing modern medicine and appealing to the new age types by hyping it all as natural healing techniques long forgotten, and they do bemoan how they are unfairly dismissed by modern medicine. I won’t go into every claim made by the essential oil scam, it would be a long post on its own. I will leave a link or two though, and Google is your friend. There are some good links to follow from this fist link liste here:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/doterra-multilevel-marketing-of-essential-oils/

https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/aroma.html

A convesation I overheard at this residence, involved one of the family members talking about the prospect of putting their kids in a public school and they would have to present shot records or they would have to sign some waiver that excluded them from such a satanic activity. So we can add anti vaxxers to the list.

Which brings us to the crux of the problem. Crank Magnetism. Crank Magnetism is a term, and I quote from Wiki:  “coined by physiologist and blogger Mark Hoofnagle on the Denialism Blog in 2007 to describe the propensity of cranks to hold multiple irrational, unsupported or ludicrous beliefs that are often unrelated to one another…”

Essentially once you open yourself up to to believeing in one nonsensical claim, the reality is you may be predisposed to let other crank ideas reside in your head. Add to that the alternate reality propped up by the far right and its propaganda arm Fox News, and the sort of total morons who espouse their idiocies on the radio or youtube, such as Alex Jones/Rush Limbaugh, plus the fact we now have a president that totally believes in these alternate realities AND makes up his own, we are left facing, with a growing concern about a wholesale attack on fact based reality itself.

It seems to me that the idea is to promote so much of this kind of shit that it blurs the line between evidence based reality and the alternative reality they want to create. The problem is there are more than enough mouth breathing morons out there to support this nonsense. It is the zombie that never dies.

I’m going to go one step further and lay the blame of Crank Magnetism right at the feet of religion. Nothing, and I mean nothing, opens up the door to believing in complete nonsense as religion. It is the gateway drug to Crank Magnetism.

I saw it all in one house…

The only thing I can think of to combat this issue is ensuring a proper education for every child coming through the education system, and some sort of pushback from holders of a fact based reality. Which is pretty much the blogging community I know here, and the multitude of others like us out there in internet land. In other words, keep up the good work 🙂 We need it. Fact based reality needs it.