I recently found the following website: American Patriot News. If you can see past the amateurish HTML coding, horrendously bad spelling, poor grammar, and egregious typos, you’ll see it’s practically one-stop shopping for any sort of conspiracy theory or quack science you can think of. Jesse Ventura, Alex Jones, anti-vaxers, Obama-is-Kenyan, the HAARP program, 9/11 truthers, FEMA concentration camps, and the nuttiest ideas about fluoridated water I’ve seen since Dr. Strangelove. It’s all here. If I could advise the guy who runs this site, I’d tell him he’d have a stronger brand if he focused on just one or two of these crackpot agendas and left the rest for someone else. I’d also tell him they’ve made some great innovations in website design in the past 15 years or so (I wouldn’t have guessed the < BLINK > tag even still worked).
If you’ve followed that link, you know it resolves to a page on this domain, which belongs to Joel Quinn, a massage therapist in the Atlanta suburb of Doraville. The statue of Thomas Jefferson Quinn poses with in a photo at that site is on the square in Decatur, a neighboring Atlanta suburb (and the one in which I live).
I’ve found, generally, that massage therapists are prone to accepting many unsubstantiated or downright false alternative medicine concepts, like reflexology, homeopathy, chiropractic, therapeutic touch, and acupuncture. I’m not sure why credulity seems to go with the profession. Massage therapists provide genuine comfort to people without overstating their effectiveness (unlike chiropractic “medicine”). They do themselves a disservice by associating with quacks.
That’s a subject for another post. The reason I’m sharing this website is because of how I learned about it. One day recently I found this card taped to the door of my mailbox:
Taped to the door of my mailbox! Imagine the passion behind that! Over half a million people live in DeKalb County, which includes both Doraville and Decatur. Mr. Quinn could have driven around with flyers or cards promoting his massage therapy business, taping them to mailboxes in every neighborhood he drove through and probably getting at least several new clients.
Instead he chose to spend his time disseminating these, which say nothing about his massage therapy practice while taking him away from his paying clients. Is he making money off the website? I doubt it. He must really be a true believer. I guess I respect that, at least. I can’t see myself ever using similar measures to promote the Skeptic Ink Network, or anything else I feel strongly about.
Can any of you?
