The Good, The Bad, The Spin

Think that throwing money and resources at a problem is helpful?

Think again.

This book shows, in an uncompromising way, how people with the best of intentions to help others end up doing more harm than good. Specifically, Maren takes his first-hand experience, the anecdotes of others and the words and records of the organizations he criticizes, to show how international charity, aid organizations and the United Nations are less set up to help poor people than they are to further their own bureaucracies.

As an aid worker himself and later a correspondent, Maren examines 19 years of foreign aid in Kenya, Burkina, Faso, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, Ethiopia and the U.S., to show how foreign aid did far from improving situations in these countries; instead, these organizations made things worse, far worse.

Aid organizations, Maren concludes, end up epitomizing ethnocentric colonialism at the expense of the poor people they allege to help. Maren’s unforgiving research paints a picture the commercials of Sally Struthers are incapable of and stridently resistant to telling. Humanitarian intervention, as Maren pens it, is a destructive force preying on the guilt of those who appear to be better off — middle class, American consumers.

As Maren convincingly shows, however, the road to hell is paved with the illusions of modern civilization. The overt victims are evident while the less-obvious victims remain naïve and in denial. With any luck, The Road to Hell will change that.

[NOTE: This was originally published in 2001.]

Cynthia Eller wields a cunning scythe. Bit by bit, she hacks away at the roots of goddess-oriented philosophy to reveal a landscape fraught with fantasy, imagination and gobbledygook. Gender studies has a new era upon it, one that must, if taken seriously, heed Eller’s accounting of the rise, and, should her book have any impact, demise of this seductive, female-dominated view of prehistory.

The goddess myth obviously serves a purpose. In the evolving social consciousness of civilized culture, portrayal of women in general leaves much to be desired. Simply, the female gender is clearly richer in different ways than men are, and women, because they biologically put their lives at risk in the reproductive process have a deeper kind of burden in serving life. But mainstream portrayals of women tend to disavow this organic aspect to femininity in favor of basically relegating them to being lesser than men. Patriarchy, in other words, is alive and well.

So the matriarchal projection into the prehistoric past is a perhaps all-too convenient redress for current grievances, Eller says, and thus, she takes to task the literature purporting a matriarchal dominated prehistory. New age fluff writers, archaeologists and anthropologists are treated to her critique, namely Marija Gimbutas, who dressed in different hats as both archaeologist and purveyor of distorted interpretations of the prehistoric past. Not surprisingly, according to Eller, the academic community never really took her seriously, not even enough to critique her work. (more…)

By Harriet Hall, MD

Reprinted from this week’s eSkeptic.

Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam, by Pope Brock, is not only a rip-roaring good read, but it brings up serious issues about regulation of medical practice and prosecution of quackery. It tells the story of John R. Brinkley MD, who transplanted goat glands into people, and of Morris Fishbein MD, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who tried to stop him.

An impotent patient supposedly told Brinkley, “Too bad I don’t have goat nuts.” So Brinkley gave him some.

The Charlatan

Brinkley was a colorful character whose very first job was a scam, selling a patent remedy. He went to medical school but never finished, eventually buying a diploma elsewhere for $100. A bigamist, drunkard, liar, and con man of incredible audacity, he built up an empire of quackery that made him filthy rich. Apart from his medical adventures, he practically invented modern political campaigning techniques, revolutionized advertising, and was almost single-handedly responsible for popularizing country music and the blues with his radio station. (more…)