I think he's just trying to look quizzical. I selected that photo from the JREF site because I assume it's what he looks like now - time's wingèd chariot etc.
Note added 15 Oct 2013: A bit of searching reveals, or states, that Zwinge obtained a passport, apparently illegally, for someone called Alvarez, described as 'an artist', and Zwinge's "companion" for years. Possibly the pained expression in the photo related to painful rectal sex; who knows. Also impressive amounts of money have been channeled to and through this 'foundation'. It would be interesting to know how much of this was paid by (for example) medical and drug companies shoring up bogus research, for example in vaccination. It seems likely he's out-frauded the frauds.
|
He has quite a bit in common with
Martin Gardner, notably the professional-level magic and dislike of things like spiritualism. Gardner's 1957 book
Fads and Fallacies has a chapter on Joseph Rhine and ESP and 'parapsychology'. Gardner's math material is hard to judge - Gardner (who had a degree in philosophy) contributed a lot of fascinating-looking math articles to
Scientific American, which of course was a heavily-censored publication - try to find anything on US weapons and war crimes, for example. However Gardner was a reporter, and no doubt the various people wanted publicity—it's hard to know how much original work Gardner put in.
However Gardner certainly prefigured the US 'Skeptic' movement very faithfully.
Fads and Fallacies was a repackaged version of a badly-titled 1952 book. In it, 'Apologists for Hate' (on 'crackpot theories of race') was one chapter title—it doesn't really fit in with his other chapters; Gardner is adamant, without evidence, that modern science has proved there are no racial differences—obviously not true. Gardner writes nothing whatever rationalistic about Judaism. On the other hand there isn't much critical of Christianity - presumably as Jews got more control of the USA they cranked that up later. And there's nothing on weapons and the 'Cold War', except a hope that scientifically skilled Americans will outweapon the horrible 'Soviets'. And of course nothing on science frauds, apart from Lysenko, safely behind the Iron Curtain of course; to be fair, the expansion of these was largely to be in the future. [Note added 12 July 2017: I've seen Miles Mathis state Lysenko was a Jew. It's perfectly possible his wrong genetic theories were
intended to damage the wheat harvest in the USSR, to help kill off whites] And nothing on monetary critics, either! Like Dawkins, Gardner simply assumes that views attributed to Einstein must be correct, despite their internal incoherencies and inconsistencies. This must be related to belief in nuclear weapons. It's not credible to me that Gardner (or Dawkins, or Randi, etc) can have detailed views on the speed of light, or whether curved space-time is meaningful, or the derivation of e=mc squared.
What Gardner does have is a large collection of crank material - one of the striking things about US affluence is the vast expansion of new 'religions', money-making cults, publications, small businesses, snake oil types and so on, aimed at a dumbed-down populace. (Quite a few of these people seem to have been engineers, for some reason). His chapter on UFOs, which were new then - mass flight itself was newish - does not much more than say Air Force officials say they don't exist. Gardner's medical views are entirely mainstream; his relatively long chapters go for homeopathy
[Note added Oct 2016 - it occurs to me that Samuel Hahnemann may have been yet another Jewish or Jew-funded fraud -rerev], and osteopathy and chiropractors, and things like naturopathy and iridiagnosis, but, again, to be fair, the great days of fake biology were ahead of him. Gardner was quite skilled in writing deadpan dismissive journalistic descriptions of people he wasn't keen on, picking out some irrelevant unflattering detail, though he also has some relatively detailed accounts of e.g. Wilhelm Reich and L Ron Hubbard and others still alive in about 1950. Gardner never updated his book past his 2nd, 1957, edition, which added Bridey Murphy, a newspaper-promoted fake past-life scam.
Virtually all Gardner's material is still part of the self-limited stock-in-trade of the professional 'Skeptics' of the USA.
In 1981 Prometheus Books (a 'Skeptic' imprint) published
Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus. In Britain it was reprinted by Oxford University Press. It's a collection of essays and book reviews. However, the title is misleading - the collection deals with such people as Uri Geller and Conan Doyle and Arthur Koestler, none of whom claimed much in the way of scientific status, and with things like 'psychic surgeons' and ESP. He reviewed e.g. include "Bourgeois Idealism" in Soviet Nuclear Physics, 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', and 'Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television'. There's very little science in this book. But the general attitude is exactly similar to Randi's.
The big weakness and missing element in the 'Skeptics' is the absence of serious treatment of money and power. This must be a deliberate evasion. One of the irritating things about Gardner is that he is very conscious of the need for professional magicians to keep their methods secret, so he often explicitly states that he's not giving away the full secret when he e.g. describes a small magnet attached to a shirt collar or tip of a shoe - he's perfectly aware of the conversion of mystery into money. And most of the people the Skeptics attack are making money from their more or less bogus claims. For example, 'psychic surgeons' in the Philippines make what appears to them a fortune from simple trickery. The people who pay them do it voluntarily. The audiences in spiritualist performances, or mind-reading acts, and the consumers of absurd 'flower' remedies or tablets with no active ingredients, are all more or less adults. Why shouldn't they pay their money? Most of the crits by Skeptics are of failed cults, or failing - psychoanalysis has come under withering fire. But 'Skeptics' don't criticise serious abuses of power. There's nothing much on Freemasons or Jews or Mormons or Catholics, except when some lack of power is detected - for example, psychoanalysis is increasingly under fire. What about mass killings and chemical warfare in Vietnam? The 'Skeptics' said nothing. What about Coca Cola in the third world, where what they need is clean water? What about tobacco companies? What about NASA? What about the detail of science - the endoplasmic reticulum as a fraud, criticisms of immunology, the nonsense about 'AIDS'? What about 9/11? And what about nuclear issues, which this site is addressing? The 'Skeptics' attack in inverse proportion to the seriousness of the issue.