No Cure For Teeny Weenies

  Here's why it pays to be skeptical, guys. It turns out that the makers of the "male enhancement" pill Enzyte weren't inflating anything but their claims. The government is prosecuting company officials for conspiring to defraud its customers out of 100 million desperate, small-wanged dollars. From Cincinnati.com:

James Teegarden Jr., the former vice president of operations at Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, explained Tuesday in U.S. District Court how he and others at the company made up much of the content that appeared in Enzyte ads.

He said employees of the Forest Park company created fictitious doctors to endorse the pills, fabricated a customer satisfaction survey and made up numbers to back up claims about Enzyte’s effectiveness.

  There are a few things about this situation that really stick out.

1) PAY ATTENTION. Slick marketing and customer satisfaction surveys are fine, but if a company can't or won't explain to you how its product works, DON'T GIVE THEM MONEY.

2) This is especially true when the company makes "health" claims that are so sensitive. The harder you want something to be true, the easier it is to let yourself believe dubious claims. If a pill claims to fix a heretofore unfixable problem, it's time to be even more diligent.

3) The only thing classier than conspiring to sell millions of dollars of dubious dick drugs is cutting your mom in on the action. From the article:

Several other company employees, including [the founder's] mother, Harriet, also are charged with participating in the conspiracy.

  I also find it insane that, as of February 1st, 2008, the company's website it still up and running, making the same claims and apparently still taking orders. Why hasn't the District Court issued an temporary injunction to stop the company from making these (allegedly) fraudulent claims?

  Nobody needs an herbal penis pump so badly that they can't wait a few months. If the Court rules in favor of the company, then let them go back to peddling their pills. In the meantime, why risk letting the company defraud more innocent men? They're already upset about the size of their junk. The court shouldn't allow their wallets to be deflated as well.

  On the plus side, I finally have a reason to use the "dick" tag non-euphemistically.

Take Back The "U"

  In the middle of an interesting report on the aftermath of the Texas UFO sightings, Sam Ogden of Skepchick.org reports this little tidbit.

"I sat across the aisle from some fellow Texans on the plane ride home from Florida who were very vocal that the reversal by the air force was proof that the government is covering something up."

  This, my friends, is the definition of ambivalence. I love to be right; I hate the credulity. It's a powerful sensation, akin to choking myself to death with delicious cookie dough.

  Folks, it's time we did something ridiculously pedantic as we paddle upstream in the flood of blind belief. We've got to take back the word "unidentified." We've got to stop letting true believers conflate the term with “alien.”

  Here's how we do it. If someone observes a UFO, and then either attempts to gather evidence and make a determination of what it was, or calmly accepts that it can't be precisely identified, then they can call it unidentified. If they’re going to leap to an otherwise unsupported conclusion as to the object's outer spaciness, we have to insist that they use a word like alien or extraterrestrial that clearly indicates the (desperately crazy) conclusion they’ve drawn.

  I'm not nearly so delusional as to think that this semantic quibbling will change the minds of anyone in the woo-niverse, but it might just rescue an innocent word from misappropriation by the tinfoil hat crowd. That's a worthy enough goal all by itself.