![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It looks as though this story - Useless bomb detector sold worldwide risks lives - is finally getting mainstream attention.
To summarise - the Iraqi security forces have been gulled into paying up to $40,000 per item for a woo device that supposedly 'dowses' for explosives or whatever.
Of course it doesn't work.
When one fails to detect a bomb (as will be the case in Iraq), people get blown up. People get mutilated. People get killed.
What gets me is that not only is there a guy making serious amounts of money out of selling these useless objects, but that there are people around the world who have been convinced to buy them.
People - this is an attempt to use magic. And when it comes to the hard, physical world, magic doesn't work. On soft, psychological aspects, it may do - the human mind is a complex thing, and belief in something can have amazingly strong effects, to the extent of affecting one's physiology. But it won't work miracles - the strongest belief that one can fly without using wings won't going save one falling off a cliff.
This is almost as shameful as promoting homeopathy for curing AIDS.
To summarise - the Iraqi security forces have been gulled into paying up to $40,000 per item for a woo device that supposedly 'dowses' for explosives or whatever.
Of course it doesn't work.
When one fails to detect a bomb (as will be the case in Iraq), people get blown up. People get mutilated. People get killed.
What gets me is that not only is there a guy making serious amounts of money out of selling these useless objects, but that there are people around the world who have been convinced to buy them.
People - this is an attempt to use magic. And when it comes to the hard, physical world, magic doesn't work. On soft, psychological aspects, it may do - the human mind is a complex thing, and belief in something can have amazingly strong effects, to the extent of affecting one's physiology. But it won't work miracles - the strongest belief that one can fly without using wings won't going save one falling off a cliff.
This is almost as shameful as promoting homeopathy for curing AIDS.
