[Sasha]
> MENSA:
> Mr. Serebrayakoff, the founder of MENSA was a countryman of mine and
> harbored many negative elitist attitudes of people who consider IQ as a
> substitute for knowledge and hard work.
> After running away from my own country almost 20 years ago I felt the
> understandable urge to "belong" and having my IQ tested for free at the
> Church of Scientology in Stockholm (and run away from their recruiters) I
> understood that this MENSA place may be a good place to meet people who
> actually know something. Joined MENSA and alas... What a disappointment!
> After several years of meetings all over CA, NV and even UT and later NY and
> NJ, I found nothing but a bunch of self-indulgent, mostly lazy,
> overwhelmingly sloppy and unbelievably snotty crowd that just happened to
> have some neurons in their brains wired in a peculiar way that allowed them
> to see questionable patterns in a very specific and completely useless set
> of exercises. Oh, wow!
>
[More Sasha]
> Homeopathy -
> From a point of view of what common people call "common sense" quantum
> physics makes no sense either. "Common sense" has its areas of application
> and its gigantic failures as a mental tool.
> My life and scientific experience proved that never should we mix
> experiments and theories. Theories are just interesting pastimes.
> Experiments are the core of science. Most of the medical treatments had
> ridiculous explanations just before the end of 19th century. But medicine
> was a very successful discipline despite that since antiquity and did its
> job pretty well.
> Jenner invented vaccines having no idea of mechanisms of immune response and
> was ridiculed for years for attempts to make a hybrid between people and
> cows for years by people who used arguments very similar to yours.
> I do not give a damn about homeopathic theories. I do not give a damn if
> they are capable of understanding the causes and effects of their treatments
> as long as the treatments themselves show results and I saw that. I have
> very little interest in so-called "peer reviews" that usually used to
> validate science because I saw so often how "peers" jump out of their pants
> to prevent concurrent theories to see the light of day. One of the best
> examples are these two guys, Marshall and Warren who got their Nobel Prize
> recently for proving that stomach ulcers is a bacterial disease and can be
> cured in HOURS!
> For more than 20 years they were called quacks, their work pushed aside and
> their results questioned because they attempted to take away hundreds of
> millions if not billions of dollars from gastroenterologists. I know some of
> these real quacks who even now resist the truth. Reading about their
> tribulations and how their work "did not make sense" in the eyes of
> gastroenterologists is a scary reading that is the best explanation I know
> why we still have no serious breakthroughs in cancer treatments. Peptic
> ulcers is just some hundreds of millions of $$, cancer is tens of billions
> of dollars that can be potentially taken away from cancer surgeons!
> So before you or my good friends Lew and Michael Plant express their views
> on homeopathy so cocky and easily, I suggest you exercise a little caution.
> All you do is to pre-judge something that may as well save your life one day
> as it did for countless patients. I knew a guy, who is a gastroenterologist
> himself and despite years of our mutual friend trying to convince him to try
> antibiotics on his own wife who had peptic ulcers, he, using 'common sense"
> dismissed the whole thing and her ulcers turned cancerous and she died. His
> words were "What do two crazy Aussies know about ulcers that I do not know?"
> Apparently a freaking lot.

[Michael]
OK, I Michael the Cocky here. Guilty as charged. I admit:

1) I've never read studies on the efficacy of homeopathy.

2) I've heard from possibly reliable sources that well
designed and executed studies exist showing that the
homeopathic effect surpasses the placibo effect.

3) I get high marks for glibness and do occasionally
well with sarcasm. I also score high on lazy and sloppy.
Happily, these qualities will never compromise the good
name of MENSA since I have nothing but my wits to put
on the table. I suffer from mediocrity.

Nicely written and heart felt, Sasha. I enjoyed your
post above, and I get it.

Michael