Money For Huffin'. Steve Huff's Patreon Exposes Just How Sleazy He Is.

It's late, you're preparing for bed when there's a familiar ping from your phone. A little red bubble appears over your messenger app. A friend who keeps tabs on the worst scumbags in the paranormal field has something to show you. You open the message getting the feeling you have when you pull open the door of the seediest bar of your town. That's what happened to me tonight when my friend directed me to Steve Huff's Patreon (0). Just when you think that a human being could not possibly sink any lower than selling broken radios to the gullible at massively inflated prices. When you believe that this same person couldn't do anything more tasteless than 'contacting the spirits' of recently deceased celebrities.

He suprises you on both counts.

Let's get something out of the way first. I have no objection to people opening a Patreon. Heck, when I mulled over the move from blogging to making Youtube videos and podcasts I considered doing the same. The time restrictions on making videos meant I may well have to cut down my working hours and I thought Patreon would help me do this without impacting my family. I never made that move, mainly because I enjoy writing and the time constraints of recording audio and editing videos were just too limiting. But opening a Patreon isn't something I rule out, nor is it something I frown upon others for doing.

So why do I have a problem with Huff doing this?

Essentially, it comes down to the fact that Huff uses the videos and content he creates in order to sell his ridiculous range of broken or at best, poorly functioning radios. He's already receiving a revenue stream from the videos he creates, which are essentially just advertisements. But he's not content with that. He wants his followers to pay him to create his advertising material. Obviously, Huff can't outright say this, so let's unpack his justification for soliciting money from his followers.

Huff tells his followers that by donating to him through Patreon they are helping him to conduct his 'research'.

His "drive is stronger than ever before"? I guess a lot can change in a few months because only last year Huff quit the paranormal 'field' after claiming he was under sustained attack from demons! (1), As for Huff's claim that he is conducting 'research'. Where is it? In his introduction video on his Patreon he claims that people have never even seen the majority of his research.

Two questions. Why is that? And given that is the case, why the fuck should anyone pay to support Huff conduct more research, just for him to lash the results in the fucking garbage?

Sitting in your bedroom playing with neon-lights and broken radios is not research. It's tinkering and he's got a damn nerve asking others to pay to allow him to continue to do it. Now he's receiving money just for the purposes of research doesn't Huff have a responsibility to his donors to properly and publically present that research?

I believe so, but he gives no indication that he is going to do this.

In the above video, Huff declares that he is broke, that he can only continue his 'research' without donations. But surely he's got a revenue stream from selling his junk? In fact, only on January 25th, he posted his latest products on his website, costing between $900 - $3995! (2)

And finally, the model that costs over $3000. It will set you back over $4200 if you want it shipped abroad!

Now, Huff can't have lots of his money tied up in stock of this rubbish for the simple reason that he requests you accept that he won't build your box until he's got your cash in his hand.

There's another interesting condition the Huff asks his customers to agree to. He asks his customers to accept that there is no guarantee that his boxes will actually work!

Can you imagine any other type of retailer selling a product that they don't guarantee will work! Huff may actually be falling afoul of a piece of US legislation, the Sales and Storage of goods framework (3), which states:

This requires that the seller knows that an item is fit for purpose at the time of sale, Huff is expressly telling his customers that he does not know that!

Back to Huff's Patreon, as well as crying poverty, you'll notice that Huff brings the issue of heaven and hell into the equation of whether you choose to support him. Huff tells us he has categorically discovered there is a heaven and a hell, and his research is helping discover who goes where when they die. In this respect, Huff has made himself indistinguishable from televangelists like Jim Bakker who threatened that viewers' grandchildren would go to hell unless they buy a $60 bucket of pancake mix. (4) Well, there is one difference. Give your money to Bakker and you get some pancake mix.

So what is Huff offering to his donors?

It's a lot sleazier than pancake mix.

Steve Huff. Ghoul for Gold.

So, for your monthly contribution, Huff is offering to attempt to contact your deceased loved one. Of course, with everything Huff offers, he's quick to point out there are no guarantees. And when it does work, it's very likely because the patron has provided Huff with the name or names of the person they want to be contacted. Something which makes audio pareidolia and suggestibility a much easier for Huff to exploit.

Clearly, in the pursuit of the almighty dollar, there is no level Huff will not stoop to now. He is quite happy to manipulate his patron's grief and pain. Something that shills in the paranormal circus have been doing for years.

Just like mediums or anyone else who proposes to contact the dead, Huff is a ghoul. Pure and simple. It angers me greatly to read the messages from patrons on Huff's page requesting him to contact their loved ones. 

No-one deserves to be exploited in this way.

No one.

So what can we do? The first step I'd suggest is going to Patreon directly. I have to say that they aren't particularly responsive, but if enough people register their disdain perhaps we can help shut down this thinly veiled exploitation. Next, raise awareness, whether by spreading this post around social media or by writing your own posts and articles.

One thing should be abundantly clear here, Huff is a fraud and a charlatan. He has shown himself to have absolutely no boundaries in what he will do for money. 

Sources

(0) https://www.patreon.com/huffparanormal/overview

(1) http://skepticsboot.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/the-huff-model-disrespecting-dead-for.html

(2) http://huffparanormal.com/2018/01/2018-versions-of-the-portal-backwards-box-and-wonder-box-now-available-to-purchase/

(3) https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/8-618-0307?transitionType=Default&contextData=(sc.Default)&firstPage=true&bhcp=1

(4) http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2017/11/televangelist-jim-bakker-buy-pancake-mix-grandkids-go-hell/

Stuffing a Turkey: Another Round With Rountree.

So I've been waiting awhile for David Rountree to respond to my criticism of his "academic paper", I've been waiting even longer for him to actually direct me to his doctoral thesis, which is still, as far as I'm concerned, non-existent. He has responded, in exactly the way a man of his academic stature would be expected to.


By telling me to engage in fellatio with multiple penises on facebook.

Sweet.

Frankly, David, I'd rather snack on a thousand sacks of genitals than swallow an ounce of the bullshit you feed your followers.

But I don't blame Rountree for gloating, noted physicist Michael Robishaw totally agrees with his research and findings. Wait did I say "noted physicist"? I meant "self-proclaimed Psychic healer, shamen and spiritual warrior", none of which qualify him to verify theories in physics. In fact lets be honest, the only reason a person surrounds himself with so many self-appointed bullshit titles is because he or she is fundamentally unremarkable otherwise.

So what was the cause of Rountree's gloating anyway? It turns out he'd read this article: Magnetic Wormhole created in lab published on IB times August 22nd 2015. Unfortunately for Rountree, he either didn't bother to read the article fully or didn't understand it... or there's a third possibility which I'll get to in a second.

The first line of the article Dave shared states: "A wormhole for magnets has been created by scientists in a laboratory. The wormhole is not of the space-time variety, but rather it tunnels a magnetic field from one point to another." So its not the type of wormhole which Rountree's theory relies on. This magnetic wormhole is a wormhole in name alone. Of course I let Rountree know this on Twitter, which resulted in him immediately blocking me after telling me to "get a life".

Blocking opponents of his, is nothing new for Rountree, and he's clearly avoiding a discussion regarding his wormhole theory. But there is something more insidious at work here in my opinion. Dave is protecting the fragile web of lies he has constructed around his scientific credentials. He knows that a public debate with anyone (quite literally anyone in his case) with the ability to punch holes in this faux "man of science" image risks the admiration and respect he has lied to garner. Rountree fears exposure more than anything else, that's why he claims to be a quantum physicist on YouTube and Twitter, but not on Research Gate a site for academics (see here). He knows that an actual academic would expose him as a fraud in seconds.

His opinion of his followers and fan's intelligence must be very low indeed. I think he's fairly confident that they won't understand the research he linked to and why it doesn't support his wormhole bullshit.

Rountree clearly thrives in an echo-chamber, and he has a few dotted around. For example, I was recently directed to this thread in the "Keeping the Paranormal Friendly" forum. Here Rountree exposes more of his bullshit pseudo-science. Laughably one particular section of Rountree's first post shows how fundamentally dishonest Rountree is. He plagiarises the following section but can't bare leave it in its original form. Check out the one adjustment:

Rountree:

"Researchers have no observational evidence for wormholes, until now. The equations of the theory of general relativity have valid solutions that contain wormholes. Because of its robust theoretical strength, a wormhole is one of the great physics metaphors for teaching general relativity."

Original source, Planetary science.org

"Researchers have no observational evidence for wormholes, but the equations of the theory of general relativity have valid solutions that contain wormholes. Because of its robust theoretical strength, a wormhole is one of the great physics metaphors for teaching general relativity."

Laughably his addition of "until now" not only makes no grammatical sense, it's  directly contradicted by what follows!

Needless to say, Rountree's entire post plagiarises this source wholesale, unfortunately, he fails to perform a further edit and omit the following.

" Physicists have not found any natural process that would be predicted to form a wormhole naturally in the context of general relativity..."

Err... whoops...

Rountree is very much in his element in this forum, he clearly feels this is a safe space in which his bullshit is unlikely to be challenged. He's probably right. The moderator and some other posters fawn all over Rountree. He responds to this adulation by adopting a professorial tone, congratulating his mock students for not challenging his bullshit, such praise as "Yes, that's right Paige. Good memory."

But my favourite line is the following, the one utterance that should scream to anyone who has studied physics, that Rountree is not only a sham, but he literally doesn't have doesn't a blind clue. Really, this is a doozy.

"Well ignore the math. The math is used mearly for scientific verification of the concepts discussed. When you see the equations, just mentally say "Oh, this is the justufucation for the statement""

"Ignore the maths," said no physicist EVER.  Remember Dr Matt Hunt's words when he took a look at Rountree's quantum physics pdfs?

"There are no equations when talking about quantum mechanics which suggests he doesn't have the skills to understand them."

Rountree dismisses the importance of the mathematical foundations of physics because he can't do the maths. This is why there isn't a single use of mathematics in his "wormhole" paper.

 But Rountree doesn't just preach to the faithful to social media and forums, he also blogs to them mocking critics of his theory. In a post entitled "The Next Level" he writes:

"I will be doing my first attempt at artificially opening a wormhole this weekend..... This is a serious experiment based on my thesis work, so the outcome is very important to me. oh wait, i forget i lied about my educational credentials thus i am uneducated. Lol."

The level of arrogance here is astounding considering Rountree categorically DID lie about his education.

Much of the article focuses on the casimir effect, in the discussion of this Rountree massively misrepresents one of the main arguments of his critics:

"...the Casimir effect plays an important role in the chiral bag model of the nucleon; in applied physics, it is significant in some aspects of emerging microtechnologies and nanotechnologies.This is not theoretical. This is a proven and measured effect...."

Yes, that's true. But no-one is arguing this! Rountree's critics point out to him that WORMHOLES are theoretical not the casimir effect.

Speaking of the Casimir effect, Rountree laughably spells "casimir" and "resonances" wrong at several points throughout the piece. Now I think its pretty low to focus on an opponents spelling and grammar in a debate, its usually a fair sign that you haven't got much else to focus on, but there is a really good reason for my to focus on spelling here. Roundtree, you see, doesn't spell Casimir wrong throughout the account. In fact he switches between spellings.

This implies the Rountree is up to his old plagerism tricks, remember how I showed that his "paper" published on Research Gate was made up of a huge amount of text copy and pasted from Wikipedia? Well after I wrote that some inspired soul ran it through Grammarly and found that a whopping 44% of it was plagiarised! Take a look at the PDF here. Anyway back to this post. A quick scan on Plagscan of the first half of the post alone shows a staggering amount of plagiarism. Most comes from Rountree's go to source Wikipedia, other sites he has STOLEN from include Yahoo answers, the Anderson Institute and laughably Youtube comments sections!

If this doesn't persuade you that  Rountree has none of the expertise he claims nothing will, these aren't even legitimate scientific sources. If he is going to plagiarise, why Wikipedia and Yahoo answers? Why not published papers and peer reviewed journals? I suspect Rountree is so deluded, and crucially, not scientifically literate, that he can't identify a legitimate source. 

He further reveals this in his closing words:

I will at this time refrain from revealing any further details of the work, incuding protocols and equipment identification, configuration, and experiment protocols. Simply because its my work. I own it. And i want the stalkers and trolls to melt down from curiosity. Because…well….I can. More to come. Hopefully….

Sorry Dave that's not how legitimate science works, you have to reveal your methodology! Also you critics aren't stalkers and trolls, Criticism is a vital part of the scientific methods. What are you going to do when your research is actually brought before your peers for peer review? Tell them to get a life if they critique it? What about the projects which endeavour to replicate your results if they fail? Will they also be told to eat a bag of dicks?

Speaking of said interesting meal suggestion, mine has just arrived.

Merry Christmas Everyone!