Of course these devices work; the government relies on them!

Today, Bob Park of “What’s New” zeroes in on the role that phony detecting devices have in the ongoing bloody drug “war” for control of the Mexico/U.S. border:

…According to Monday’s New York Times, outgunned Mexican officials spent more than $10 million to purchase high-tech dowsing rods to detect caches of drugs, or weapons or anything else you have in mind. (The first application [of these dowsing rods] was as a golf-ball finder sold in Golf-Pro shops.)

The Mexican army says the devices are extremely helpful. Made in the UK by Global Technologies Ltd., the GT 200 has no sensors. Priced at more than $20,000, it’s a plastic rod attached to a hand grip by a swivel, allowing the rod to point in any direction depending on the orientation of the handle.

That also describes the ADE 650 sold by ATSC Ltd., another UK company, which recently sold 1,500 imaginary detectors to the Iraqis to search for explosives at checkpoints.

Could Global Technologies and ATSC be the same company, switching names and locations to avoid exposure?

The British government [has notified] Mexico and other countries that the GT 200 "may not work."

Of course it "works"; it just doesn't detect anything. That's not its purpose[!]

Human Rights Watch is worried that people are actually being arrested and charged solely on the basis of readings from the device…. ([I]n the United States…, local law enforcement agencies use these devices to justify probable-cause for searches.)
. . .
The British government is said to be considering legislation to stop exports of the GT 200 and similar devices, but a British diplomat in Mexico said of the GT 200, "It's now up to the Mexican authorities."

Why is it that the people who market imaginary science never seem to go to jail? I served several State Attorneys General as a expert witness in cases involving charges of fraudulent science.

Every case ended with a consent decree in which the perpetrator agreed to stop cheating residents of that state.

ALSO: No smelly fish at new Russian market (Lake Forest)

Obeying TV

I heard about this contemporary take on the Milgram experiment yesterday on NPR:

French polemic over fake game show electrocutions (AP)

A state-run TV channel is stirring controversy with a documentary about a fake game show in which credulous participants obey orders to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks to a man, who is really an actor, until he appears to die.
. . .
In the end, more than four in five "players" gave the maximum jolt.
. . .
The experiment was based on the work of late psychologist Stanley Milgram, who carried out a now-classic experiment at Yale University in the 1960s. It found that most ordinary people — if encouraged by an authoritative-seeming scientist — would administer ostensibly dangerous electric shocks to others.
. . .
Recruiters found 80 "contestants" and said they would take part in a real TV show called Zone Xtreme. Each was presented to a man said to be another contestant — in reality an actor — whose job was to answer a series of questions while strapped into an electrifiable chair in an isolated booth.

In a game of word associations, the actor identified as "Jean-Paul" was told that any wrong answers would merit punishment in the form of electric shocks of 20 to 460 volts, zapped by a console operated by the contestant.

As the wrong answers invariably roll in and the voltage increases, the presenter, a well-known TV weatherwoman on France-2, exhorts contestants not to bend to his cries of agony. A goading studio audience adds to the pressure.
. . .
As wrong answers pile up, and the voltage increases, Jean-Paul pleads: "Get me out of here, please! I don't want to play anymore" and finally stops answering, then falls silent despite the electric jolts.

Contestants grow increasingly edgy but told to continue, the vast majority do.

In the final tally, 81 percent of the contestants turned up the juice to the maximum — said to be potentially deadly — level, according to "L'Experience Extreme" (The Extreme Experience), a book authored by … the producer. Only 16 people among the 80 who took part backed out…..