McGill’s Office for Science and Society 2026 Quackery Piece: Excellent

here, the kind of article I'm sadly not seeing much of these days:

001. at mcgill.ca's Office for Science and Society, Jonathan Jarry writes in “Quackery in Quebec: The Trojan Horse Bill I Worry About" as dated 2026-06-26:

"A new bill has been proposed at the National Assembly of Quebec, and while it may look like it will benefit our health, there is a lot going on under the surface. It is an excellent example of how the rebranding of pseudoscience gives it legitimacy, and this Trojan horse is now knocking on our legislative door [... ] here is a list of so-called therapies that are often sneaked in under the moniker of integrative health:

• Homeopathy: the practice of taking, for example, a natural substance that makes you vomit and diluting it out of existence to make you stop vomiting
• Reiki: conceived by a Japanese spiritualist who starved himself and hallucinated, it is the idea that a person can hover their hands over a patient and inject a divine healing energy into them
• Iridology: the practice of looking at the colored part of the eye to diagnose any health condition
• Reflexology: the idea that the entire human body can be mapped onto the sole of our feet and that a targeted foot massage can heal any disease
• Naturopathy: an umbrella term for therapies that use so-called natural methods of healing, including homeopathy, herbalism, acupuncture, iridology, and loads of dietary supplements

In 2026, these practices are not serious. They check all the boxes of a pseudoscience: they are based on a primitive, overly simplistic understanding of how the body works; they may rely on the spiritual idea that a mysterious life force exists which can be manipulated; they fail to progress and change; they often lack a plausible mechanism of action; and their promising, preliminary studies are commonly contradicted by rigorous clinical trials [...]”;

"31 U.S.C. § 3730's Qui Tam Provision is Especially, Precisely for this Situation"

here, some AI-LLM legal musings on the last Perplexity thread that is the context of the last two posts.  Of course, I am not a lawyer but I am a citizen with legal interests:

001. the tasking to Perplexity, particularly because I refer to these statutes in the blog subtitle, and I'm curious how they stand now:

"Reflect on this thread’s bleak outlook in terms of justice and HEA section 487(c)(3) 34 CFR Subpart F, 668.71–668.74 AND 31 U.S.C. §§ 3729–3733."

002. the answer [in full]:

"The thread's outlook is bleak precisely because the legal instruments that should provide relief are either structurally limited, chronically underenforced, or dependent on prosecutorial will that has historically not materialized in this sector.

But the instruments named here are among the sharpest available, and the gap between what they authorize and what has been done with them is itself a form of institutional ignorism.

HEA Section 487(c)(3): The Misrepresentation Provision

What It Authorizes

Section 487(c)(3) of the Higher Education Act prohibits Title IV-participating institutions from engaging in "substantial misrepresentation" of the nature of their educational programs, their financial charges, or the employability of their graduates. The Department of Education's implementing regulations at 34 C.F.R. §§ 668.71–668.74 define substantial misrepresentation as any statement that has "the likelihood or tendency to deceive or confuse" a prospective student, and specifically include misrepresentation regarding:

• The nature of the program: its educational objectives, the occupational designation for which it prepares students, and whether it is accredited
• The employability of graduates: job placement rates, types of positions graduates obtain, and starting salaries
• The financial charges: the total cost of attendance, net price, and the relationship between debt and expected income

An Essay on Ignorism-by-Design: Shedding Light on Manufactured Darkness and Compliance Theater

here, because the last post's thread was so robust with interrogations I committed towards the ED-CNME-NACIQI institutionalized context, I tasked the current Claude Sonnet 4.6 to create an essay centered around a great word that may capture [a pun!] a great deal of it -- ignorism:

001. tasking language: 

Create an essay that talks about how what this thread's context involves is an example of a broad and peculiar "ignorism" by naturopathy's advocates and its institutional enablers.

002. an ignorism-augmented logo upgrade for 2027, perhaps?

[2000, as I have talked about even in 2013's Episode 1, is the year I really awoke while in naturopathy school to the obvious chasm separating the essentially naturopathic and the typical basic medical sciences I was studying while in naturopathy school in CT at UB: "Fourth semester coursework is when I started to really feel that there were two types of course content going on at the college, legitimate medical science stuff, and hokey naturopathic junk [...e.g.] homeopathy [...] Chinese medicine [...] hydrotherapy."]

002. in full [I've lightly changed / edited some aspects, and added comments in right-aligned blue, but I think the output is pretty good --- a mundane, short scenic view kind of way-point / pause on this long journey]:

"Ignorism by Design: How Organized Naturopathy and Its Institutional Enablers Manufacture and Protect Ignorance

[Note: A very good title.]

I. A New Word for an Old Mechanism

There is a word that has not yet entered common usage but that the phenomenon documented in this thread demands: ignorism.

ED SDO's 2026-06 Naturopathy-CNME Determination

here, what a mess --

• precisely "a nauseating, deliberately exploitative, structurally convergent, ethically regressive, academically fraudulent system — one that presents as a mess [to distract from its overall intentionality] while functioning as a machine, and whose deepest harm is not the individual clinical encounters it enables but the institutional infrastructure of positive freedom it has converted, layer by layer, into an architecture of epistemic obstruction";
• with the ED SDO's “remedial framework [...] structurally incommensurate with the harms he identified [...serving as] an institutional gatekeeper managing access to an organism that consumes what enters it [...] SDO and ED, in their concierge function, are not merely smoothing a guest experience — they are managing the intake process for an institution whose documented outputs include insurmountable student debt, compromised patient care, and the systematic corruption of the epistemic infrastructure of positive freedom";

[hear, hear! -- minimally; because, I'll herein identify many more issues and suggest multiple remedies]

001. documents used for my Perplexity taskings:

• 001.a. “Naturopathic Accreditor Gets Reprieve” by Josh Moody at insidehighered.com 2026-06-24”, where we’re told about the determination;
• 001.b. the 26-page USDE letter dated 2026-06-23, included in the web page above, authored by Under Secretary Nicholas Kent [the above link is archived];
• 001.c. my pre-decision Naturocrit post of 2026-06-23;
• 001.d. my 2026 CT ND Final Report archived here;
• 001.e. the AANP press release;
• 001.f. the CNME press release;

002. via Perplexity, taskings [letters 'a' through 'p']:

002.a.1. [tasking] "In light of the attached post PDF and the 2026 CT ND Final Report PDF, what does the attached ED Letter PDF address, avoid, support, undermine, value, defile, uphold, undermine?" [So, respectively: 001.c., 001.d., and 001.b.; oops, two undermines!!!]