Skeptic: Magic Water and Mencken's Maxim; April 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Michael Shermer; 1 Page(s)

Henry Louis Mencken was a stogie-chomping, QWERTY-pounding social commentator in the first half of the 20th century who never met a man or a claim he didn't like ... to disparage, critique or parody with wit that would shame Dennis Miller back to Monday Night Football. Stupidity and quackery were favorite targets for Mencken's barbs. "Nature abhors a moron," he once quipped. "No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people," he famously noted. Some claims are so preposterous, in fact, that there is only one rejoinder: "One horselaugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms." I call this "Mencken's maxim," and I find that it is an appropriate response to preposterous claims made about magic water sold on the Web. I offer as a holotype of Mencken's maxim the following: Golden 'C' Lithium Structured Water (www.luminanti.com/goldenc.html).

This "is pure water infused with the energies of the Golden 'C' crystal, a very special and extremely rare stone mined near San Diego at the turn of the 20th century." The stone "contains more lithium than any other stone on the planet" and "emits a signature one-of-a-kind healing energy." How does the Golden 'C' water get these magical qualities? Crystal and water are placed in a ceramic container in a "dark and quiet space" for 24 hours, then the water is poured into "violet glass bottles" that "energize it." Finally, "each violet bottle is placed precisely within a special copper pyramid, specially designed to have the exact Sacred Geometry to create a Pillar of Light Jacob's Ladder vortex."