Double standards

I read with fascination and a sense of utter incredulity that some bloke called James McCormick has recently been convicted of fraud for selling fake bomb detectors to the Government for £27,000 a piece when they consisted of nothing more than a novelty golf ball finder normally sold for $13. My disbelief stems not from the conviction but the fact that he was able to get away with it for so long and make millions of pounds selling utter trash packaged up as something miraculous to otherwise intelligent people.

This story made me think of the strange double standard at work in our society, i.e. how come we can convict someone like McCormick for selling fake bomb detectors but embrace Homoeopathy into our state funded health service? The parallels seem excruciatingly similar to me, false security in potentially life threatening situations, extortion of unreasonably large amounts of money for unproven and unskilled products and services and a complete disregard for normal processes of testing and validation.

The more you think about this case and the wider implications of it the more you realise that our society is riddled with similar situations, in fact you could say this predator-prey state is the norm and not the exception. From greedy bankers exploiting unrealistic aspirational borrowing, unscrupulous doctors seeding future measles epidemics via scaremongering media moguls selling newspapers through to handicapped people paying thousands of pounds to travel to Lourdes hoping for a miracle, only to catch a water-born parasite from drinking polluted "blessed water" from a communal font.

If we want to examine the true cost of credulity then we don't need a case like this, we need only look around, it seems to be part of our nature.