5 People Ironically Ruined By Their Very Stupid Beliefs

Hazzard asserted that all illness -- and we do mean all, ranging from tuberculosis to a dropped uterus -- spawned from "impurities" built up in the digestive system. Thus, her prescribed treatment for every single patient was to check them in for a weeks-long fast. Once the patient had become sufficiently fashionable, she'd then proceed to the next stage of her treatment, which involved having them sign over their bank accounts for some reason, then enduring "massages" in which Hazzard would pummel them about the head and back with her fists while screaming "Eliminate! Eliminate!" Ah yes, Dalek therapy. Very soothing.

Peter Dazeley/iStock
Thank God no one believes this stupid idea anymore.

Unsurprisingly, several patients died while in Hazzard's "care," and in 1912 she was convicted of manslaughter, for which she served two years in Washington State Penitentiary. After a brief stint in New Zealand following her release, Hazzard returned to her old stomping grounds, where she used her considerable proceeds to open up a "dream sanitarium" -- a place that locals nicknamed Starvation Heights. She continued prescribing enemas and face-punching right up until 1935, when tragedy(?) struck and Starvation Heights burned down.

via starvationheights.com
Was she starving the fire extinguishers too?

Hazzard -- by then a fragile old lady -- finally and unfortunately believed her own bullshit. In 1938, she commenced a fast of her own. And get this: It totally worked! After all, "dead" is technically no longer "sick."

In January of 2005, Derek was a passenger in his friend's Ford Explorer when it skidded off of icy Interstate 80. Driver Luke Havermann and front-seat passenger Nick Uphoff emerged from the battered SUV relatively unscathed. Derek -- the only passenger in the vehicle who chose to eschew his seat belt in favor of sticking it to The Man -- was tossed clean out of the unjust steel cage that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration built for him.

Greg Younger
Live free then die.

In memorializing the five-major UNL senior (history, psychology, economics, sociology, and political science, in case you were wondering), Daily Nebraskan opinion page editor Erica Rogers said that Derek's "brains and intensity would be missed" -- a statement that, in light of the circumstances, probably could have been worded better.

Snipes cited the well-known (well-known to be complete horseshit, anyway) 861 argument. It's a movement in which tax protesters point to the wording of Internal Revenue Code Section 861, which states that "compensation for services" is taxable, and interpret it to mean that wages ... aren't ... compensation for services? Look, we don't get it either, but it probably makes a hell of a lot more sense if you also believe in chemtrails.

Cornell Law
Gotta read the stuff that comes after that "if" part, man.

It's likely that Snipes's anti-tax stance came about as a result of his association with the Nuwaubians, a quasi-religious sect of black Americans who promote anti-government theories. Considering the timing, his refusal to pay may have even been in retaliation for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms rejecting his application to set up a military training compound on the Nuwaubians' land and- holy shit, Wesley Snipes. Holy shit.

Kenneth C. Budd
A government that doesn't support black power UFO militias is not a government worth funding.

Of course, taxes don't cease to exist because one stops believing in them (that's fairies -- you were thinking of fairies, Passenger 57), and Snipes was convicted of three counts of willful failure to file income taxes. After two years of thoroughly failed appeals, he eventually reported for his three-year stay in a four-star federal prison. We hate to say "We told you so," so we'll just say "Exactamundo."

But where Maggiore leveraged complete medical ignorance into a book tour, Hulda Clark turned that shit into big business. She claimed that every disease, from AIDS to advanced cancer, was caused by parasites within the body, and that these parasites could be vanquished through the use of a "zapper" -- a device less like the Ghostbusters proton pack and more like a cash vacuum. When Clark herself came down with multiple myeloma, it became clear that her trilogy of medical books -- The Cure For All Cancers, The Cure For All Diseases, and The Cure For All Advanced Cancers -- belonged in the fiction section after all.

huldaclarkzappers.com
The zapper still sells for $800.

Then there's infamous 1950s Texas evangelist Jack Coe, who renounced medical science altogether in favor of a good old-fashioned dose of God's love. Two days after being declared cured at one of Coe's faith-healing rallies (which basically consisted of Coe yelling the sick out of people), three-year-old polio sufferer George Clark was rushed to the hospital when his (obviously still polio-stricken) legs swelled dangerously. No sooner was Coe jailed and brought up on felony charges of practicing medicine without a license than said charges were dropped because, let's face it, Coe never technically practiced medicine a day in his life.

Probably feeling like the good Lord was on his side, the renowned healer waltzed out of the courtroom and was damn near immediately stricken with polio -- thereby proving that while he may have been a flailing asshole, he wasn't entirely wrong about the power of God.

For more proof that humanity is standing on the edge of both being great and being extinct, check out 6 People Who Died In Order To Prove A (Stupid) Point and 5 Ridiculous Ancient Beliefs (That Thrive on the Internet).

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