Oh god, Skepticon

Jebus, it’s only the first night. Rebecca Watson, Bailey’s, Amanda Marcotte, Red Stag, Vic Stenger, some random ale. I seem to have outlasted everyone else tonight, but I can’t keep this up the next couple of nights.

This. Is. SKEPTICON.

I confess. It was pretty funny watching Vic Stenger trying to stagger out of the party room. And it was a wild conversation about the role of chance in physics and biology. You ought to be here.

I think I better curl up and get some sleep now. Let’s see when I regain consciousness tomorrow. I might have to stand toe-to-toe with Richard Carrier and Rebecca Watson tomorrow night, and that will be rough.

Bad move, A&E

The A&E Channel has a new show coming up: Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal. Sounds awful already, doesn’t it? But it’s worse than you think: they’re looking for disturbed kids who think they’ve got magic powers, and then they’re flying in “professional psychics” to coach them in dealing with their awesome powers, i.e., indulge their delusions, get off on feeling superior to unhappy kids, and collect a paycheck for psychic child abuse.

They’re putting kids in the hands of a creepy skeevo like Chip Coffey, all for your entertainment.

This is quite possibly the most loathsome thing I’ve ever seen on TV, and my cable gives me access to the Trinity Broadcast Network, so that’s saying a lot.

Skepchicks are mobilizing the skeptic hordes. Call or write to A&E and let them know that their schlock has reached a new and despicable low.

I mentioned that I have cable…but there’s almost nothing on. The quality has been on a steady decline for years; cable stations like A&E, TLC, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel were all set up with the noble goals of providing good educational/informative programming, and they’ve all sold out to provide little more than dreck ala Psychics with Serious Mental Illnesses Hunting Hitler’s Ghost While Driving A Big Truck with Their Freakish Family. It’s cheap, it’s easy, the ‘talent’ they hire are all boring nobodies with only their disturbed personalities as a selling point — these are modern freak shows, plain and simple — and audiences eat them up.

Meanwhile, look here: somebody has a petition begging someone, anyone to pick up Richard Dawkins’ thoughtful and intelligent documentaries. They’re done, they’re just sitting there, they’re begging to be broadcast…but I guess he just doesn’t have the charisma of a hammy metaphysical child abuser.

This is news?

This is billed as a special news report: do angels exist?. I remember using “special” in exactly that way in grade school, too. Do Fox News reporters also ride the short bus to work?

I suppose I should be grateful that they brought in one skeptic to moderate it a bit, but otherwise…it’s an excuse to quote the Bible a bunch of times and drag in some truly stupid people to testify. Joey Hipp ought to be in jail: after being told, he says, that his wife’s spine was so mangled she might not be able to walk, he strolls up to her hospital bed, takes her hand, and makes her stand up…what kind of dangerous moron would do that? That she isn’t crippled now is due to luck and medicine, not her husband’s demented faith.

I’m also left feeling a bit peeved at angels. That tall, handsome angel in the silver corvette who helped some lady not be late for Bible study should have been off warning Joey Hipp to slow down on his motorcycle before he killed his wife.

But yes, O you fortunate people in distant lands, this is the American news media. I bet you also didn’t realize that Mike Judge’s movie, Idiocracy, was a documentary.

Last call for Skepticon

Only a few weeks are left until Skepticon III takes place, and only a few seats are left — this is a conference that has some fabulous speakers (well, except for me. Since I utterly reject the notion of the supernatural, I’m merely mundane), yet admission is entirely free. All you have to do is cough up travel money.

If you can’t make it, there’s something else you can do: buy one of their calendars to help them pay for this event. They’re amazing works of art, and educational, too. I have learned that naked skeptics are masters of the art of the Strategic Placement of Random Objects. I think this skill is called Feng Shy.

Drinking bleach is good for you?

I haven’t heard much about Rhys Morgan in the US (if you follow Ben Goldacre, though, you know all about him), but he won an award at TAM London for his skeptical work, so I thought I should do my part to spread the news. Simply put, he was participating in a forum on Crohn’s Disease and boldly took on peddlers of evil woo: they were selling some crap called Miracle Mineral Solution, which is nothing but bleach.

Amazing, isn’t it? It takes some gall for a quack to prescribe a treatment for a chronic intestinal disorder that involves glugging down a corrosive poison, and then when the poor patient suffers with a painfully sore throat, vomiting, and diarrhea, to claim that they should drink more, that’s a sign that it is working…but that’s what they were doing.

Morgan took the step of being aware of what constitutes an unlikely medical claim and looking it up.

First off, I found an FDA safety bulletin posted on 30th July 2010. From the FDA page which can be found here, I learned that MMS was an industrial bleach, when made up as according to the instructions. It produces chlorine dioxide, which is used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment. I’ll come back to the FDA warning in a minute. After learning what it actually is, I went to the official MMS website. It is utterly disgusting. It claims that MMS is a cure for AIDS, cancers, hepatitis A, B and C, malaria, herpes and tuberculosis. This started my alarm bells ringing. The website screams DANGEROUS WOO to me.

Then he went further and alerted people about the dangers. And for that he was harrassed and threatened with expulsion from the discussion.

You should read his blog. Realize too that he’s only 15 years old, so we can look forward to another hundred years or so of Mr Morgan shredding the quacks. I almost feel sorry for the poor lying frauds.

i-2ecedadaea3c6752c64fcdbeaf3a2691-rhysmorgan.jpeg

The Amazing Meeting: London

Do you expect a full report? TAM London is over, I have no sense of time left, I just got back from a late and very entertaining dinner with the ferocious Rebecca Watson and the fabulous Richard Wiseman, and I think I need to pass out.

It looks like you can get a video feed of the various talks at the live feed — they’re playing back the recorded events right now. You can read the #TAMLondon hashtag to get an idea of the audience reaction, and Martin Robbins has liveblogged the whole weekend. Or if you’d rather, you can read few short sound bites.

My talk went fine, I think, although it’s hard for the speaker to get a good impression. I did let everyone know my excuse ahead of time: Tim Minchin sang The Pope Song the night before, completely stealing the entire text of my planned talk, so I had to rewrite it at the last moment. By the way, the live song was fantastic, far better than the youtube recording — he had a hard, angry tone to the whole song that made it even more biting.

TAM is always a fun meeting. You should have gone!

Two Scots in a bar

I was hanging out in the hotel bar last night when a pair of great Northern savages came up to me and handed me a beer and a flyer and told me, “Here! Promote our meeting!” Or at least I think they did. They were a bit fierce in how they handle the English, you know, for which they have a bit of a reputation.

But sure, I’m happy to mention the Glasgow Skeptics and their upcoming event, Skeptics in the Palace on 21 November. Everyone should go and tell them I sent you, so they’ll know they got good value for their beer.

And now you know the price of advertising on Pharyngula…

It’s not just us

I will not wade into this one, it gets so tiresome over here, but Gnu Atheists aren’t the only people afflicted with tone trolls. Orac points out that the anti-vaxers are now using the ‘civility’ argument.

To people who are palpably wrong, the whole world is always going to look very rude to them. You’d think they’d learn after a while that whining about civility is never going to persuade anyone except other shallow, superficial wankers.

Michael Shermer coming to Minneapolis

Hey, don’t miss this: Shermer will be speaking at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities next week, 14 October, at 7pm in Willey 175 (West Bank). There is a charge, but it’s cheap: $1 CASH members (advance sale only), $2 advance tickets through CASH tabling or at general meetings, and $4 at the door. All this is through the UM’s Campus Atheists, Skeptics, & Humanists.

I wish I could make it, but I’ll be all tied up that night.