As one of those geezers in his grey, tired, wizened 50s, I’m torn between the cranky get-offa-my-lawn attitude and a patronizing bless-their-little-hearts when I see all these young’uns romping about at meetings nowadays. And the internet is even worse: look, it’s a literate 13 year old atheist and a hardnosed 16 year old skeptic!
I’m going to have to combine my views — it gets easier as senility looms — and kick their little hearts around on my lawn, I guess.
I’m jealous. Jen McCreight is on the Savage Love podcast. She chews him out for a lack of skepticism, too.
Author Annie Jacobsen has a new book that finally reveals the truly true truth about the so-called UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico. And here is the answer: Roswell Martians May Have Been Deformed Nazi Kids Sent by Stalin.
It explains so much.
The craft, she writes, wasn’t an alien spaceship, as many have since theorized, nor was it a weather balloon, as the U.S. military alleged in its clumsy cover story. It was, according to Jacobsen, a Nazi-inspired Soviet spy plane with Cyrillic letters embossed on the hull, crewed by malformed adolescents, two of whom survived the crash.
Stalin used captured Nazi aircraft designs to build the plane, according to Jacobsen. She says he had Mengele provide surgically altered “grotesque child-sized aviators” who were supposed to climb out of the aircraft and be mistaken for visitors from Mars — to sow the kind of confusion in the U.S. created by Orson Welles’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast.
Of course! Why didn’t I think of this before?
This “revelation,” such as it is, will no doubt gratify those who already suspected as much.
I…wait. I was being sarcastic. Really. This can’t actually have been an explanation with widespread currency, could it? I mean, I’ve seen the photos of the “wreckage”.
It doesn’t look like a crashed interstellar spaceship, but it also doesn’t look like a top-secret Nazi Wunderwaffen, either. It sort of looks like tattered scraps of a weather balloon.
I can tell it’s going to be even worse than usual. They’re going to have another Global Atheist Convention, which I predict will be even bigger and more successful than the first one, and now I’m getting requests to plug other skeptical events in Melbourne, as if the kangaroos and drop-bears who will attend that sort of thing need even more recognition of their ungodly superiority over us gullible Americans.
It’s going to be a long 11 months, isn’t it? And even when it’s over, Oz will be smirking in that superior way over how they were able to pull off such a grand event.
Hey! How about if some of the smart Aussies come over here? All we ever get are the dregs.
Hey, Copenhagen, there’s a Skeptics in the Pub starting up in your town. It was inspired by the big Gods and Politics conference there last year, so you know these events do have some effect — they can help get local activists get started.
You know I’m coming to the big city in less than two weeks, right? I’ll be at the Anti-Superstition Bash on Friday, May 13, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM at the Corinthian Yacht Club, in Essington, PA. You know you want to go, if for nothing else for the snooty thrill of being able to tell your friends you have an engagement at the Yacht Club to attend that evening.
I’ll do my best to dispel any bad luck you might be experiencing right now, replacing it instead with chance events.
Oh, look what’s on the pharmacy shelves! It’s “medicine” for cute little babies! Everyone loves babies, and we want them to gurgle and coo and be happy, so when their widdle tummies make them cranky, we give them a little medicine to make them feel better.
Only…Brauer is marketing homeopathic “medicine” to kids — it’s not going to do anything. Those colicky babies are going to suffer and continue to cry and cry and cry, and the only change will be that Brauer will be a little richer.
Brauer profits off the pain of children, and offers nothing in return.
If you use advertising that exploits our susceptibility to sympathize with cute smiling babies, there ought to be some kind of backlash against them when it’s discovered that they are abusing those babies.
Steve Novella is going to appear on the Dr Oz show today, and that promo has convinced me that Oz is an unforgivable charlatan. I’m swamped with work — we’re into the final two weeks of classes — so I don’t think I’ll be able to tune in, but any of you who do…report back! I’m sure Novella will acquit himself well, but it really looks like flaming woo central.
The New York Times has a long profile of Andrew Wakefield. It’s not at all laudatory (read the last paragraph in particular), but it does include quotes from people who regard Wakefield as a hero…and even something more.
“To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one,” says J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a group that disputes vaccine safety. “He’s a symbol of how all of us feel.”
Handley, of course, is a certifiable kook and an awful excuse for a human being. I am amused that he sees Wakefield as a Jesus, though; there doesn’t seem to be much self-sacrifice in Wakefield’s past or any prospect of martyrdom in his future. Jesus did say “suffer the little children,” though, which we can quotemine to apply appropriately to these promoters of childhood mortality.
After reading about callous fraud Wakefield, though, you need some context. How about this?
Europe, especially France, has been hit by a major outbreak of measles, which the U.N. health agency is blaming on the failure to vaccinate all children.
The World Health Organization said Thursday that France had 4,937 reported cases of measles between January and March — compared with 5,090 cases during all of 2010. In all, more than 6,500 cases have been reported in 33 European nations.
“This is a lot of cases, to put it mildly. In past years we’ve had very few cases,” said Rebecca Martin, head of WHO’s office in Copenhagen for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization.
“There’s been a buildup of children who have not been immunized over the years,” she said. “It’s almost like a threshold. When you have enough people who have not been immunized, then outbreaks can occur.”
Wakefield’s body count is much higher than Jesus’s or Mandela’s.
The world is full of people selling products that are nothing but advertising, like those silly “power balance” bracelets that do not give you either power or balance. Add another one to the list: Real Water. Did you know that going through a pipe strips water of its electrons? That lots of the foods we eat are lacking electrons? Well, Real Water is good for you because it adds extra electrons! The Guardian has an excellent take-down of their claims.
Now the real question is whether an expose by some science nerd will outweigh celebrity endorsements by Paul Oakenfold, Melanie Brown, and Chad Kagy. Anyone want to take any bets on whether Real Water will collapse into bankruptcy now that their fraud is revealed? Nah, not me either.
By the way, Real Water hates ORAC. No, not that one — the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Test, because they say it doesn’t do a good job of measuring how powerful Real Water with Electrons is at clearing free radicals.
