Let us count the ways the Catholic church is like the mob

After their recent raid to expose information about child-raping priests, the Belgian police are facing another problem.

Officials say that police are also looking into threats to the lives of some witnesses and magistrates connected to the case.

Jean Marc Meillure, a spokesman for the public prosecutors office, confirmed that an investigation was under way.

“There are some threats against certain people around the case, and the prosecutors office is investigating that,” he told the BBC.

He said the threats had been made against people who gave the authorities information or made a complaint, or against some magistrates.

Nobody rats out the head Ratzi. If the stool pigeons can’t be bought, they can be disappeared.

Attempted intimidation by a quack

I don’t envy Stephen Barrett at all, but this is going to be good. Barrett is the doctor behind QuackWatch a wonderful resource for exposing bogus medical claims. Among the many subjects of common charlatanry he’s taken apart, one is the use of invalid tests to justify useless treatments, like chelation therapy, which is a goldmine for quacks. Do the doctory thing of drawing a little blood while wearing a white lab coat, send it off to a ‘lab’ that does a few tests and sends back a very official looking mass of data, and then the quack gazes into it and announces that you need powdered newts’ eyes, or whatever nostrum he’s peddling that day.

Barrett explained in thorough detail how the reports of one such ‘lab’, called “Doctor’s Data”, were jiggered to create unnecessary fears in patients.

Now Doctor’s Data is suing him.

This is going to be such a hassle for Barrett—a pointless, frivolous suit by con artists who don’t like the fact that he has publicly exposed their scam. But it is also deliciously ironic, because the suit will also make Doctor’s Data more widely known as a fraud. Everyone should go read the relevant articles on QuackWatch:

Spread the news far and wide. Make sure everyone knows Doctor’s Data is a fraud.

And if you want to help out monetarily, Quackwatch accepts donations.

The Joys of Homeopathy

The video below will hurt your brain, but don’t worry, the pain will make you stronger. This is a mashup of a few homeopaths rationalizing their baloney, mixed in with Star Trek technobabble. One worry is that it might have the side effect of making you hate Trek, which isn’t that bad — Star Trek in all of its versions has been saturated with a woo version of science, anyway.

Wait, don’t cry, don’t curl into a fetal ball and whimper. There is a corrective: good news. British skeptics have been working hard to fight homeopathy, UK doctors have called for a ban on homeopathic ‘medicines’, and the doctors have voted to make homeopathy unsupported by the national health service! Reason triumphs for once!

At least, it triumphs on the other side of the Atlantic. The University of Minnesota still supports homeopathy. I am so embarrassed.

If you don’t understand why rational people oppose homeopathy, maybe you need to read a cartoon about it.

Jerk of the Day

Why, oh why do I despise Christianity so much? Look to George Berkin to understand why. And if you can’t understand, you’re probably one of those Christians.

He’s got a long article up arguing that God is being good to Christopher Hitchens by afflicting him with a lingering disease, because it will give him a chance to repent. And then it suggests that everyone pray for a deathbed conversion. Hallelujah.

First, Hitchens is not dead. He has cancer. There’s a difference. Learn it, or next time I see you I’m going to point out that you’re aging and start talking about you in the past tense, with lots of pitying looks.

Second, your god is clearly a dick, and so are you. I don’t see why you’re worshipping him, except that dicks seem to like other dicks an awful lot. Fortunately, your god is entirely imaginary, so I can’t get pissed off at him, but you are supposedly a civilized and rational human being, so I do get to regard you with deserved contempt.

Third, I have enough respect for Hitchens’ integrity and personal courage that even if he were on his deathbed, hopefully many, many years from now, I’d expect him to remain true to his principles…unless he were dying of Alzheimer’s disease, or major head trauma. Stop begging him to be weak and cowardly.

Most annoyingly of all, Berkin is addressing Hitchens and writes, “But now, let’s talk, one grownup to another.” Berkin, you condescending twit, someone is excluded from the conversation by that restriction, and it isn’t the guy who refuses to believe in magic wish fulfillment fantasies involving a dead charlatan who’ll poof you into a celestial candyland if you believe in a woman cursing humankind for eternity by eating bad fruit.

God is not great. But his followers are worse.

Biblical verification of an atheist message

Austin has put up one of those mild, positive, and effective billboards that so rile up the faithful. It’s impressive that it’s happening in Texas, but I noticed something portentious in its placement: it’s on I-35, a road familiar to me as the major north-south artery in this region (Minnesota and Texas have a direct connection, you see). I-35 also has a freakish association in the fundagelical brain, because of a passage in Isaiah 35:8:

And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.

If any indignant bible-lovin’ Texans start complaining about the billboard, I suggest we tell them to read their Good Book, where it clearly says there can be no error in the sign.

Episode LXXV: My people

I have allowed the amazing thread to go on a little too long, but my excuse is that I’m distracted. When I’m not trying to get some work done in my hotel room, I’m out among the milling hordes at Convergence. I warn you, the video below may horrify some…but these motley nerds, geeks, weirdos, freaks, and strangely imaginative and gentle partiers are my people.

It’s going to be interesting tonight. The Trophy Wife™, who is actually a normal person and has never been to a con before, arrives to find out what goes on at these things, and there may be a little culture shock. It could unlock her inner geek, or there may be marriage counseling and psychiatry in our future. I can take being locked in the rubber room, dear, as long as there is wireless.

(Current totals: 10,528 entries with 1,041,399 comments.)

Zombie sightings

Frickin’ electricity, how does it work?

This is a scanned page from a Christian science textbook published by Bob Jones University. I think they’ve been listening to too much Insane Clown Posse.

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We’re all just mindless zombies here at scienceblogs, but somehow, BJU is even more brainless. I swear, a creationist could walk by right now and I wouldn’t even drool. But even in my decaying state, and as a biologist, not a physicist, I can answer this one.

Electricity is not a mystery on the level this book is discussing. There is a lot we don’t know about fundamental particles, but we understand the principles of electromagnetism so well that we can use it to build hair dryers and Large Hadron Colliders; to make the argument that we are mystified by it is lying to the kids.

The common creationist argument that we can only know what we directly perceive with our unaided senses is also nonsense. One could argue that we don’t really see people, what we do is gather photons that have been perturbed, we think, by a body, and infer the existence of a person…but that’s sophistry. It is no less ‘seeing electricity’ to say that I can hook up a current meter to a couple of wires and see a needle move in response to the flow of electrons.

That second paragraph is a horror of gobbledygook. Apparently, they think electricity is something like oil, a substance lying in large deposits that must be harvested and poured into your hairdryer to make it work. A current, as mentioned above, is produced by the movement of charged particles, nothing more or less. The sun produces moving charged particles, so it is a source of electricity, and the movement of the earth generates an electromagnetic field, but I can also do the zombie shuffle across the carpet to build up an excess of charged particles and touch the cat to allow them to flow, creating electricity myself, like unto a God. I do not have to create particles to make electricity, I just have to make them move.

Also, if that little girl did not use electricity, she would be dead. All of the cells in your body create charge imbalances by pumping charged ions across their membranes, and using the flow of ions back across those membranes to create chemical energy — they are machines that convert chemical energy into electricity that is used to power little dynamos that create stored chemical energy. We also use the gated movements of charged ions to generate electrical currents in our nerves and muscles, which is how we think and move.

Isn’t it nice how clearly religion is shown to be a science-stopper? Just take common questions, declare them a mystery and that no one has an answer, and presto, religion becomes an authority. An authority stuck at a dead end.

(via @jbrownridge)