The threat of a pandemic creates so many ways for parasites to prosper. Take Stefanie Kelley Haines, of Eastern Oregon, who is, surprisingly, the director of clinical services for Harney District Hospital.

Stefanie Haines is director of clinical services for Harney District Hospital in Burns. Like many rural health care workers, she plays more than one role in the region’s isolated health care system. Haines owns the only fitness center in a town, which isn’t just a gym. It’s also an affiliate of The Wellness Way, a chiropractic company selling pricey lab tests to diagnose all kinds of ailments. The program also markets treatment plans like the “vaccine detox.”

On her personal Facebook page, Haines advances conspiracy theories about the debunked dangers of vaccinations, while promoting services available through the fitness center. Through memes, articles and her own words, Haines has vilified immunizations that protect millions of people from communicable diseases like measles, influenza and polio.

Before people in the U.S. started dying from the new COVID-19 disease, for which there is no vaccine, Haines told friends and followers, “the flu shot increases susceptibility to Coronavirus.”

Don’t worry about Ms Haines, though. The hospital is distancing itself from her views, but isn’t doing anything about their employee spreading misinformation.

Great. There is always a line of frauds ready to take advantage of people’s fears.

This guy is seriously suggesting that we simply infect everyone with the coronavirus right now and get it over with, because drawing it all out is hurting his pwecious stock market.

This is absolutely horrifying.

Rick Santelli on @CNBC says we should consider giving coronavirus to everybody to just get it over with.

That way it won’t wreak so much havoc on the economy.

This is your brain on capitalism.pic.twitter.com/Uv5UYyKtxy

— Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) March 5, 2020

Even if you play it with the sound off, he looks deranged. How dare we hurt his money?

I have a few objections to his plan. One is that part of the problem with a pandemic is that it overwhelms the capacity of clinics and hospitals to properly treat patients. His solution maximizes chaos and thereby maximizes the amount of death and suffering. These viruses mutate every year, like the flu, so slamming the population now doesn’t mean we won’t get a repeat next year. And finally, and least, if he thinks the stock market is hurting now, imagine what it would look like in a month in which 10 million Americans died and far more are flattened with illness and grief.

That bozo is Rick Santelli, a business editor for CNBC. He’s not a doctor. He is evidence that a business degree tends to inflate the ego but not the knowledge of its recipients.

A couple of my anti-creationist pals, James Downard and Jackson Wheat, have released a new book, The Rocks Were There: Straight Science Answers to bent Creationist Questions, Volume 1. I expect it will be good, but I just ordered my copy 5 minutes ago, so I haven’t read it yet, and can’t actually review it.

That doesn’t stop the creationists, though: it has a single one-star review from a long-winded pseudoscientist named James V. Kohl. I’ve dealt with him before, he’s a crank. Don’t let his review stop you — we need more honest reviews to counter the nonsense kooks like Kohl throw around.

There are many ways that fake science can be promoted: two factors are the profit motive and lazy media. Or are those the same thing? The media has become obliging to industry in part because they also want to make money.

One day at the conference, while six or seven of us were standing in a circle during a break, the conversation shifted to climate change. Because I didn’t know much about the subject, I kept asking the others questions, trying to understand whether the research was any good. A woman who covered the environment for a newspaper out west began laughing, saying that there were about a dozen scientists who said that climate science was nonsense. She kept contact information around for all 12 of them, she told us, because her editors required her to put one of these doubters in every story to provide journalistic “balance.”

Several reporters in the circle giggled. This was my first hint that what I was reading in the media on climate science might be overemphasizing contrarian opinions. Because what everyone in that circle already knew, and I was learning, was that by 2004 thousands of climate experts around the world had published research showing global warming was real, and mostly caused by carbon dioxide pollution from burning oil, coal, and gas.

I’ve noticed that. There are huge numbers of qualified people working at universities around the world who will give you the same strong answer — climate change is real — yet it’s always the same handful of climate “skeptics” who get all the attention. Understanding and accepting the scientific consensus makes you a mundane member of a huge community of informed agreement, disagreeing makes you one in a million, and therefore newsworthy. I’ve joked before that if I wanted to fund my retirement, all I’d have to do is accept Christ in my heart and reject godless evolution, and I’d get daily invitations and honoraria to make my testimony.

But there I’d just be getting bits of cash from little church groups all over the country. If I really want to clean up, I’d have to tap into the oil and gas and coal industry, or maybe Big Tobacco, industries with bigger pockets.

Industries create these campaigns because they are effective at confusing the public and the press about science, which helps to slow or stop policy changes that would require stronger anti-pollution laws, or taking products off the market. Today disinformation has become its own industry, one that distorts not only climate science, but most areas of research where studies might influence how the government regulates corporations.

There’s the catch: I don’t want to be effective at confusing the public. Clarity doesn’t pay when your salary comes from liars, though.

But I have to add that money isn’t the only motive to fake science. Creationists are driven by their religion; anti-vaxxers don’t personally profit, usually, and are doing themselves harm; flat-earthers are fueling their ego with contrarianism. Money helps, though.

Here we go again. We have a new gang of atheists with the same old meaningless buzzwords: Atheists for Liberty. It’s for Americans who care about Enlightenment Values, specifically Atheists • Agnostics • Freethinkers • Non-religious • Skeptics • Independents • Conservatives • Libertarians • Classical Liberals • Centrists. I notice there are a few labels missing from their list, like liberals, progressives, and humanists, and that becomes even more obvious when you look at their “principles”, which are basically dogmatic conservative Americanism. Of course they worship Free Speech! But mainly because they hate social justice. Even much of the atheist community which used to pride itself on steadfast free-thinking principles, has fallen victim to the poisonous, emotional forces of Intersectionality, Social Justice, and “Wokeness”.

They never get around to saying what “Enlightenment values” are, but it sounds good. I expect that what they really liked about the Enlightenment was the eurocentrism, the racism, the slavery, and the colonialism. Bring back the 18th century!

The founder bios say a lot, too.

Thomas Sheedy is President and founder of Atheists for Liberty. Sheedy is an entrepreneur from Long Island, New York. He is an undergraduate in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs at the University at Albany, where he serves as an Auxiliary Officer for the University at Albany College Republicans. He has appeared on multiple podcasts, blogs, and YouTube video interviews, and has participated extensively in student atheist activism. Sheedy was an Assistant State Director for American Atheists, President of the Long Island Atheists, Event Organizer for Center for Inquiry Long Island, President and founder of the Ward Melville High School Secular Student Alliance, and a member of the Center for Inquiry Student Advisory Committee from Fall 2015 to Summer 2016. Additionally, he is a member of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State‘s Youth Advisory Council. In 2015 he received the Richard and Beverly Hermsen Student Activist Award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation and was FFRF’s student of the year. He also holds memberships with Turning Point USA at SUNY Albany, Louder With Crowder Mug Club, the National Rifle Association of America, The Ripon Society, and the American Conservation Coalition.

Yikes. American Atheists, FFRF, and Americans United, you disappoint me, coddling this viper in your midst; CFI, I’m not surprised; TPUSA and the NRA, this is exactly the kind of young asshole I expect from you; Louder With Crowder Mug Club, that must be comic relief, right? Crowder is one of the dumbest conservatives on YouTube, and you just pay him money to join that club.

Guess who the advisors to Atheists for Liberty are.

Go ahead, guess.

They’re the usual suspects in the atheist community.

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