What is it with all the quacks on daytime TV?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
What is it with all the quacks on daytime TV?
Registration is now open for Skepticon IV, to be held in Springfield, Missouri on 19-20 November. I don’t know how you’ll be able to afford it — it still has that extravagant price tag of $0. It’s a fun event! And if you get bored, you can always hop on a bus and go to Branson, instead!
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.
