This is the sort of stuff everyone should know by the time they finish grade school.

This is what can happen when people take psychics seriously. A Canadian School Board made accusations of sexual abuse based on a psychic’s ‘vision’.

Leduc said they advised her that Victoria’s educational assistant (EA) had visited a psychic, who said a youngster whose name started with “V” was being sexually abused by a man between 23 and 26 years old.

For some reason, I’m unconvinced. You?

I found this story by way of this Skepticality post.

The above comic is created and licensed by Rudis Muiznieks of Cectic.com.

Not only does this comic point out the absurdity of treating any ‘alternative’ theory seriously, it actually makes a deeper point. It’s also a critic of modern American media. When the media reports on almost any issue, it tries to report on both sides of that issue, even when one side is a deluded minority with an agenda.

It kinda brings to mind media’s coverage of global warming and teaching evolution, doesn’t it?

Happy Friday!

The above comic is created and licensed by Rudis Muiznieks of Cectic.com.

I just love Cectic.com. They even have a cool shirt you can buy now.

A while back, I blogged about my disappointment over the British government employing a ‘psychic’ to de-haunt a home. Now, that very same government is implementing new laws that protect gullible consumers from supposed fortune tellers, mediums, spiritual healers, etc. The new laws require such ‘psychics’ to demonstrate the efficacy of their trade before selling products or services.

Not surprisingly, the bullshit artists are complaining about the new laws. An astute observer might note that they have nothing to fear if their products and services actually work. So why are they protesting? It’s likely because most of them know it’s bullshit and fear that their ill-gotten income will be lost.

If I’m giving a healing to someone, I don’t want to have to stand there and say I don’t believe in what I’m doing,” said Carole McEntee-Taylor, a healer who co-founded the Spiritual Workers Association.

“I’d rather keep that to myself,” she may as well have added.

Many of con-artists are claiming these laws amount to religious discrimination. I’m sorry, but being religious doesn’t not exempt you from consumer protection laws or any other laws for that matter.

This is a small victory for evidence-based policy advocates!

I found an excellent article on the website Science Progress via RichardDawkins.net. It was written by Leah Ceccarelli and is about a class of sophistry that is 2,500 years old yet is being used to great effect by anti-science elements in recent decades.

The technique manufactures a controversy where none exists to create public confusion in order to pursue an agenda. Ceccarelli gives three examples in recent years. The first is from global warming deniers. Those who have reason to delay action on global warming exaggerate the minority scientific opinion way out of proportion in order to make it appear main stream. This generated a controversy where none existed and it effectively halted political action that would have been based on good science.

A second example of the use of this tactic is from Africa. Some political leaders did the exact same thing with AIDS deniers (those who denied a link between HIV and AIDS) to forestall spending on treatment.

The final example is the ‘teach the controversy’ campaign used by the Discovery Institute and other evolution deniers. There is no controversy in the scientific community but by marketing the minute opposing view, the public has been convinced that there is. Their goal, of is to undermine science so that religion can once again become our culture’s only truth source.

The rest of the article is Ceccarelli’s hypothesis as to why this brand of ancient sophistry has been so effective at undermining science. These are her first steps in trying to find a way to combat this irrationalism from a rhetoric point of view. Please, read the article. It’s fantastic information for those of us who love and want to protect science.

The above comic is created and licensed by Cectic.com.

If people believe the bullshit works, sell it to them! Happy Friday!

Reuters is carrying an interesting story. Apparently, the British government paid a ‘psychic’ to rid a state home of a ‘poltergeist’. My knee-jerk reaction is outrage that the government of an ‘enlightened’ country would waste funds on charlatans but reading more about the story uncovered an interesting moral dilemma.

The poor family living in there were going to leave the house and never return unless the government did something about the ‘haunting’. This would leave the family homeless. So two things to note here. First, the government didn’t believe in the existence of the ghost, the family did. Second, procuring alternative housing for the family would cost more than the fraud ‘psychic’. So here’s the dilemma: Should the government let the family’s own superstition drive them from their subsidized housing and make it available to more rational, but still needy tenants or did the government do the right thing? I’m interested in your thoughts.

In the past, I have read that corn-based ethanol may have a net carbon-neutral effect at best. This was because the fossil fuel based fertilizers used to grown most all corn in the US offset any gains. Now, Scientific American has published an article about two new studies that show a major piece of the carbon equation has been neglected in previous research on biofuels. These show that the widespread use of all biofuels would definitely increase net carbon emissions.

It is true that when burned, biofuels represent a carbon-emissions savings over fossil fuels. So how is it that they increase overall carbon emissions? It is through plant-displacement. When an area is cleared to make way for growing biofuels, the plants that were being used are no longer sucking up and storing their share of carbon. In fact, they begin releasing their stored carbon as they decay.

This plant-displacement effect is amplified by free market forces. For the first time, space to grow fuel is competing with space to grow food. The upshot of this is that biofuels will increase food prices, especially soy bean prices. With high soy prices, people in places like Brazil start cutting down carbon-rich rain forest and planting lucrative soy. An acre of soy stores much less carbon than an acre of rain forest. As that rain forest foliage is burnt or left to decay, all their carbon is released into the atmosphere.

There are ways to make biofuels work, but none of them are economically efficient and thus won’t be pursued without government intervention. Combine this with the fact that “if we convert every corn kernel grown today in the U.S. to ethanol we offset just 12 percent of our gasoline use,” and one can see that biofuels are not a way out of the global warming problem.

Recently, Scott of Spiritual Tramp tagged me with with an astrology related game. Participation had the following rules:

1. Mention the person who tagged you and create a link back to them.
2. Copy-paste the traits for all the twelve months (see below).
3. Pick your month of birth.
4. Highlight the traits that apply to you.
5. Tag 12 people and let them know by visiting their blogs and leaving a comment for them.
6. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve done it!

Being the curmudgeon skeptic that I am, I can’t in good conscious spread this game, so I will not participate in step five. Also, instead of highlighting the traits that apply to me, I’m going to highlight the traits that do not apply to me. I’ll also offer commentary (of course). To be fair, Scott participated for the fun of it. As far as I know, he certainly doesn’t believe astrology in any form is legitimate.

My month is November. Here is a list of November’s traits with the ones that do not apply to me highlighted:

Read the rest of this entry »