Balderdash & Hoaxes – Page 2

Nibiru apocalypse failed again

Since you’re reading this, the world didn’t end, Saturday. Again. Damn… All those wacky “predictions” from the fringe of the ignorati didn’t come true. Again. Not that that’s surprising: what’s surprising is that these conspiracy-minded folk keep proposing the end of the world as we know it (TEOTWAWKI) over and over, often regurgitating the same nonsense, just with new dates. And yet they keep missing the mark. Yesterday was no exception. Here we are, bereft of another apocalypse on a beautiful, sunny Sunday morning. Damn. … click below for more ↓

WiFi hysteria again

2017-04-09 2017-04-09 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & QuackeryLeave a comment

Every so often, old crackpot ideas, hoaxes, cons and plainly silly pseudoscience resurface online under the guise of Trump-like alternate fact. Scary stories about chemicals in your food, fake health tips, and Facebook-stealing-your-photos nonsense compete for attention with actual news and factual stories. The old bromide about wireless signals (WiFi) killing things is just one to come back to life this week on Facebook. (You already know Facebook isn’t a reliable source of anything factual, even though factual content does get shared now and then. … click below for more ↓

Antarctica’s icy hoaxes return

2017-03-24 2017-03-24 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & QuackeryLeave a comment

Under the thick ice of Antarctica lies buried the remains of an advanced civilization, dating back 55,000-65,000 years. So startling was this discovery that world leaders were flown in to the perennially frozen continent to witness for themselves the proof of alien presence on our planet. Or not. Well, really not. Not at all. You don’t really believe that claptrap about Antarctica, do you? I tried to warn you about this malarky in 2013. It’s a hoax that just won’t die. Or rather a series … click below for more ↓

Ghostly claptrap

2017-02-27 2017-02-27 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Faith / New Age CodswallopLeave a comment

Does the Large Hadron Collider Actually Disprove Ghosts? That’s the question asked in a recent article posted on Gizmodo. Well, of course it doesn’t. The LHC doesn’t disprove invisible pink unicorns, either. It can’t disprove what doesn’t exist. No matter how many wingnut websites promise to reunite you with your long lost loved ones (for a fee, of course), ghosts are all in your imagination. Along with goblins,orcs, vampires, werewolves, dragons, angels, fairies, demons, and, yes, invisible pink unicorns. Nothing the LHC does will change … click below for more ↓

Hoax: Five-meter giant skeletons

2017-02-22 2017-02-23 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Creationism / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & QuackeryLeave a comment

Once again, the internet is being circulated with fake news that grabs the gullible by their grey matter. This time’s it’s a regurgitation of a 2014 hoax – then recycled in 2015- claiming the skeleton of a five-meter tall giant was unearthed in Australia. Accompanying the reports are risibly Photoshopped images that even a child could see are fakes. As a report on Hoax-Slayer noted: Supposedly, the skeleton was found near Uluru in central Australia and was 5.3 meters long. The report also claims that … click below for more ↓

TEOTWAWKI, New Year’s Eve

2016-12-26 2016-12-24 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Christianity / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Faith / New Age CodswallopLeave a comment

Some religious wingnuts aren’t planning to celebrate the ringing in of the New Year, 2017. Nope: they’re going to await the arrival of their zombie deity who, one can only suppose, will be bringing the champagne to his own party when he returns from the dead. The end of the world party, of course. And another day that, for the rest of us, will pass by with nothing happening, end-of-the-world-deity-arising-wise. According to a story in Christian Today (which judging by the click-bait ad content and … click below for more ↓

The meaning of dreams

2016-10-29 2016-10-29 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Behaviour & Psychology / Critical Thinking / New Age CodswallopLeave a comment

Jack Kerouac woke up most mornings in the 1950s and scribbled into a bedside notebook what he could remember of his dreams. Characters from his novels interacted with fantasies and real life events. The result was eventually published in 1961 as his Book of Dreams; 184 pages of mostly spontaneous or stream-of-consciousness writing, as this excerpt shows: WALKING THROUGH SLUM SUBURBS of Mexico City I’m stopped by smiling threesome of cats who’ve disengaged themselves from the general fairly crowded evening street of brown lights, coke … click below for more ↓

The 10 Worst?

2016-10-24 2016-10-24 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Creationism / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & QuackeryOne Comment

Skeptoid just published its top-ten worst anti-science websites and I’m sure you won’t be surprised at the awardees, especially not the regulars like Mercola, Dr. Oz, Deepak Chopra and Food Babe (aka the Worst Assault on Science on the Internet). Predatory quacks, crackpots and fakirs you will easily recognize. Surprisingly, the uber-wingnut David Wolfe was absent this year. Some of these sites sugar-coat their nonsense with pseudo-spirituality, usually some mashup of New Age codswallop and ancient mumbo-jumbo. Many ascribe their claptrap to traditional – non-medical, unproven … click below for more ↓

Enough with the astrology claptrap already

2016-10-01 2016-10-01 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & Quackery2 Comments

“No,” wrote Phil Plait on Slate, “NASA Didn’t Change Your Astrological Sign.” Which it didn’t. But that hasn’t stopped the wingnuts from wailing over the recent announcement from NASA allegedly changing your horoscope. Let’s start with the basics. Plait sums it up nicely: Astrology isn’t science; it’s nonsense. It’s been tested 10 ways to Sunday and every time it fails. Even astrologers have come up with tests for it, and it’s failed those. Astrology doesn’t work. Ah, but that doesn’t seem to dampen the belief … click below for more ↓

Fake Ark, Fake Religion

2016-07-16 2016-07-16 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Christianity / Creationism / Critical Thinking / Cults / Faith / Religious intolerance3 Comments

Well, it finally opened: the $100 million-dollar Noah’s Ark theme park in Kentucky that features an allegedly life-size model of the mythological boat described in the Bible. It’s 510 feet (155.4m) long, 85 feet (26m) wide, more than three storeys (51 feet) tall, uses 3.1 million board-feet of lumber, steel and other modern materials, on a base of rebar-reinforced concrete.* The only two materials specifically mentioned in the Biblical tale are gopher wood and pitch. But this reconstruction doesn’t use gopher wood or pitch – curiously, both are conspicuous in … click below for more ↓

432 vs 440Hz: Science or Codswallop?

2016-02-14 2020-10-04 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Culture / Music & Reviews / Musical Instruments / New Age CodswallopOne Comment

Canadian band Walk Off the Earth posted excitedly on Facebook that they had just recorded a new song. Great. I like WOTE and look forward to their new song. What was really different about that notice was that they also said they had changed their instruments from the standard A440 to A432 tuning, and it made a huge difference to them: For all the music nerds out there, you might want to look into this. This has not been 100% proven but the evidence is … click below for more ↓

The Flat Earthers Respawn

2016-01-24 2016-01-24 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & Quackery5 Comments

While flat-earther might be a metaphor for a certain kid of myopic, political stupidity (think of your local council…), I learned this week that it’s also a thriving online subculture of rabidly pseudo-science wingnuts. A couple of entertaining articles about the flat-earthers appeared on the UK’s Guardian paper site (here and here) this week (and in the HuffPost, too). They surprised, but also disturbed me. I hadn’t actually believed in flat-earthers as a modern reality: while I knew of their former existence, I thought the concept was … click below for more ↓

What Would $101 Million Buy?

2016-01-18 2016-01-18 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Christianity / Creationism / Critical Thinking3 Comments

The answer to that question could be very long. I’ll bet among all the things you thought of buying with that much, you weren’t even once thinking it could buy a 510-foot replica of the mythological Noah’s ark. But that’s what it is buying the folks who run the Ark Encounter theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky. You can see video “encounters” of it being built. Sort of (they wouldn’t work for me, but I’m an evolutionist, so their god probably stopped me from seeing them…) The park … click below for more ↓

The “Secret” Space Program Hoax

2016-01-10 2016-01-10 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Pseudoscience & Quackery2 Comments

It’s just one more of those wingnut fantasy conspiracies that popped up on my Facebook feed recently. It’s not a new one: the old aliens-among-us nonsense just gets recycled and re-spewed by a whole new group of ignorati who follow the scam artists, hoaxers and charlatans who in turn make their living off this stuff. This latest group is, apparently, led by two top wingnuts. If there was an army for wingnuts, they’d be five-star generals. One is Corey Goode, described as having… …an extensive knowledge … click below for more ↓

The Mouse on Mars

2015-11-25 2015-11-25 Astronomy & Cosmology / Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Science & TechnologyLeave a comment

No, that’s not the title of a 1960s’ sitcom or a 1950s’ movie. It’s what some conspiracy theorist thinks he found in a NASA photograph taken by the Curiosity Rover on Mars, in late 2014. The story was posted on the IFL Science website this week. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Why pay these poor, deluded wingnuts any attention when it’s such an obvious case of pareidolia?” The answer is because they must be mocked in order to keep their silly gullibility from spreading to … click below for more ↓