Category: Balderdash & Hoaxes

Basic folderol: nonsense being promulgated as science; allegations parading as fact; suspicion and paranoia being presented as proof. Sometimes the intent to mislead is deliberate, sometimes the result of simple gullibility or lack of education.

Putting Homeopathy to the Test

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & Quackery2 Comments

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Homeopathic products often make a lot of outrageous claims. Given that these products are just water, or sometimes water and sugar, anyone with a gnat’s worth of common sense doesn’t believe those claims. Nor are they backed by any evidence. It’s no wonder homeopathy is called the “air guitar of medicine:” It should not be a shock to learn that homeopathy has no basis in scientific fact – should anyone doubt this I invite them to peruse Edzard Ernst’s systematic review of the practice. Homeopaths … click below for more ↓

Modern Credulity Sucks

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical ThinkingLeave a comment

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People believe a lot of crazy things. I’m talking about really seriously bat-shit crazy  stuff that somehow people you thought were normal believe and now you look at them like they have grown extra heads. It’s like discovering a whole family of cousins you’ve been inviting for Xmas dinner all those years are actually Scientologists. Or Westboro Baptists. Islamic Jihadists. Harperites. That sort of crazy. The sort of crazy that makes saner folks frightened enough to hide in the basement and hope for the apocalypse to … click below for more ↓

Apocalyptic Wingnuts At It Again

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / New Age CodswallopLeave a comment

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The end-of-the-worlders are again predicting the immanent destruction of the planet. This time it will happen on 22-23 September, 2015. You might recall the world ended in 2000, 2003, 2009, 2012 and again in 2013. So this is what it looks like after the end… The latest wingnut theory is that an asteroid will land in the Caribbean that month, swamping Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. It will create 300-foot tsunami waves up to the east coast of the USA. Florida will be completely inundated. … click below for more ↓

Jade Helm 15 and the Madness of America

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Politics / US PoliticsLeave a comment

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For a guy who gets great entertainment from reading the wild and wacky conspiracy theories that sprout like mushrooms online, I was surprised that I missed the rapid growth of the Jade Helm 15 conspiracy. I only noticed it as a surface ripple until this past weekend, when I realized it had blossomed into a full-blown madness. Jade Helm 15 goes beyond the usual tinfoil-hat conspiracies: it’s full tinfoil body armour stuff.  And it’s been raised to the level of a hundred voices in an … click below for more ↓

Another TEOTWAWKI

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Christianity / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Faith2 Comments

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TEOTWAWKI – The End Of The World As We Know It – has been predicted ever since humans looked up in wonder at the sky and decided it was peopled with invisible beings. Beings who wanted to do us harm, it seems. And as quickly as we people the sky, there developed an industry predicting when they would harm us, which soon led to the invention of the cash register. Wikipedia has a long list of dates predicted for the end of the world over … click below for more ↓

Ontario’s Assault on Health Care

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Provincial Politics / Pseudoscience & QuackeryLeave a comment

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Earlier this month, the Ontario government took a shot at real medicine when it became the first province in Canada to regulate homeopathy. What the government should have done, if it had any real concern about our collective health or our health care system, is ban it. Instead, although it at first seemed an April Fool’s joke, on April 1 the Wynne government announced legislation that will do nothing but legitimize and help spread this dangerous pseudoscience. Clearly this was a political move,  since it is not … click below for more ↓

Extraordinary Claims

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Creationism / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & QuackeryLeave a comment

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As the poster for the Centre for Inquiry notes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It’s a popular catchphrase for the skeptical movement, but should be an intellectual policy for everyone. Regardless of what is being claimed, it requires evidence at the same level of the claim. Anecdote is not evidence, please note, especially personal anecdote even with the corroboration of other witnesses. People often “see” what they choose to see, and interpret events and objects according to preconceived ideas. Seeing UFOs instead of ordinary aircraft, or … click below for more ↓

It’s Official: Homeopathy is Bunk

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Health & Medicine / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & Quackery / Science & Technology4 Comments

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“Homeopathy not effective for treating any condition, Australian report finds,” reads a headline in The Guardian this week. Well, that’s hardly news. But it repeats saying anyway. It’s a story about the latest in a series of studies that again and again debunk homeopathy as a treatment and conclude it is useless. Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) “…thoroughly reviewed 225 research papers on homeopathy to come up with its position statement,” the paper reported. And on Gizmodo they said: An analysis of over … click below for more ↓

Bad News For Balderdash

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Creationism / Critical Thinking / Memes; Internet & Social / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & Quackery / Social media & cyberbullying / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

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A recent story on New Scientist gives a glimmer of hope for those of us who bemoan the swelling tsunami of claptrap and codswallop that fills the internet: THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free “news” stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness. What a relief that will be. Of course it may spell doom for the popularity of pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, fad diets, racist, anti-vaccination fearmongers, … click below for more ↓

Comets, Aliens and Conspiracy Wingnuts

Astronomy & Cosmology / Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Science & Technology / Technology & GadgetsOne Comment

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The European Space Agency has accomplished one of the greatest engineering and scientific achievements in human history this past week. Not only did it get a space vehicle into orbit around a comet travelling at more than 55,000 km/hr (34,000 mph), it landed a probe on the very rough surface of that comet. Outstanding, brilliant, superb… the superlatives fail me when trying to describe this event. The Rosetta spacecraft chased Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for ten years (since March, 2004) travelling almost four billion miles (6.4 b km) … click below for more ↓

Camping’s madness carries on

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / FaithLeave a comment

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6zEUCiyFqg&feature=youtu.be] Harold Camping has been dead for almost a year, but his legacy lives on. Not just in the broken dreams of his deluded followers, but in the many lives he destroyed through his madness. You would have thought that, having predicted the end of the world several times, and been wrong each one, because of the general embarrassment of anyone who gave him even the slightest credence, he would be buried and forgotten, except as a caricature of religious nuttiness. And a scam artist. But no, … click below for more ↓

Debunking Homeopathy. Again.

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Health & Medicine / Pseudoscience & QuackeryOne Comment

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Homeopathy. It’s absolute bunk. But you already know that. All those forms of ‘magic medicine‘* are bunk, of course, but homeopathy has a special place reserved for it in the kingdom of codswallop. Codswallop is dangerous to the mind, and often to your wallet, but homeopathy compounds that by being dangerous to your health, too, even fatal, as Penelope Dingle discovered. Yes, homeopathy can kill you, if you take it’s fake cures instead of actual medicine or treatment.** But, you ask, if a placebo works … click below for more ↓

The Ebola Panic

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Health & Medicine / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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Ebola has gripped the imagination of North American media and been spun into a terrifying spectre looming like a horseman of the apocalypse over us. So widespread has it become that Jenny McCarthy, one of the top wingnuts of quackery and pseudomedicine, and poster girl for the pro-measles-pro-mumps parents, felt compelled to pipe up with her own “cure,” should it spread to the USA: Lemon juice. Yep. Wonder how the scientists missed that one. A quick trip to the grocery store and you’re immune. Safe easy … click below for more ↓

Chemtrails: yet more conspiracy claptrap

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Pseudoscience & Quackery5 Comments

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A bit of simple math was used to debunk the chemtrail nonsense conspiracy recently. Over at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry’s website there’s a great piece explaining why there simply aren’t enough pilots, planes or chemicals for the chemtrail silliness to be true: A typical crop duster might use seven ounces of agent diluted in seven gallons of water to cover one acre of land. Chemtrail “people dusters” would use a similar concentration to cover the entire United States, just to be safe. For 2.38 … click below for more ↓

Talking to water, yelling at rice

Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & Quackery4 Comments

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Dr. Masaru Emoto thinks you can hurt water’s feelings by shouting at it. No, really. Stop laughing. He’s written a bestselling book about it – The Hidden Messages in Water – and he’s convinced a whole lot of people that he’s right. But of course, the sheer numbers of believers doesn’t mean he is. Dr. Emoto has a degree in “alternative medicine”* from the Open University of Mumbai. According to CSICOP, “the only requirement for this degree are one year of study and completion of one … click below for more ↓

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