British Chiropractic Association promote bogus treatments

Along with a lot of other bloggers, I want to repost this quote from an article by Simon Singh:
The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is [...]

Daily Mail campaigning both for and against vaccination

Via The Lay Scientist: Nauseating tabloid The Daily Mail publishes editions in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Like a lot of the UK press, it’s taking part in an irresponsible and anti-scientific campaign to deny people life-saving vaccines (the cervical cancer vaccine in this case), but the Irish edition is campaigning for [...]

New Scientist: Religious books masquerading as science

Hooray for the mighty Wikileaks, preserving for us the New Scientist article “How to spot a hidden religious agenda” that the magazine itself has taken off its web site for legal reasons.
The piece is important and deserves a wider discussion. The “science” shelves of a high street bookshop put outright pseudo-science right alongside popularisations of [...]

Calling out Clueless Celebrities

Madonna says she’s “working with scientists” to “neutralise radiation.” Juliette Stevenson says a baby’s immune system can’t handle three pathogens at once. David Baddiel raises alarm about “chemicals” in his blood. None of these people seem to have a clue what they’re on about, but what they say is accepted by a lot of the [...]

9/11 Conspiracy Theories

In Skeptic magazine, Phil Molé gives a well-argued demolition of the arguments of the “911 Truth Movement”. Basically these are conspiracy theorists who blend defensible concerns about the War on Terror with daffy or contradictory speculations about the 9/11 attacks, inadvertently doing the Bush Administration and right-wing media a huge service in the process.
This post [...]

Christian Fundamentalists on Hurricane Katrina

Depressing, but worth noting. Just as there were evangelicals who thought the 9/11 attacks were sent by God, so there are now pastors thanking God for destroying the Gay Pride marches, the abortion clinics and the bare-breasted revellers in New Orleans.
“New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration [...]

Deunant Books: Father Neil Horan

Sports fans will be familiar with the name of Neil Horan, who disrupted a Grand Prix race at Silverstone by running onto the track and dancing in front of the cars, apparently only realising afterward that he could have caused a massively fatal pile-up. This weekend he disrupted the final event of the Athens Olympics [...]