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Entertainment/culture Personal Politics

Get off my lawn, you whipper-snappers!

Friday morning while doing some work in my office, I was treated to a discussion by the two hosts of a morning radio talk show. The talk was apparently prompted by a rather odd website, ihateyoungpeople.com, which asks: We want you to create a video of yourself explaining what you hate the most about young […]

Categories
Humor Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Global warming skeptics: Punk’d!

Hilarious. Even though I risk bringing back some of the anthropogenic global warming “skeptics” (in reality pseudoskeptics) here, this is too rich not to mention, because it reminds me of how advocates of all stripes of pseudoscience react, particularly advocates of alternative medicine, most of whom wouldn’t recognize a well-designed study if it bit them […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

One last update (for now) on the youth who “cured himself” of melanoma, Chad Jessop

I hadn’t intended to write about this again, at least not for a while, but curiosity got the better of me. About a month and a half ago, I discussed a highly dubious story that was going around by e-mail about a 17-year-old boy with melanoma whose mother supposedly “cured” him with “natural” treatments. As […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Pseudoscience, quackery, crankery, and the ad hominem

Over the weekend, it appears that a post of mine, in which I included a link to a video of comic Tim Slagle doing the comedy routine that, in my never-ending effort to live up to the stereotype of the humorless skeptic that the credulous like so much, I castigated for its misrepresentations of science […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Surgery

An update on the youth who “cured himself” of melanoma, Chad Jessop

About a month and a half ago, I discussed an e-mail that was being propagated far and wide that described the case of the mother of a 17 year old male who, or so the e-mail claimed, cured her son of stage IV melanoma using “natural means” and was supposedly thrown in maximum security prison […]