Me-Too snowflakes

It has become like a mass hysteria.And everybody is joining in especially the hypocrites that knew about it but never said a thing.Yes you Meryl Streep.
And of course the Golden (what is so Golden about it, it is all plastic?) Globes have become a platform for those who seek attention. Hollywood disgust me. After all they are only  mere actors desperately seeking attention.
So?
One individual that took full advantage of appearing on stage was Oprah Winfrey. Most definitely and without doubt to further her own ambitions.

Does anyone remember all the pseudoscience and quackery she’s promoted?

Pseudoscience and quackery? Oh, yes. In the early years of this blog, Oprah was a frequent topic of Orac’s Insolence, and for good reason. She was one of the foremost promoters of pseudoscience, quackery, and general New Age BS in the world. If you think I’m exaggerating, just think of it this way. Oprah not only gave the world America’s quack, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and the foremost promoter of pseudoscience in mental health, Dr. Phil McGraw, who also stands accused of providing alcohol and drugs to addicts featured on his show in order to ramp up the drama factor. It would be bad enough if that were all she had done, but it’s not. https://respectfulinsolence.com/2018/01/09/oprah-winfrey-president-anyone-remember-pseudoscience-quackery-shes-promoted/

As I say, she is an ecumenical promoter of fantasies. Remember the satanic panic, the mass hysteria during the 1980s and early ’90s about satanists abusing and murdering children that resulted in the wrongful convictions of dozens of people who collectively spent hundreds of years incarcerated? Multiple Oprah episodes featured the celebrity “victims” who got that fantasy going. When a Christian questioner in her audience once described her as New Age, Winfrey was pissed. “I am not ‘New Age’ anything,” she said, “and I resent being called that. I don’t see spirits in the trees, and I don’t sit in the room with crystals.” Maybe not those two things specifically; she’s the respectable promoter of New Age belief and practice and nostrums, a member of the elite and friend to presidents, five of whom have appeared on her shows. New Age, Oprah-style, shares with American Christianities their special mixtures of superstition, selfishness, and a refusal to believe in the random. “Nothing about my life is lucky,” she has said. “Nothing. A lot of grace. A lot of blessings. A lot of divine order. But I don’t believe in luck.” https://slate.com/health-and-science/2018/01/oprah-winfrey-helped-create-our-irrational-pseudoscientific-american-fantasyland.html

But do yourself a favour and read the book by kitty Kelley.
If there was one untruth Oprah would have sued Kitty to hell and back!

This is murder

With reference to my previous (re)blog of the girl who died from cancer after following a quack cure I have come across this story here

It is about time that these quacks are removed from society. For good!

A controversial herbal “healer” and naturopath is under fire after the death of a teen girl he was treating for leukemia using a strict vegan diet and herbal supplements.

The Canadian Broadcasting Company reported on the death of the teen girl, who was from one of Ontario, Canada’s aboriginal First Nation tribes. Another teen girl from the same community is still in the care of Brian Clement, who Florida officials have ordered to stop practicing medicine and calling himself a doctor.

Clement operates the Hippocrates Institute, a spa-cum-clinic in Orlando, Florida where patients with serious diseases have been treated with what the state of Florida is calling “unproven and possibly dangerous therapies.”

Clement urges his patients to forego conventional medicine like chemotherapy in favor of veganism, supplements, juices and a raw diet.

Makayla Sault was 11 years old last July when she left chemotherapy in Hamilton, Ontario, to attend the Hippocrates Institute, which is licensed in Florida as a massage parlor. The girl died in January. The Ontario coroner’s office is investigating.

In the meantime, however, Clement has been ordered to cease and desist in calling himself a doctor — he is licensed only as a nutritionist, not a medical doctor — and to stop providing medical care to patients. The state issued their orders, along with a $3,738 fine, to Clement on Feb. 10. He was given 30 days to respond. He is facing possible felony charges of practicing medicine without a license.

 

Yes and this is the horror story… and it is true!

‘We were smart enough to eradicate measles, but arrogant enough to invite it back. Welcome to a four-part series on the precise ways we’re fucking up 50 years of medical progress. ‘ By Leigh Cowart

The great Persian physician Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī carefully documented  this little strand of RNA tucked in a protein envelope and which  has enjoyed a rare kind of notoriety, even in the shock-and-awe world of infectious diseases.

In 1529, the Spanish introduced it to Cuba, killing two out of three natives. Over the next decade or so, the virus ravaged Central America, decimating many populations and killing up to half of all Hondurans. And in 1693 in colonial America, Virginia governor Edmund Andros issued a proclamation for a “day of Humiliation and Prayer” in the hope of waylaying the virus.

It is one of the leading causes of death among young children, despite our ability to safely vaccinate against it. It is estimated that between the years of 2000 and 2013, vaccination has prevented 15.6 million deaths.

But please  read for yourself.

View at Medium.com

And if you are an anti vaccine being, hang you head in shame. THERE IS NO AND I STRESS ABSOLUTELY NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF THAT VACCINATION CAUSE AUTISM AND IF YOU ARE STUPID ENOUGH TO CHOOSE TO BELIEVE IT REMEMBER ONE PERSON WITH MEASLES CAN INFECT UP TO 18 UNVACIINATED PEOPLE AND SOME OF THEM MAY BE BABIES WHO WILL DIE.

Is this a CONSPIRACY?

 

Interesting article about conspiracy theorists. I have always said and I am saying it again,  they  conspiracy theorists, hav e an (interesting ) not so balanced psychological profile with a ‘ touch of ‘ paranoia of course. No point arguing with them either.I have known a  few, say no more!

 

Once you buy into the first conspiracy theory, the next one seems that much more plausible.

To believe that the U.S. government planned or deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks, you’d have to posit that President Bush intentionally sacrificed 3,000 Americans. To believe that explosives, not planes, brought down the buildings, you’d have to imagine an operation large enough to plant the devices without anyone getting caught. To insist that the truth remains hidden, you’d have to assume that everyone who has reviewed the attacks and the events leading up to them—the CIA, the Justice Department, the Federal Aviation Administration, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, scientific organizations, peer-reviewed journals, news organizations, the airlines, and local law enforcement agencies in three states—was incompetent, deceived, or part of the cover-up.

Conspiracy theory psychology is becoming an empirical field with a broader mission: to understand why so many people embrace this way of interpreting history. As you’d expect, distrust turns out to be an important factor. But it’s not the kind of distrust that cultivates critical thinking.

The common thread between distrust and cynicism, as defined in these experiments, is a perception of bad character. More broadly, it’s a tendency to focus on intention and agency, rather than randomness or causal complexity. In extreme form, it can become paranoia. In mild form, it’s a common weakness known as the fundamental attribution error—ascribing others’ behavior to personality traits and objectives, forgetting the importance of situational factors and chance. Suspicion, imagination, and fantasy are closely related.

Read it for yourself!

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/11/conspiracy_theory_psychology_people_who_claim_to_know_the_truth_about_jfk.single.html

 

 

Exciting Times!

Exciting times! Indeed.

European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission successfully placed a small spacecraft on the surface of a speeding comet on Wednesday. Now maybe we will find out of comets filled the oceans of the Earth! Maybe we could find out of organic material exists on comets which could mean life was seeded from outer space.

But of course this news is not for the faint hearted, creationists and conspiracy theorists.

For scientists, one of the central mysteries that Rosetta will explore is whether Earth’s oceans are filled with melted comets.

Since the rocky bits that came together to form the planet were dry, water has to have come from somewhere else. One possibility is that comets slamming into the Earthearly on seeded it with water. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/science/space/european-space-agencys-spacecraft-lands-on-comets-surface.html

And how big exactly is Rosetta’s comet? Compared to Los Angeles very big.

 

http://www.iflscience.com/space/graphic-shows-size-rosettas-comet

Science!

 

People who take non scientific stuff as gospel make me

 

Do you believe in ghosts?

Watched a ghost story on DSTV travel last night.

Elva Zona Heaster, the murder victim, was born in Greenbrier County sometime around 1873

The story goes that 3 months after they got married the bride fell down the stairs and died. The husband was so overwhelmed with grief that he did not want to leave his departed wife alone for a single moment; the coroner could not even perform a proper autopsy. He even dressed her in her best outfit (unusual for that was the task of the women of the church) and put a beautiful scarf round her neck.

Not long after her death her ghost appeared to her mother showing her that she was strangled  by her abusive and cruel husband and had marks around her neck to prove it. This happened three times after which mother went to the police and insisted on having her daughter’s body exhumed and a proper autopsy be performed.

So indeed she was strangled, her windpipe broken and to cut a long story short husband was found guilty and sent to prison.

Fact or Fiction? Well I do not believe in ghosts and think the mother suspected the husband of murder but had to convince the public prosecutor in some way. It still makes for a nice story though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenbrier_Ghost

Gluten sensitivity is the name of the game.

I know somebody who at the age of 70 plus has suddenly been diagnosed as being gluten sensitive! What?

Gluten free products do not come cheap plus the homeopath (who by the way did not send her for tests but diagnosed from symptoms) has prescribed natural medicine at a small fortune. Does it help? Well, sort of, she thinks. But people will believe what they want to believe.

I suppose there is no point in sending this to her?

http://www.businessinsider.com/gluten-sensitivity-and-study-replication-2014-5

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP

 

Maybe I am the crazy one?

Crazy people are not locked up, they walk the streets (of Hollywood too)!

Somebody sent me this clip and thought I may enjoy it. Well you have to define enjoy I suppose but my reply was that maybe she committed a crime and wants to claim insanity.
In the latest episode of ‘Gwyneth Paltrow states the absolute ridiculous’, the actress has claimed that saying negative things to water can hurt its feelings.

WATER?

OK but I think I prefer Shirley Valentine talking to the wall.

I am thinking of getting this book:-

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014: A successful young author suffering from writer’s block journeys to New Hampshire to visit his former professor. Shortly after he arrives, the bones of a girl are found buried in the professor’s backyard. Now the professor has been arrested for the murder of the girl–who disappeared in 1975 at the age of fifteen–and the author has an idea: he will write a book based on the case that will ultimately exonerate his professor and jumpstart his writing. Already a massive best seller in Europe (and translated into 32 languages), The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair arrives in North America amid such wild praise you might expect something groundbreaking. Instead, what you get is a wonderful, fun, and boisterous read, a book with an uncanny ability to both fascinate and amuse you. Twists and turns and oddball characters make this a rollicking bullet-train of a novel. –Chris Schluep

Anybody read it?

Do you have a recipe?

 

For a good potion

Or maybe a spare Voodoo doll you wish to pass on?

–

A Candle in the Dark is the title of a courageous, largely Biblically based, book by Thomas Ady, published in London in 1656, attacking the witch-hunts then in progress as a scam `to delude the people’. Any illness or storm, anything out of the ordinary, was popularly attributed to  witchcraft.Witches must exist, Thomas Ady quoted the `witchmongers’ as arguing, `else how should these things be, or come to pass?’

For much of our history, we were so fearful of the outside world, with its unpredictable dangers, that we gladly embraced anything that promised to soften or explain away the terror. Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death. Carl Sagan

Marilyn Bardsly in After Midnight in the Garden of good and Evil writes ‘ Jim Williams was very superstitious and interested in knowing the future. Some said that he had a deep belief in magic and the spirit world. For those who read John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil or saw Clint Eastwood’s movie, one of the most interesting characters was a colorful voodoo princess called Minerva. During the book and movie depiction of Williams’ four trials during the 1980s, she seemed almost omnipresent, casting spells on District Attorney Spencer Lawton, witnesses and jurors. She also performed rites designed to appease the spirit of Danny Hansford, whom she reasonably assumed was angry about being shot. Minerva reputedly learned her skills from her husband, who called himself “Dr. Buzzard.” Jim was a client of Dr. Buzzard, and when he died, he went to Minerva, who took over his practice as a “root doctor.”

 

Minerva’s real name was Valerie Fennel Aiken Boles. She lived in Beaufort, South Carolina. According to a man who frequented the Monterey Square area where Jim’s Mercer House is located, Ms. Boles was in Savannah frequently in the 1970s and 1980s, finding a ready market for her services from Jim and others. She passed away in early May 2009. Her age was undisclosed, but she was well past middle age.

 

Root doctors are still a big thing in the Low Country, especially in parts of South Carolina. They perform a wide range of personal magical services, such as getting revenge on an enemy, removing curses, preparing love potions, or even ensuring a criminal a shorter prison sentence. They are a current-day version of a shaman or witch doctor using herbs…’

 

Superstitions will put mankind right back on the Planet of the apes and maybe that is where they ought to be.