Scientology Drug Rehab Center Under Investigation

Law enforcement is investigating a Scientology Narconon center in eastern Oklahoma after four people died while undergoing a Dianetics-based ‘treatment’ for drug addiction there. 

Antivax Family Not Allowed to Adopt

The state of Arizona is not allowing the Van Tienderen family of Valley, AZ to take foster children because their biological daughter isn’t fully vaccinated for “philosophical” reasons.

Homeopathy News!

It’s been a bad week for homeopathy, which translates to a good week for science-based medical policies.

5 Atheists Who Need To Just Find The Jesus Already

You can pick  your friends, you can pick your nose, and if you’re sneaky you can pick your friends’ noses while they’re sleeping. But you can’t pick the most prominent atheists who get lots of media attention.

The thing about atheism is that it barely tells you anything at all about a person. Atheists can believe in ghosts, demons, racism, sexism, alien abductions, or any other number of other weird things just as well as theists. I once had a conversation with a young woman who told me, all in the same conversation, that she knew for certain that God didn’t exist and that fairies were real. Like, they have a type of habitat and certain environment where they thrived and there are foods they prefer and all that. In another conversation I learned that organized religion was horrible, but also that astrology wasn’t total bullshit.

Short of untimely deaths, there’s really nothing stopping bad proponents from speaking out on atheist issues on major media networks except for conversion. So here are some prominent atheists who would do better work making the other side look like idiots instead of doing the same for us.

Know Your Right-Wing Homeopaths

LOL WHAW

World Homeopathy Awareness Week started this past Tuesday, probably because Tuesday is an infinitely diluted Monday. It’s kind of like Breast Cancer Awareness Week in that the thing we’re supposed to be more aware of suffers a major PR blow from all that awareness. But they’re different in that homeopaths are perversely proud of their special week while cancerous cells tend to not promote theirs.

Dr. Rachael Dunlop Interview

Rachael Dunlop is an ALS and ageing researcher and Vice President of the New South Wales committee of the Australian Skeptics. She also won the most hilarious internet award ever. She blogs at Skeptic’s Book. We talk about science communication, homeopathy, the anti-vaccination craze and some of the other pseudoscience she and her fellow skeptics deal with in Australia.

American Atheists, I Am Disappoint

A Disappoint Editorial

A couple of recent events have me disappointed in American Atheists. I agree with most of what they do, but being a skeptic means you have to call bullshit when you see it, even when it’s coming from friends.

Alex Jones is the King of All Crackpots

I first heard about Alex Jones during one of my first breaks home from college, catching up with a friend from high school. He went to college in Meadville, PA, at the same school which after one semester drove Trent Reznor into the happening nightlife of Cleveland and probably fueled his angst-based career for the next 20 years.

So there wasn’t much to do in Meadville. One thing to do was drive around delivering pizzas to townies while listening to the Alex Jones radio show. That’s what my friend did. This was in the days before iPods, so unless you wanted to drag around your CD collection and risk it getting stolen by Alex Jones fans for crystal meth money, radio was your only option.

So we would get stoned and laugh at the crazy man yelling about the global “elite” in his documentaries. It’d be fun to pick apart the fact from fiction and to try to identify the point where reasonable concerns about government waste turned into the fever-dream rants of a paranoid lunatic. So yeah, the drug war is bullshit, but it’s not part of a UN plot to end American sovereignty.

4 Ways the Alt-Med Industry is Fucking With Animals

Animal testing is a tough subject. For the most part I’m for it, although there are probably a lot of unnecessary ways it goes down which should probably be stopped. But when it comes to developing new drugs to treat diseases, there’s a certain amount of acceptable harm to non-human animals which in my opinion can be justified in the interests of a greater good to humanity.

Probably some readers disagree with me there, and we can have a discussion about the moral ambiguities and grey areas, and maybe learning more about it might cause some of us to change our minds. But when you get into how animals are used in the alternative medicine industry, all these potential nuances are wiped away since by definition alternative medicine doesn’t even work. If any of the practices I’m about to get into had shown efficacy through real scientific evidence, then they wouldn’t be alternative medicine anymore; they’d just be medicine. So what we’re talking about here isn’t about whether we should sacrifice X number of Y species to save Z number of humans; it’s just about how much we should let the quack industry harm animals for the sole purpose of profit.

Homeopath Has a Diluted Understanding of a Simple Story

So I went to see Contagion last weekend. The first thing I did afterwards was lash out at and threaten our followers on Twitter for no good reason. The second thing I did was check out what the alternative medicine crowd thought of it. I thought it’d be fun to see how angry they were over certain aspects, but what I found was even more disturbing than what I expected. [Spoilers ahead!]