Reality TV and What It Can Teach Us
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- Written by Barbara Drescher
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The Osbornes are clearly not a typical family. Getting a job as a chef does not usually involve living with a bunch of other candidates to be picked off one by one over a period of weeks, all while being yelled at nightly, and forced to consume various innards or chase pigs as the Hell's Kitchen contestants do. And I seriously doubt that The Bachelor just forgot the camera was there when he was on a 'date'. If the cameras do not catch humans in their natural habitats, what can we learn from them? A lot, I think.
Another Boring End of the World. Yawn...
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- Written by James Randi
- Category: Swift
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For a man who’s almost 90 years old, a man in Oakland, California, Harold Camping, isn’t very mature. He’s been bleating and screeching on the Family Radio Network, a religious broadcasting organization funded entirely by donations from listeners. Mr. Camping owns 66 radio stations in the USA alone, with assets of $120 million. For a former civil engineer, this is quite an improvement in his financial situation, though he doesn’t expect to enjoy it for very long…
You see, the Day of Judgment, the Second Coming of the Lord, is coming up on May 21 at about 6 p.m., time zone not yet determined, Harold tells us. At that time, two per cent of the world's population will be immediately “raptured" to Heaven. I want to be outdoors to see this, of course.
As I’m sure you guessed, the rest of us will get sent straight to the Other Place. See you there!
Another Tragic Case of Medical Neglect
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An article on the TIME website yesterday (Did Homeopathic Medicine, Breast-Feeding and Veganism Kill a Baby?) tells the tragic story of a French couple sentenced to prison last week for neglect of their 11-month-old daughter, who died after they ignored a doctor's advice that the child might have pneumonia.
There are a lot of factors that make this a complicated story: the mother's unusual diet, France's bizarre anti-breastfeeding attitudes, the use of homeopathic remedies and "natural" alternative medicine. There's also that widespread (maybe instinctive) feeling that the youngest of our species are public property, in a way, and that every part of how parents raise babies is everybody's business.
Toss Out The Q-Tips, Bring In The Ear Candles
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- Written by Bobby Nelson
- Category: Swift
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Anyone who has ever held a job knows that people in the workplace often engage in conversations completely unrelated to work. Recently, a woman in the customer service department at my job has been praising a form of alternative medicine called thermal-auricular therapy also know as ear candling. After overhearing a couple of women talking about how amazing ear candling was, I couldn’t help but involve myself in the discussion.
Although I don’t remember what was said word for word, I was basically told that using cotton swabs, or Q-Tips, to clean my ears was not only ineffective at removing the ear wax but it was also very dangerous. Instead I should be using ear candles. Intrigued by this claim, I asked how they worked. Sadly none of the women knew the science behind this technique. They proceeded to tell me how great their ears felt after using them and that the best part was cutting open the base at the end to reveal just how much earwax was removed from the ear.
A Quick Test of Your Gullibility Index
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- Written by James Randi
- Category: Swift
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Try believing this story. No doubts, interpretations, exceptions, or additions: just the facts as related in the Holy Bible and the Koran, which we’re assured are inerrant, perfect, and represent Absolute Truth…
A man from the Bronze Age named Noah, and his two sons – with no boat building skills – chopped down literally hundreds of trees, and fashioned them into planks. From these, they constructed The Ark, the biggest boat ever made, and loaded it with enough quantities and varieties of food to feed every species on Earth – polar bears to mosquitoes, whales to vultures, diatoms to jellyfish – for the next seven months. The three men then went around the Earth and rounded up pairs of every living life-form and herded them aboard, into suitable environments – tanks, sheds, trees, caves – whatever they required, including temperature needs.
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