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In a Huffington Post article titled “In the Vaccine-Autism Debate, What Can Parents Believe?”, Jenny McCarthy, in a reaction to the damning British Medical Journal (BMJ) expose of wrongdoings on the part of disgraced British researcher Andrew Wakefield, unsurprisingly jumps to his defense, and in the course manages to, again unsurprisingly, misrepresent some basic facts about this issue. McCarthy doesn’t seem to care much about the facts; for example, she still maintains that there is antifreeze in vaccines, a claim which has been definitely shown to be untrue, and yet she has not retracted it. This is the problem with arguing via talking points: the person who relies on them instead of research becomes immune to the facts.

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Every week I receive invitations to speak at various venues around the world. On March 15, 2011, I received the following invitation to speak in London. As I was running out the door to go on my morning bike ride, I missed the obvious cues that this was a scam:

Dear Michael Shermer,

My Name is Prof. Peter Kopelman from the London Youth Community Here in London UK. We want you to be our guest speaker at this Year ST' GEORGE UNIVERSITY , which will take place here in UK. We are writing to invite and confirm your booking to be our Guest Speaker at these year ST' GEORGE UNIVERSITY Event.

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Here is a recap of the stories that appeared last week at Science-Based Medicine, a multi-author skeptical blog that separates the science from the woo in medicine.

 

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Today marks the 137th birthday of one of the greatest and most innovative human beings our species has known: Erik Weisz, better known by his stage name: Harry Houdini. Although most of the information that is written about him today will likely be about his magical prowess as the greatest magician the world has known (and make no mistake Houdini was and always will be the greatest magician in history) it is of vital importance that we remember him for being so much more, because he was so much more.

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By now you're either one of the millions of people who felt the earthquakes in Japan, or one of the billions who heard about them. I'm one of the millions. You have probably seen awful videos of the Magnitude 9 earthquake already (if you haven't, watch this), as well as the ensuing tsunami (see these three videos) and then there was the nuclear threat. The last thing we need here in Japan is something to lower our spirits even further.

With all the pain and horror looming over the North-East prefectures of Japan, the locals are all cooperating, persevering, and generally trying to maintain some semblance of their routine life. Since Monday last week (three days after the massive quake people started returning to work, children were returning to school, and parents were again cooking dinner for their families. Most news broadcasts suggest that life is basically back to normal in Tokyo. However, throughout the Kanto and Tohoku regions, food is off the shelves quickly, and classrooms are not filled with so many students, because parents have to strategically ration their limited gasoline supplies. Trains around Kanto are unreliable, and rolling blackouts make traveling anywhere difficult, if not dangerous. So while it seems that life has somewhat returned to normal in the affected areas, there's still more than a few hints of change. And yet there's always one thing we can count on to remind us that things haven't changed too much: pseudoscience and scams.

  1. See James Randi in Norway - Live Online Video on Monday
  2. Video: Christopher Hitchens from TAM5
  3. Last Week at Science-Based Medicine
  4. Weaseling, Arrowhead Bottled Water-Style