Can Anyone Help...?
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- Written by James Randi
- Category: Swift
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We have a request from a law enforcement agent who needs a volunteer who can translate documents from Romany into English. If any SWIFT reader knows of such a person, the work would have to be done on a confidential basis and not publicized in any way. Do any readers know such a person…? If so, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. And thank you…!
The Mothering.com Bait and Switch (part 1 of 2)
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- Written by Michael Blanford
- Category: Swift
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Mothering Magazine and Mothering.com are probably unfamiliar to most of our readers. That doesn’t mean they haven’t played a key role in a topic of interest to many skeptics—the anti-vaccination movement. Mothering is a widely read parenting magazine with over a hundred thousand readers that focuses on “natural” parenting. Its online counterpart hosts the largest parenting community found anywhere on the internet. Mothering describes itself innocently enough as:
“celebrating the experience of parenthood as worthy of one's best efforts and fosters awareness of the immense importance and value of parenthood and family life in the development of the full human potential. As a readers' magazine, we recognize parents as the experts and wish to provide truly helpful information upon which parents can base informed choices.”
All of that sounds just great until we get to the parts about “helpful information” and “informed choices.” The problem is that Mothering does anything but help parents make informed choices. In fact, Mothering is one of the loudest and most effective distributors of dangerous pseudoscientific misinformation on the newsstand or the internet.
Danger, Will Robinson -- and Everyone Else!
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- Written by James Randi
- Category: Swift
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Our good friend Robert Lancaster, who hangs out at http://stopsylvia.com/ sent me this observation:
Last year saw the end of the Montel Williams Show, Sylvia Browne's primary media platform for many years.
Last night was the final episode of Larry King Live, where Browne appeared once or twice a year until her failure in the Shawn Hornbeck case was revealed. After that, I don't think she was ever a LKL guest again (whether by his choice or hers).
And this is the final season of The Oprah Winfrey Show, long a bastion of woo (her recent "John of God" lovefest being the most recent example, though she has sung the praises of various "speak-to-the-dead" frauds and AltMed scams as well. Her Oprah Winfrey Network starts up on Jan 1 2011 though, and time will tell how woo-friendly THAT will be.
So, is the world of TV Talk becoming less wooful, or am I just doing some wishful thinking here?
Last Week at Science-Based Medicine
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- Written by Harriet Hall, MD (The SkepDoc)
- Category: Newsflash
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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.
Serves Em Right
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- Written by James Randi
- Category: Swift
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Recession of the economy in that country has prompted the law to require these woo-woo artists to pay their share of supporting the country while they continue to misinform, swindle, and cheat the citizens – professionally. Sounds fair to me. The hoi polloi will never give up their favored delusions, so I think they should contribute to the support of superstition – religious or not – and to the cumbersome governmental system that has to now handle another angle of public idiocy.
Ah, but now a real witch has announced that the Romanian bureaucracy will be reduced to a shambles as the result of her planned interference. She’ll be casting her famous tried-and-true “black pepper and yeast” curse, so we can confidently expect that the country will collapse. It sure beats the “tobasco and baking powder” spell, I can tell you…
(What’s that cackling I’m hearing…?)
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