SWIFT June 13, 2008
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Silly Neck-Stuff, Incredible, Yet Another “Search” Show, Discovery Channel Discovers More Woo-Woo, Dow Jones Offers the Latest in Science, What Winners Do, Pretty But Useless, Waldorf Schools Examined, and In Closing…
Reader Richard O. Brown writes us about that silly “Q-Link” that we’ve handled at tinyurl.com/63u6zl. Just another fraudulent – but highly profitable – bit of junk jewelry. Richard says:
Q-Link couldn't have gotten a less critical puff piece if they wrote it themselves: tinyurl.com/6jj6jf
Embarrassing. At least, based on the online comments, the readers aren't buying it. The Chronicle has good reporters who can write critically about science, health and technology, but as usual they assign an "arts and features" writer with no science background to this.
All sorts of sports and music-world heroes are said to wear this phony “charm,” as if IQ is well represented by pop stars. “More than 300 golfers in the PGA wear theirs” so we can be further reassured by that inclusion. There's more. Said Richard Gray, president and CEO of Clarus Transphase Scientific Inc., maker of Q-Link:
SWIFT June 6, 2008
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Facilitated Fraud, The Perfect Solution, Getcher Latest Vibes, Van Praagh in People Mag, A Quandary, A Sad Comment on Our Time, Wait – There’s More, We Renew Our Offer, An Alien Sighting, Another “Police Psychic”, Don Your Deerstalker Caps!, Legislation Sought, Arm-Pushing Again, A Boots Specialty, Ask Questions, FYI, In Closing…
In mid-May, I spoke at Syracuse University, where Douglas Biklen, Dean of their School of Education, is still preaching the ridiculous notion of “Facilitated Communication” – only because the University can’t resist the huge amounts of cash that go into their coffers because some naïve and generous persons and agencies simply can’t recognize academic flummery when it’s immediately in front of their noses.
SWIFT May 30, 2008
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Academic Madness in Maryland, Coroner Cornered, New York Magazine Adds to It All, Another Non-UFO, A Lame Reply, When Will We Grow up?, An Astronomer Comments, Do Take a Look, A Comments Comment, Geller in Turkey, and In Conclusion…
My most excellent friend Bob Park, who grinds out a simply wonderful “What’s New” website from Up North, must have been crushed to discover that Stupidity and Superstition are offered as major subjects on the campus he serves. This is – literally – like discovering that students there are being taught Christopher Columbus was a woman, had two noses, and never left the shores of Europe, while Madame Marie Curie was a Russian ballet star who died at age 22. How could it get any stranger, less logical, or more bizarre than what Bob has as the current lead item in What’s New? I run it here exactly as featured on his page:
SWIFT May 23, 2008
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Geller Dodges and Weaves, A Fine Delusion Explained, That Substitute Wizard, “Books-A-Million” Doesn’t Much Care, Bottom Line – Sell the book, It Worked, Incredible, My Solution to a Question, A Cruel Delusion, and In Closing…
At the beginning of February this year, I was in Mannheim, Germany, to appear on a TV show duplicating and explaining the standard Uri Geller tricks. At about the same time, Geller was interviewed by Guido Schmalriede, and the interview appeared in “Der Skeptiker,” the journal of the German skeptics group, “Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften e. V.”, more conveniently referred to as “GWUP.”
SWIFT May 16, 2008
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Amateur Time, More Astrological Problems, Last Week's God-Message, More Desperate Data-Fitting, An Update, Last Week's Assignment, To Arms!, Praise Where Due, Strange Pride, A Centurt Out of Tune, More On Astro Timing, Tune In, Attention Norway, In Closing.
I heard from Mr. Arash Irani, who notified me about yet another grubby who has attempted – dishonestly – to attack my integrity from his lofty position as a homeopath. Mr. Irani wrote:
Dr. Masud Naaseri, an Iranian scientist and researcher, is one of the supporters and theorists of Homeopathy and he has written a book about it in Persian... He also has written a book in English titled “Study of Relationships in the Fractal Matrix of Spacetime.”
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