Kevin Trudeau Propaganda

Oh the joys of being on Kevin Trudeau’s mailing list. Last week I received the cure for herpes, which apparantly is a $200 bottle of sugar pills, and now I get this gem:

Dear KT Insider,

I was just interviewed on the Alex Jones Show. He received hundreds of emails from people who said my books gave them better health, got them off drugs, and in some cases saved their lives. He also got many “hate Kevin” emails calling me a liar, a scammer, a criminal, etc. The point is that those who actually bought and read my books (over 90%) LOVE me and my books. Those who KNOW me, worked for me, or did business with me (over 90%) LOVE me and have only good things to say. Yet those people who only get their information about me from the internet or the mainstream media (MSM)….HATE ME! Do you understand? The mainstream media BRAINWASHES YOU into believing things that aren’t true. The MSM does one thing under order of the government and their corporate owners ATTACK and do a character assassination on the PERSON telling the truth. They cant attack the message, so they attack the PERSON. I know that the more I’m PERSONALLY attacked by the mainstream media, the more I KNOW I’m making a positive impact in a big way! Thank YOU for your support.

Kevin Trudeau

Hey Kevin, how about rather than using questionable stats (over 90% what?), CAPITALIZED WORDS, and creating paranoia about the “MSM”, you provide evidence that your claims are true? Oh, right, I forgot, it’s all bullshit.

I pity anyone who falls for Trudeau’s lies.

Bill Donahue Belittles Irish Catholic Church Abuses to Victim of Priestly Rape…

…and keeps digging his hole deeper.

Have a listen for yourself, if you can stomach it.

Part I & Part II

Oprah, Providing a Platform for Lying to the Public

Oprah’s Harpo Productions has recently struck a deal with anti-vax quack Jenny McCarthy, giving Jenny her own show.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Asked if Oprah or her show endorses McCarthy’s views, a representative for Oprah’s program said, “We don’t take positions on the opinions of our guests. Rather, we offer a platform for guests to share their first-person stories useless anecdotal experiences in an effort to inform strike fear into the hearts of the audience and put a human face on topics relevant to them do them a disservice by spreading misinformation and pseudoscience.“

Fixed.

Jesus Appears in Marmite Jar

Maybe he was trying to warn them not to eat it?

Marmite: a sticky, dark brown paste with a distinctive, powerful flavour, which is extremely salty and savoury with umami qualities, somewhat comparable to soy sauce.

Westminster University Comes to its Senses, Scraps Homeopathy Degree

 

It’s fantastic that this university is eliminating their bachelor degree program in homeopathy, but what’s shocking to me is that any self-respecting university would offer a degree in something so implausible and unsupported by any kind of evidence in the first place.

Galileoscope…Celebrating the International Year of Astronomy

To mark the International Year of Astronomy a team of leading astronomers, optical engineers, and science educators have developed a low cost way that allows anyone to take part in backyard astronomy.

Order your Galileoscope now for only $15:

If you don’t need a telescope you can donate them to a local school or give them to your friends and family. Or you can get the best of both worlds and buy your own and donate some in one shot…the website makes it very easy.

The only reason I don’t have a telescope is the expense, so I’m so excited about this. I’m looking forward to seeing Saturn and its rings with my own eyes! I’ve never looked at the stars through a telescope! I can hardly contain my excitement!

Bill 44…Censorship in the Classroom

Way to go Alberta…

The bill would finally include gay rights in Alberta’s human rights law, while at the same time enshrining parents’ right to pull their children from classes on sex, sexual orientation and religion.The key problem with Bill 44 isn’t that it might — or might not — stifle discussion of evolution in the schools. The key problem is that it creates a whole new class of potentially aggrieved parties — parents who could now invoke the elaborate tribunal mechanism to complain about their kids’ teachings.

Bad enough that the legislation still infringes the free speech rights of the likes of Ezra Levant. Now, it potentially infringes the free speech of teachers, too.

Asinine.

the history of the universe, fixed

Collaboration in the Space Station

The International Space Station will be welcoming three new astronauts this week:

“Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, European Space Agency astronaut Frank De Winne, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Bob Thirsk are expected to arrive at the space station Friday morning. The trio will begin an era of six-person crews aboard the station.

They will join station commander Gennady Padalka and flight engineers Mike Barratt of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and they will remain aboard the space station for six months. The entire Expedition 20 crew represents five agencies — the first time a space station crew has represented all five international space agency partners at once.”

Cheers to international cooperation for science!

I’ll keep the updates coming.

Coincidences…Business as Usual

Last week I got an email from my boss. He’s on holiday in Italy and he was just sending a fun update on his trip. One of the noteworthy parts of his email was that he had run into one of my co-workers, we’ll call her Cindy, randomly in St. Mark’s Square. Wow, what are the odds that they would be in such a far away place at the same time?

Well, let me think about this. I work in a huge company with thousands of employees, and the nature of my job, as well as my boss’s, require that we know many of these employees, so we know a lot of the same people. Cindy travels to Europe as often as possible, and my boss went to Italy for an entire month. Most people who go to Italy make a point of going to Venice, and St. Mark’s Square is a big tourist attraction in Venice. This time of year is a good time to visit Europe, because it’s not too hot yet.

The more I think about it the more it seems like it would have been weirder had my boss not either a) run into her, b) run into one of the hundreds of people we both know, or c) run into somebody he knows.

I could go on and on with instances of seemingly amazing coincidences that have happened to me or to people close to me, but I imagine that if I carefully examined each one of them there would be an explanation for why they aren’t so surprising.

The law of truly large numbers says that with a large enough sample any odd coincidence is likely to happen. It’s natural for people to look for patterns, and some people take these patterns and coincidences that happen as having meaning, or being evidence for something, when really there’s nothing extraordinary about a coincidence.

Here’s a great video explaining coincidences: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98OTsYfTt-c

Last I Checked it was 2009

The California Supreme Court chose to uphold the Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage.