World's Most Famous Liar

His scam on America continues as he sells a $5 t-shirt for $34. Yes, like his candidacy for President, many will buy his snake-oil and swallow his cool-aid.

Trump’s drumbeat of lies about the 2020 election keeps getting louder. 

Here are the facts

https://apnews.com/article/trump-2020-election-lies-debunked-4fc26546b07962fdbf9d66e739fbb50d

Brain Supplements are Dangerous and Don't Work

There are dietary supplements targeting brain health being marketed to consumers that should be considered adulterated and misbranded. Advertisements and product labels may be deceiving and could put the public at risk. Education is required so that the public can recognize red flags while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration works to “modernize” the current regulations for dietary supplements.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7153641/ 

Rumor Guard

The News Literacy Project is encouraging everyone to push back against misinformation with its new platform, RumorGuard, which helps you know what’s safe to share and which rumors should be stopped in their tracks. It cites topical viral rumors and lays out exactly how the public can determine that a claim doesn’t hold weight, based on five factors for credibility.

Deepfake-style Marketing Clones

People are hiring out their faces to become deepfake-style marketing clones

AI-powered characters based on real people can star in thousands of videos and say anything, in any language.

Hour One is building up a pool of what it calls “characters.” It says it has around 100 on its books so far, with more being added each week. “We’ve got a queue of people that are dying to become these characters,” says Natalie Monbiot, the company’s head of strategy.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/27/1033879/people-hiring-faces-work-deepfake-ai-marketing-clones

James Randi

Most of you know of James Randi.

Here is an “In memoriam” that you might find to be interesting reading.

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2021/01/the-amazing-life-and-legacy-of-james-the-amazing-randi/

FACT CHECKING 101

Poynter.com offers a FREE self-directed course in FACT CHECKING for Seniors. The course is very much apolitical and unbiased. However, I would not be surprised if when some people apply these lesson material to their favorite sources they find them full of mis- or dis-information and as a result think this course is biased or political.  It is. It is biased against the spread of garbage.

The course teaches the following checks and procedures:

• How to check who is behind the information

• What is the evidence

• What are other sources saying

• Lateral reading

• Smart keyword search and click restraint

• Using Wikipedia responsibility

• Reverse image search

I have been asked, "Who checks the fact-checkers?" Answer is - YOU! and this teaches you how.

Hydroxychloroquine Use for COVID Still a BUST

In early July Henry Ford Hospital reported some positive results treating COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine even after every credible research laboratory declared it to be ineffective.
https://mtskeptics.blogspot.com/2020/07/hydroxychloroquine-cut-covid-death-rate.html 

So what's the story?

Like masks, hydroxychloroquine became associated with political affiliation. Trump hyped it at White House briefings, and even announced that he himself was taking it. The FDA revoked its use.  Nevertheless, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro is still pointing to the Henry Ford study, But it was a retrospective one, neither randomized nor controlled. “The Detroit study touted by Navarro has very poor methodology—completely observational, meaning that the choice to give hydroxychloroquine was probably also linked to other factors that explain the benefit,” says Bob Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at UC San Francisco.

"What is the cost of continuing these trials?” 

The politics and social alignments that swirled around hydroxychloroquine made it hard for US researchers to enroll enough participants to make a study work. That slowed things down. An analysis by Stat showed that of the more than 1,200 Covid-19 drug trials underway or planned, 237,000 people—more than a third of volunteers in all the trials—were supposed to be enrolled in hydroxychloroquine studies. That now seems disproportionate, to say the least. “Nobody should get it,” 

Wachter says. “Overall, the evidence against it is strong enough that the drug should simply go away in Covid, and it would have weeks ago had it not been for the politics.”

https://www.wired.com/story/hydroxychloroquine-still-doesnt-do-anything-new-data-shows/

The Shape of Misinformation

The following meme is now being shared on FACEBOOK.  It is a classic example of how misinformation is used to polarize opinions.

The above meme does contain a lot of facts and appeals to many people's emotion regarding both climate change and the media.  The problem is - the meme contains one glaring lie - Dr. Judith Curry NEVER said Climate Change is a hoax.

Dr. Curry is a reputable climate scientist that recognizes the enormous complexity of climate science and urges people not to rush to simplistic solutions or causes based on correlation models, such as those promulgated by the IPCC.  The fact that she isn't one of the alarmists has designated her as a Climate Change Denier, which couldn't be farther from the truth.

Check out Dr. Curry's blog at https://judithcurry.com/

John Oliver Takes on PSYCHICS

While on the subject of psychics here is another video.  https://youtu.be/faBIIFA5wng 
It wouldn't be such a big deal except - 40% of Americans believe in them - and THEY VOTE.

Starving-Polar-Bear Photographer Recalls What Went Wrong

One year after Cristina Mittermeier took that gut-wrenching polar bear image later, she explains what she and her team were trying to accomplish. This story appeared in the August 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Climate change kills slowly and by proxy: through fire, drought, cold, and starvation. The connection between an individual animal’s death and climate change is rarely clear—even when an animal is as emaciated as this polar bear.

Photographer Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier were on a mission to capture images that communicate the urgency of climate change. She admits they were naive. The polar bear picture went viral—and people took it literally.

When Paul posted the video on Instagram, he wrote, “This is what starvation looks like.”  But he did not say that this particular bear was killed by climate change.

National Geographic picked up the video and added subtitles. It became the most viewed video on National Geographic’s website—ever. News organizations around the world ran stories about it; social media exploded with opinions about it. Cristina estimated that an astonishing 2.5 billion people were reached. But they lost control of the narrative.

The first line of the National Geographic video said, “This is what climate change looks like”—with “climate change” highlighted in the brand’s distinctive yellow. In retrospect, National Geographic went too far with the caption.

Perhaps we made a mistake in not telling the full story—that we were looking for a picture that foretold the future and that we didn’t know what had happened to this particular polar bear. I can’t say that this bear was starving because of climate change.

Cristina Mittermeier is a contributing photographer, speaker, and explorer for National Geographic. She is the co-founder, executive director, and vision lead of SeaLegacy, a nonprofit organization working to protect the oceans. 

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/08/explore-through-the-lens-starving-polar-bear-photo/ 

New York Times Is Engaged in Climate Fraud

The New York Times said yesterday that heatwaves in the past were “virtually unheard of in the 1950s”, temperatures approaching 130 degrees didn’t used to occur, and summer temperatures have shifted towards more extreme heat.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/28/climate/more-frequent-extreme-summer-heat.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1 

Every single claim in the article is patently false, and the exact opposite of reality. The authors intentionally started their study in a cold period, after the extreme heat of the 1930’s.

https://realclimatescience.com/2017/07/new-york-times-shifts-towards-extreme-climate-fraud/

Oren Cass in City-Journal.org reporting of this kind of hyperventilating said, "What hysterical nonsense."

Jonah Goldberg in NationalReview.com said, "The public remembers past doomsday predictions about environmental catastrophies that didn't happen."

In fact even atmospheric scientist Michael Mann said in WashingtonPost.com, "Climate doomism in fact can be just as destructive as climate-change denial"

FACEBOOK and Fake News

      I am a senior and I live in Tennessee.  An overwhelming number of my family, friends, and me are Republicans.  I am not surprised that the fake news that I receive ispredominantly Republican leaning.  In fact, I almost never receive fake news reports those who are Democrat leaning.  Most of it comes via email with some heavily biased set of statistics or story. 

     Few of my group use FACEBOOK, including me.  So, I never experienced issues in the press which FACEBOOK is receiving about it being a cesspool of fake news.  However, with virtually everyone having a FACEBOOK account, these reports are probably an accurate reflection of the population in general and can answer the question “Do Republicans tend to circulate more fake and misleading stories than Democrats?” 

Doom Sayers Have a LONG History if Failure

      Here’s a list of predictions made with much fanfare and extensive coverage in the media in the 1970s

• the population explosion would be unstoppable;
• global famine would be inevitable;
• crop yields would fall;
• a cancer epidemic caused by pesticides would shorten lifespan;
• the desert would advance at two miles a year;
• rain forests would disappear;
• acid rain would destroy forests;
• oil spills would worsen;
• oil and gas would run out;
• and so would copper, zinc, chrome and many other natural resources;
• the Great Lakes would die;
• dozens of bird and mammal species would become extinct each year;
• and a new ice age would begin;

      All of these were extolled in the mainstream media. Not one of them has come even close to meeting the apocalyptic expectations of their promoters. Often it was because the scare was exaggerated.

Later, more predictions of doom:

• sperm counts would fall;
• mad cow disease would kill hundreds of thousands of people;
• genetically modified weeds would devastate ecosystems;
• nanotechnology would run riot;
• computers would crash at the dawn of the millennium, bringing down civilization;
• the hole in the ozone layer would cause blindness and cancer on a huge scale;

Add to these the predictions of Climate Doom

• malaria was going to get worse because of rising temperatures; it didn’t.

• snow would become a thing of the past; yet northern hemisphere snow cover shows no trend

• hurricanes/cyclones would get worse; they haven’t.

• droughts would get worse; they haven’t

• the Arctic sea ice would be gone by 2013; it wasn’t.

• glacier retreat would accelerate; yet more than half the retreat of glaciers happened before 1950.

• sea level rise would accelerate; it hasn’t

• the Gulf Stream would falter, as this clip from the movie the Day After Tomorrow latched on to.

All these predictions have also failed so far.

The death toll from droughts, floods and storms has been going down dramatically. Not because weather has got safer, but because of technology and prosperity.

      James Hansen in 1988 said that by the year 2000, “the West Side Highway will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there.” 
      The UNEP predicted in 2005 that by 2010 there would be 50 million climate refugees. In 2010 it tried to delete the web link. 
      Ten years ago, Al Gore said that within ten years we would have reached the point of no return. [Inconvenient truth]

THE CONJURING 2

      With the great success in the theaters of the 2013 The Conjuring Director James Wan spins another horror yarn. The Conjuring 2 is supposedly based on a true story, which is a well worn hoax. How many people would be excited if they were told, "we made the whole thing up."  Well, more than we would be disappointed to know.  But this "little" lie does sell more tickets.
      The Conjuring 2 is based on the Enfield Poltergeist in England, 1977 to 1979. Surprisingly, Wikipedia did a good job of reporting the facts of this incident (because they did such a lame job on the Bell Witch). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enfield_Poltergeist
      Investigator Joe Nickel did a followup Investigative Brief as a follow-up to his earlier direct involvement in the case. http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/the_conjuring_2_a_nickell-odeon_review/
      Tim Wood in LiveSciFi reported the following in Is the movie the Conjuring 2 based on a True Story?

The Conjuring was one of the biggest horror blockbusters in recent memory and it only makes sense that the producers would make sequel. As with most horror movies the producers often try to blend fiction with facts, in order to make the movie bit scarier.  The first Conjuring movie according to Andrea Perron who lived in the house contained very little of the true story that actually occurred at the house. So how much of the Conjuring 2, is based on a true story?

http://livescifi.tv/2016/06/movie-conjuring-2-based-true-story/  

The answer is

Well it looks like the only part of the Conjuring 2 movie that might be true, might be the fact that the producers have the haunting occurring in Enfield, UK.  Being in the paranormal field for over 10 years and putting numerous hours investigating, reviewing, and trying to document anomalous phenomena for clients, I find it absolutely disgusting that the Warren’s will forever be attached to this case even though they absolutely had nothing to do with.  Even more disgusting is the fact that this movie claims to be based on true story, when it it clearly isn’t.

Polar Bear Numbers Increased

Survey Results: Svalbard polar bear numbers increased 30% over last 11 years

Posted on December 23, 2015 | Comments Off on Survey Results: Svalbard polar bear numbers increased 30% over last 11 years

Results of this fall’s Barents Sea population survey have been released by the Norwegian Polar Institute and they are phenomenal: despite several years with poor ice conditions, there are more bears now (~975) than there were in 2004 (~685) around Svalbard (a 30% increase) and the bears were in good condition.
http://polarbearscience.com/

Yvette d’Entremont – 'BS Detection and the Fall of the Food Babe'

I Fooled Millions Including Peer Review

      “Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows.
      And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

Here’s how we did it.

http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800

Gotta Prediction? Join the Crowd

Whatever your opinion, climate change is one of the most prominent issues of the times.
It relates to the well being of the planet and its occupants. At the same time it incurs the expenditure of billions of dollars and much of it comes from public money.
We are a small group who have followed the global warming/ climate change issue for some years. Initially we didn’t know which version was correct but we noticed several things. One was the frequent use of predictions, often scary, that seemed on the surface to be believable. We wondered whether anyone ever went back to see if the predictions turned out to be true.
This blog presents predictions that have been made over the past 40 years or so and we leave it to you to make up your own mind about them.
The blog commenced towards the end of 2014 and as it develops we will be continually adding new material and making changes to the layout. At present we plan to add about half a dozen new posts each week.

http://climatechangepredictions.org/

Scientific Paranormal Investigation with Benjamin Radford

Video interview (CLICK HERE) with author Benjamin Radford about his book, Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries. Ben is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and a Research Fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a prolific writer on topics on urban legends, the paranormal, critical thinking, and media literacy. He is author of six books:
  1) Hoaxes, Myths, and Manias: Why We Need Critical Thinking;
  2) Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us;
  3) Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’s Most Elusive Creatures,
  4) Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries;
  5) Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore and
  6) The Martians Have Landed! A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes.