I’m seeing this article everywhere today, especially in skeptic circles. It seems like every man, woman, miscelaneous, and their dog in the skeptic circles I follow are sharing it and adding comment “I’M SMRTR THAN THAT AN U SHUL B TOO1~”.
Let me just remind you of a little saying that’s also popular in the skeptic circles. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Continue reading
The ACL (Australian Christian Lobby) has recently started a campaign to get their followers and supporters to get Margaret Court nominated and voted in as a National Living Treasure by the National Trust of Australia. Women’s Day, one of the most popular gossip mags here in Australia, has a website with a short-list of 100 nominees where you can vote.
In an attempt to counter this, we’d like to try to get as many people as possible to vote instead for Professor Ian Frazer (#32 in the list), the inventor of the Gardasil vaccine. Reasons why you should support him are given below the jump. Continue reading
I’ve spoken about the Australian Vaccination Network before, but those have generally only been mentions and references, I’ve never really gone in to who and what they are.
EDIT: BREAKING NEWS! It appears StopAVN have done something fantastic and unexpected at Woodford Folk Festival! Please scroll down to the next bolded “EDIT:” and ensure even if you don’t read most of this, you at least read that!!! 😀
Who are the Australian Vaccination Network?
The Australian Vaccination Network (AVN), despite all claims to the contrary, are an anti-vaccination group. They are headed up by Meryl Dorey and claim they’re not, they claim they just support informed choice and provide a counter to the governments provides. However, the information the AVN provide is wrong on almost all counts which means it’s not really an informed choice they’re providing but a misinformed one, and if the governments provides is pro-vaccine, then any stance counter to that surely must be anti?
Their preferred sources of information are not scientific studies, but rather conspiracy theorist sites such as whale.to (a site that collects any and all articles and claims no matter how crazy and unsubstantiated they are), conspiracy theorists such as David Icke (who promotes world leaders and the royal family being lizard people), and people with revoked medical licenses such as the disgraced Andrew Wakefield.
They’ve had their charity license revoked. In the last two years, only two issues of their 6/year magazine “Living Wisdom” has been released (and despite being so far behind in issues owed, they’re still actively pushing subscriptions). They regularly cry oppression, censorship and demand free speech, despite blocking/banning anyone who dares counter their supposed-not president Meryl Dorey with information that is nothing more than factual. They have also been caught filing numerous false DMCA requests to hide public and factual information they don’t like. The Australian Vaccination Network about as hypocritical as one can get. Continue reading
Almost two years ago now I wrote a blog post about Christopher Maloney, Naturopathic Doctor / Not a Doctor / Quack Extroadinairre who had used non-legal threats towards WordPress to shut down a science bloggers blog after the person dared write a post which rightfully called Christopher Maloney a quack.
At the time, Christopher Maloney was throwing out threats of lawsuits left right and centre, and twisting anything and everything he possibly could to make it falsely look like he was being persecuted. Not long after this, all news on him died off and this was the last the blogosphere heard. This wasn’t the end of his actions though.
It has now become apparent that Christopher Maloney, Quack, N.D. had utilised his wife’s legal services to sue the original blogger. A S.L.A.P.P. suit was filed against Mr Hawkins. Continue reading
I’m not even sure if I really want to post this. It’s going up for now, may get removed later.
First it was the “brights”, people trying to push for a new name that was blatantly insulting to those not part of it. Then it was the no true scottsman / no true skeptic calls from the atheist communities against skeptics who also happened to be [gasp] theists! Now, it’s rebeccagate, and the vile and hate that just won’t die down due to it.
Sometimes I’m not really all that sure if I even want to be part of the skeptic community. Continue reading
After my post last week about #Ten23 many of you may be asking why people fall for homeopathy. Well, one reason is because many people don’t completely understand what homeopathy is, they think it is something that it’s not. There is another reason, lined out quite well in the little video below which was made by Kylie Sturgess of Podblack.com and Token Skeptic. Take a look, and don’t forget to subscribe to her podcast.
Don’t forget about 10:23 this weekend. Sydney is on Sunday the 6th at 9:30am in the Royal Botanic Gardens, we’re meeting at the Opera House entrance. For other locations in Australia check out the Kylie’s website here and for international visit the official site here. 
The weekend of February 5th and 6th will showcase the second year of the #Ten23 campaign across the world. It is a campaign with similar goals to World Homeopathy Awareness Week. WHAW seeks to educate the public about what homeopathy is and how it works, and tell people it does work. 10:23 seeks to educate the public about what homeopathy actually is, how it actually works, and its actual efficacy.
The events in Australia are being centrally co-ordinated by Kylie Sturgess at the website for her podcast, The Token Skeptic, with (currently) more cities in Australia being involved than any other country. For more information on what’s happening near you, just keep an eye on that page for updates.
Those overseas, there’s no better site than the official 10:23 website.
Finally, the Sydney #Ten23 event details, being organised by Paul Cageggi, can be found here.
And while you’re checking out sites, vote for me in #NoPants for the Shorty Awards. Sorry, had to.
Continue reading
As per my previous post, the Shorty Awards are now OPEN for nominations! Time to get voting!
What you need to do:
There’s a few things you need to keep in mind so I’d like to spell them out nice and early if I could.
You can keep an eye on how things are going here.
Some of my suggestions are:
“I nominate @DrRachie for a Shorty Award in #health because she does such standup work against quacks.”
“I nominate @BastardSheep for a Shorty Award in #NoPants because #NoPants is life!”
“I nominate @BadAstronomer for a Shorty Award in #science because he always brings us such interesting and amazing info.”
“I nominate @GeorgeHrab for a Shorty Award in #entertainment because of his awesome podcast, music and comedy stylings.”
“I nominate @PZMyers for a Shorty Award in #Religion because of his push to use reason instead of it.”
“I nominate @jref for a Shorty Award in #Education because of their promotion of reason in schooling.”
“I nominate @RSPCA for a Shorty Award in #charity because of the awesome work they do for animals.”
“I nominate @nocompulsoryvac for a Shorty Award in #Quacks because of her tireless effort to spread lies about vaccines.”
Of course, you should feel free to nominate who ever you’d like, and remember you actually CAN nominate multiple people in one category.
Those of you who were around 12 months ago may remember the fun and games that happened during the Shorty Awards. Those of you who weren’t around or don’t remember, I’ll cover that below.
The Shorty’s are only a few weeks away from opening up for nominations, and I’d like to get a jump on that quacks this year so lets start spreading the message already. If you’re interested in helping out Science and Skepticism defeat the quacks, willingly ignorant and blatantly deceptive then please create a Twitter account (if you don’t have one already), get at least a few tweets out there and watch this space ready for the nominations and voting to commence. Continue reading
Most people are too shy to get out there and do real activism, but you should be aware there’s always something you can do. Even the smallest thing helps, especially when you get a large number of people doing the same thing.
A mate of mine who goes by the online name Drunken Madman has come up with a brilliant idea (inspired by this) for a bit of small-time online activism anyone can do, so I’d like to promote the idea as well and get as many people onboard as possible.
If you use any geolocation services such as Foursquare, then you’re all set. I’m sure there’s plenty of other similar services out there, so choose which ever one suits you.
You can read the full details of this small bit of online activism at his blog, My Colleagues are Idiots. If you’re curious about the phrase he’s put forward (this phrase is especially for chiropractors), then take a gander at LibelReform.org and Sense About Science and get tagging.
While you’re at it, also check out the Skepticator and the latest on the Australian Vaccination Network.
Bastard Sheep 