Category Archives: Skeptics

From Genocide to Altmed

You could say that Radovan Karadzic successfully treated over 7,500 Bosnian Muslims with his ‘alternative therapy’. One bullet to the brain and the men never experienced health problems ever again.
That’s his business card. And no, I’m not kidding.
Gives new meaning to the MBA phrase ‘interesting career progression’.

Economics v Islam: a cage match

“We’re the ones who will change you,” the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries [...]

Be nice to nerds, you may finish up working for one

A friend of mine over here reckons that Oxford is the place where nerds go when they die. All the glorious eccentricities, social tomfoolery and obscurantist interests once repressed (or hidden) come to the fore. This is when we’re not being political junkies, finding cures for cancer or engaging in ‘other academic interests’. His comment [...]

Must be something in the water…

More than once at rowing training our crew’s been told off for - however inadvertently - putting our hands or feet in the water. This is the Isis, which, however distantly, is part of the Thames. We’ve always found it a bit funny, as during a bumps race - unless you’re really good, and we’re [...]

Mad World

It’s reasonably difficult to unite the disparate partisans of town and gown in Oxford, but this mob have figured out how to do it.
The chants of ‘Oxford University: Animal Abusers! Oxford University: Animal Killers!’ went up outside the Sheldonian on Saturday. People were graduating, although the Oxford student the protesters decided to target wasn’t a [...]

Phantasms

Every now and again, something from your past pops up out of your breakfast cereal and gets you thinking.
Last night I was chilling out with a few cold ones when an email from a good mate in the Australian Skeptics landed in my in-tray. The mate wanted me to tell him my version of an [...]

Do What Thou Wilt

Continuing my professional interest in evil…
Without Aleister Crowley, those well meaning people who press cheap tracts on the dangers of the occult into your hands would have to find other ways to waste their Saturday nights. Crowley is a staple - no, a star - of tractdom. Almost inevitably, [...]

I have now officially seen everything

Breaking my own rule about reproducing entire articles:
OTTAWA (AFP) - A former Canadian defense minister is demanding governments worldwide disclose and use secret alien technologies obtained in alleged UFO crashes to stem climate change, a local paper said Wednesday.
‘I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of [...]

Evil is live backwards

From time to time, people suggest to me that, in my line of work, I must see a fair few evil people. Not common or garden variety nasty, or plain crooked, but actively evil. The human equivalent of Old Nick, the sort who - if they went up in smoke - would leave a whiff [...]

The Darwin Awards

Well, it was only a matter of time. Spam advertising this book lobbed into the Australian Skeptics in-tray recently. I’d not known that Muslim and Christian creationists - particularly in Turkey - were cooperating in producing similar literature. Leading US Skeptic Dr Ken Miller points out that Muslim creationists recycle the same old US [...]