New Fledgeling Skeptic: Maria Myrback

On the heels of my last blog about how many practitioners of woo are beginning to see the light of skepticism, last week’s Amazing Cruise was not only a complete blast, the likes of which many of us on board had never seen, it also provided another powerful testimony. We are making big strides.

On board was a once steeped-in-woo New Age healer, channeler and psychic; Maria Myrback.  Maria’s story is one I hope to see and hear repeated over and over in the years to come. For my part in what happened in her case, it showed me that I’m making a difference. One person at a time can make a difference if we go out and DO SOMETHING.

Visit Maria’s website, www.fledgelingskeptic.com where you can read the whole story in her own words. Maria was a woo goddess. Now she is one of us. Like Karla McLaren, (read my recent post: “Culture Clashing”) who saw my NBC special “Secrets of the Psychics Revealed” and realized she was doing cold reading which led her to becoming a skeptic, Maria saw my Penn & Teller “Bullshit” episode, “Talking to the Dead,”and realized that what she was doing was wrong. She’s now a skeptical convert.

Anita's a Skeptic Now Too

Word is out that one-time $50,000 IIG claimant Anita Ikonen is also in the throes of a skeptical transformation. Those of us who have gotten to know Anita a little will reserve our judgements until more information is available, but in a conversation I had with her over lunch on the day the IIG tested Regan Traynor, she confessed that she was in the process of considering a recantation of her popular book about breatharianism and spilling the beans about what a bunch of nonsense that whole part of her life was (when she was known as “Alenara.”) We are all waiting on that one. Some stripes are harder to change than others.

When woo gets skeptical, everybody wins.

Maria & Me

It may take a little time to see the results, but if you are willing to take a stand, skeptics, rational thinkers and even a few on the fence can be effective in changing the mess we are in. There is no doubt in my mind that Karla, Maria and Anita are only the tip of an iceberg that is slowly thawing. Knowing I have been a part of these transformations is uplifting. I’m now re-invigorated.

Randi & Maria Exchange Amazements

To hear Maria tell me that I inspired this change for the better in her life made the Amazing Cruise even more amazing. This was a week I will remember. The camaraderie and inspiration was tremendous and the promise of fantastic new things to come from JREF, CFI and the grassroots movement was as exhilarating as the bracing sea air and the bright blue waters of Grand Turk Island. Maria gracefully accepted the Silver Ship Award from Jeff Wagg for her detremination and committment to skepticism and all were delieghted by her soft spoken demeanor.

I will comment more on The Amazing Cruise later on down the line. FORCE ONE managed to gain a few more operatives and I found out there are some very interesting underground hush hush deals underway that are extremely provocative. If you are one of the lurkers from the Vent/Browne/Coffey crowd – watch your backs. We are planning on more proactive premptive actions against the bottom-feeders out there and we will be bringing it to their doors, not waiting for them to sign on for a challenge or an investigation. The gloves are coming off.

I’m sure Brian Dunning will be posting something about it here and there are literally THOUSANDS of photos blossoming all over Facebook and elsewhere online if you look. 

Jeff Wagg’s Rational Alchemy podcast we did on board was a high point for many of us and should be available at www.rationalalchemy.com soon. Check it out. It was marvelous.

The Brain Pool

For the few of you who have been on board the International Space Station and haven’t yet heard the news, the 150th anniversary of Origin of Species came along last year and some Young Earthers saw a chance to leverage this into propaganda. Since the copyright is long expired, the text is in the public domain, and any Joe Blow is free to publish it. This particular Joe Blow came in the person of evangelist Ray Comfort, who vomited a “Special Introduction” intended to discredit evolutionary biology into the front of Origin. He then published it inside a cover giving every indication that it was a legitimate copy of the seminal work. Regardless of whether he admits it or not, the whole charade was a deliberate attempt to trick students into reading Ray’s own mental diarrhea instead of the book they thought they were buying, and hopefully win over a few converts.People said “Just rip out the introduction and presto, you’ve got a good book” or “It’s still OK because students are smart enough to ignore the graffiti in the front, and just read the intelligent part in the back.” Maybe, but if you’ve ever had your hands on a copy and actually cracked it open, you’ve seen that this is not such an attractive proposition.

The Ray Comfort pages. Click for a larger view.

For, while the Ray Comfort pages are nicely typeset, well designed, and festooned with illustrations, spacing, bullet points, and indentation, the Charles Darwin part has been forced through some kind of Disneyland supershrink machine. It’s been compressed into a tiny, virtually unreadable font. All breaks have been removed. There is no whitespace at all, except for a double space and a centered title at each of the 14 included chapters (not even a page break!). I don’t consider my eyes to be the worst in the world, but I can’t read it. The font is so small over these long, unbroken lines that I lose my place every time I try to go to the next line. I’d need to use a straightedge to read it, seriously. I scanned a couple representative pages from each section. Click on them to see what I’m talking about. The scans are the same size as each other.

The Charles Darwin pages. Click for a larger view.

Was this done accidentally? Was it done to save money? Of course not. It was done to discourage readers from attempting to access the content they tried to purchase; to tie a gag around Darwin’s mouth while Comfort preaches away unrestrained. More than anything else, it reminds me of what TV networks do to the end credits of movies these days: The movie is squished into one side of the screen and made to scroll past at an accelerated rate, while the majority of the screen, and all the sound, are devoted to commercials for upcoming shows.

The content (and many other aspects) of Comfort’s “Special Introduction” have been thoroughly covered elsewhere, so I’m not going to repeat them here. But I do feel that this one seemingly insignificant tactic, often overlooked, speaks with a very loud voice.

Here’s an MSNBC report about it:

Could it be an alien visitor from another world?

No, I don’t think so. In fact, I think it is another world. Venus, to be specific.

A Fort Wayne, Indiana website has an interview with one of the witnesses on video, and includes some still shots. Everything in his description, including the photographs, makes me think he and the others are seeing Venus.

Right now, Venus can be seen in the west — the direction to Lake Erie and Cleveland as seen in Euclid — shining brightly just after sunset. It is so bright it can be seen while the sky is still light (I’ve seen Venus in the middle of the day). It appears to hover. Changing atmospheric conditions can affect its color, especially when it’s low to the horizon. It can be seen night after night, in the same spot in the sky.

Sound familiar?

I’m not saying what these people are seeing is in fact Venus, but it sure fits everything I’ve heard in the news reports (sometimes the witnesses describe multiple lights, but when looking to the horizon, especially over a big city, it’s not too unlikely to see planes flying around). In the MSNBC report they talked to the FAA, the military, and others (including a UFO guy from England), but never talked to an astronomer. Hmmph. And note that in these news articles, Venus is never mentioned! That’s mighty peculiar, given how spectacular it is in the west after sunset. It’s really hard to miss. A likely explanation is that it’s not mentioned because it is, in fact, the culprit here.

I’m getting a kick out of just how positive so many people are that this is a flying saucer of some kind. I wonder how many of these folks actually are familiar with the night sky, and would recognize Venus when they see it? That’s why I think very few astronomers (pro or amateur) report UFOs: astronomers tend to know what they’re looking at in the sky.

The next time you hear a report like this, don’t jump to the conclusion that some interplanetary object is making a close encounter… because it may very well be interplanetary, but the encounter may not be terribly close.

Tip o’ the probe to Patrick Kent. Originally posted on The Bad Astronomy Blog.

Recently, we launched a new, wider-format version of Skeptic.com. Designed here in the Junior Skeptic studio by webmaster William Bull, this format offers something that speaks right to my heart as an artist: the chance to run honking big 3-column graphic banners. It’s taken skepticism a while to get on board with this “pictures are good” business. Here was a chance to have some fun with it.

We knocked around some ways to play with the format, but I always knew where I wanted to start. My own background is in visual art — portraiture in particular. To me, there are few things so compelling as a human face. And hey, “a human face” is just what skepticism needs more of.

If you’ve been involved in skepticism for as long as three or four minutes, you know what it feels like to be cast as the villain. After all, are we not “closed-minded debunkers”? Well, OK, we’re not. I’m not sure I’ve ever even met a skeptic who was quite the nay-saying caricature our critics would have us believe — but it’s hard to say that in a way that people can hear.

Thinking about putting a more welcoming face to skepticism, I thought immediately of Robynn “Swoopy” McCarthy, co-host of the Skepticality podcast. Today, the show is known as Skepticality — the Official Podcast of Skeptic Magazine, and that’s no accident. I fell in love with the show’s sincerity and heart early on; when I saw the opportunity for us to assist each other’s projects, I leapt for it. I’ve never regretted that strong alliance for a second. Derek and Swoopy’s dedication, humanity and passion have only grown in all the time since.

And so I knew, Swoopy was my first choice for the banner portrait series. What better ambassador could skepticism hope for, especially in the “skepticism 2.o” era? Nor is it just her manner or intelligence or that wonderful smile that make her an ideal representative: as co-creator of the world’s first skeptical podcast, Swoopy is a genuine pioneer.

Heck, it’s perfectly fair to say she helped create skepticism 2.0. Things have changed so fast that it’s easy to forget how sweeping the changes have been. When Swoopy first rolled up her sleeves for skepticism, the landscape was utterly different. As Skepticblog’s Brian Dunning (of Skeptoid) recalled, “The first time I listened to Skepticality, I learned two things. First, that there was such a thing as ‘podcasting.’ Second, that there was such a thing as ‘the skeptical movement.’”

And here’s the thing that stands out most of all: Skepticality took the stage as a purely independent project. Skeptic has helped to extend their reach, but Derek and Swoopy changed the world all by themselves. “Grassroots skepticism” indeed!

With my own portrait of Swoopy as the seed, I invited a small group of skeptics to contribute photos and bios for the banner series (and set to work hammering the contributions into a standard format for the series). Some are well-known figures; others are members of the wider community. Each, alone or in collaboration with others, pursues their own unique version of skeptical activism.

I wanted folks who looked friendly and inviting (this is an ad series, after all) but who also embodied the best of the new skepticism. I wanted folks who were doing things, helping people, defining the new landscape — and I wanted to use the platform of Skeptic.com to showcase their independent efforts. Think of this as a small, just-for-fun part of a larger conversation about win-win-win methods for traditional skeptical organizations and grassroots skeptics to support each others’ public service projects.

Five of the six faces in the series are female. It happens that I invited men and women in about equal numbers, but I’m perfectly happy with the way things worked out. Today, women are finally closing on parity with men in representation and respect in skepticism (they have always stood out in accomplishment), but I think it does no harm to move the spotlight around from time to time.

So, check out this first series of banner portraits, and please join me in thanking the models for participating. The six portraits should be served up automatically in random order at the top of Skeptic.com. Just refresh your browser a few times to view them all, or click through to the bios to learn more about a few of the voices of grassroots skepticism!

Last year our attention was drawn to the Texas BoE over the science standards, with particular attention to evolution. One member in particular, Don McLeroy (who was chairman but was removed) entertained (by which I mean frightened) us with phrases such as “someone has to stand up to those experts.” The particular controversy was over whether or not to insert language into the standards that opens the door for teachers to “question evolution,” meaning to insert creationist propaganda as science.

The new language that was put in includes that students must “analyze, evaluate, and critique scientific explanations” based in part on “examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific experiments.” Language was also put in to specifically question the age of the universe, the nature of stasis and change in the fossil record, and the complexity of the cell and information in DNA.

This year the focus of the Texas BoE is to review the standards for world history, and amazingly they have been as successful in causing mischief as they were with the science standards. Don McLeroy is still on the BoE, however he recently lost his reelection bid, and so will be out at the end of the year. Meanwhile, he promises to go full steam ahead with his admittedly religious conservative agenda. (See the Nightline interview from Thursday 3/11 for details.)

The Texas BoE, with or without McLeroy, is dominated by Christian Conservatives. This is not inherently a problem, in my opinion, as long as everyone is dedicated to performing their duty rather than using their position to promote their personal ideological agenda. Alas, that does not appear to be the case.

Carl Zimmer reports that the board voted to remove specific references to the Enlightenment (yes, the Enlightenment) and to (wait for it) Thomas Jefferson. Can there be a better metaphor for the fact that the Texas BoE is unenlightened and they desire Texas students to be unenlightened also?

What’s their problem with Thomas Jefferson – we can only imagine. They argued he was superfluous, which is absurd. Could it have something to do with the fact that Jefferson was the primary architect of the separate of church and state, and that he himself was a deist?

In addition, the BoE has voted to engage in a bit of historical revisionism, among other things voting to insert language that suggest the McCarthyism witch hunts of the 1950s were justified and later vindicated. They also voted for removing reference to Thurgood Marshall, and inserting references to the rise of conservatism in the 1980s, the Moral Majority, and the Contract with America.

History textbooks have always had the problem of political bias (remember the old adage that the victors get to write the history books), and it would be misleading to suggest this is a local or new problem. I also probably risk some of your ire by suggesting the Texas BoE is not entirely wrong when they argue that history textbooks have an existing liberal bias. I remember enough of my high school American history class to believe this is probably true. In fact, we had a discussion in class about bias in history books, discussing in particular the treatment of Richard Nixon with that of Millard Fillmore – the point being that the closer you get to the present, or to issues that are still controversial, the more bias becomes an issue.

The goal should be to eliminate all bias from the textbooks, including (especially) our own. If there is a liberal bias, then let’s have a balanced review and do our best to fairly present history from every perspective and with as little bias as possible. The Texas BoE has not chosen this path. Rather, they have chosen to simply insert as much of their own conservative bias as possible. This does not “balance” the history textbooks, however – it simply inserts more biased history.

It seems to me that one solution, perhaps the best, is to review the history texts with as broad and cosmopolitan a view as possible. This will allow for local biases to average out and for a consensus view to emerge. This very solution has been proposed by state governors – who have suggested the creation of national educational standards to replace state standards (a project called common core).  While they are starting with math and English, this could also apply to science and history.

This idea was proposed to solve the debate over the role of the federal government vs state governments in education. States have resisted federal standards – but this system is a voluntary system proposed by the states themselves. So far every state but two has signed on – the holdouts are Alaska and (you guessed it) Texas.

Another potential solution is to dampen the power of the textbook industry over the quality of our educational system, and by extension the power of the Texas BoE. One way to do this is to simply create high quality textbooks and make them available for free online. I think this is the future anyway – why print outdated material when you can have updated online material.  Material can be printed as needed off the online textbooks, especially for use by school systems with limited computer resources. There are already online wiki-style textbooks being developed. What we need now is a non-profit dedicated to organizing these efforts and imposing a system of quality control. I strongly suspect that the quality such a process would produce would be far superior to the crap the textbook industry generally produces.

Conclusion

The Texas BoE is a depressing spectacle – they represent the absolute worst example of abusing authority to promote a personal ideology, betraying the public trust to promote instead high educational standards. But perhaps the spectacle can be put to good use, focusing attention on the broader problem of the quality of education in the US and potential solutions. We need better and more uniform standards, and better textbooks.

In his Nightline interview McLeroy acknowledged that the Texas BoE has an influence that goes far beyond Texas – so they are acutely aware of the power they wield and choose to abuse it anyway. Perhaps it is time to move away from the tyranny of local majorities in education, to more consensus and quality-driven standards.

Of course we answer “The last thing a skeptic would have done is rush right out and give their money to the (insert the salesman of your favorite alternative woo product here).” And here is where the heads butt. Believers often feel that a truly skeptical and scientific process would have tested the product by trying it firsthand. And, to the average layman, inexperienced in science, that sounds extremely reasonable.

This is going to be a very short blog post, because this question is very simple. No, trying a product personally is not a useful way to assess its value. A scientist understands that, a layperson does not; it sounds thoroughly counterintuitive.

The scientist knows that anecdotes and testimonials, while they can be interesting, are not useful evidence, not even the scientist’s own. Anecdotes are usually of unknown origin; and even when they’re not, they are uncontrolled, unscientific, and subject to a myriad of biases, influences, random variances, and external factors. Well designed scientific tests control for, and eliminate, as many of those influences as possible — and often, all of them.

The skeptical process does not ever require personally sampling the woo. Why would it? You’re certainly welcome to try the product if you want, but doing so is completely outside of a meaningful scientific assessment.

Does this mean that every time we hear a woo claim we must go out and perform a thorough scientific test? Of course not. Well performed tests take time and cost money, and it’s the party selling the product who bears that obligation. In science, good evidence is required to move from the null hypothesis (the null hypothesis states that the claims about the product are unsupported until they are proven true). So when I’m told about a woo product, I’m probably willing to ask to see good scientific evidence, but I’m not obligated to provide such evidence myself. I’m sure as hell not obligated to buy the damned product.

So the next time you hear “I was a skeptic until…”, you know that (a) that person is inexperienced in science, and (b) their endorsement of the product was born from an invalid process.

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Yay!

The man who ousted him is Thomas Ratliff, who is — gasp! — an actual educator who has vowed to try to remove the politicization of the board and also to actually – gasp again! — listen to educators when it comes to, y’know, educational topics. You may remember McLeroy is the goofball who infamously said, "Someone has to stand up to the experts!"

However, mitigating the good news somewhat are some things to consider:

1) McLeroy is still on the BoE for the next seven months before his term runs out. He can do a vast amount of damage to Texas schoolchildren’s education in that time.

2) Ratliff only won by a very narrow margin, meaning a whole lot of Texas citizens either didn’t know about McLeroy’s maniacal attempts at derailing the Lone Star State’s educational system, didn’t care, or actually supported him.

3) McLeroy and his crew of revisionist creationists have already done so much damage that it cannot be easily repaired. There is a cycle to the way standards and such are reviewed and updated in Texas, so it could be years before things are straightened out, if at all.

Still, this is good news, and so I won’t use the "Texas: Doomed" graphic. Instead, I’ll remind you not to rest:

Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to Robert Estes and the many others who emailed me about this. Originally posted on The Bad Astronomy Blog.

I have a laundry list of retorts to this challenge, from the value of living in a rational world that is based in reality to tales of people who have died from discredited medical practices, such as “Attachment Therapy” — in April, 2000, 10-year old Candace Newmaker was smothered to death in blankets by therapists who were helping “rebirth” her so that she could properly attach to her adopted parents. Death by theory. (I wrote about this in Scientific American.)

What’s the harm? Ask the victims of the anti-Government nutter Joseph Stack, who flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas. It is one thing to be skeptical of excessive government intervention into private lives and businesses, it is quite another to take matters into your own hands, especially if those hands hold a gun.

John Patrick Bedell, Pentagon Gunman

Witness one John Patrick Bedell, the gunman who attacked guards at the entrance of the Pentagon yesterday (March 4), who now appears to have been a right wing extremist and 9/11 “truther,” who in an internet posting under the user name JpatrickBedell said that he intended to expose the truth behind the 9/11 “demolitions.” Apparently the delusional Bedell intended to shoot his way into the Pentagon to find out what really happened on 9/11.

Death by conspiracy.

More specifically, Bedell picked up the conspiracy theory about the alleged “murder” in 1991 of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in his California home in 1991. The police ruled it a suicide, but right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists have suggested that he was murdered and that the case is a coverup by the federal government. Bedell posted that exposing the truth behind the Sabow case would be “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolition.”

9/11 Truthers believe the WTC buildings were “demolished” by explosive devices. What’s that thing on the left about to hit the building?

Who is John Patrick Bedell? He was a 36-year old computer programmer from Hollister, California, a graduate of U.C. Santa Cruz (physics) who also attended San Jose State University (biochemistry). So he was a smart guy. As I’ve said before: intelligence is no prophylactic against magical thinking. If anything, smart people believe weird things because they are better at rationalizing beliefs that they’ve arrived at for nonsmart reasons.

Somewhere along the line — perhaps after his arrest for cultivating cannabis and resisting a police officer — Bedell decided that he wanted to expose “the truth of events such as the 9/11 demolitions and institutions such as the coup regime of 1963 that maintains itself in power through the global drug trade, financial corruption, and murder, among other crimes.”

The “coup regime of 1963”? Yes, you know, the coup d’état that overthrew the U.S. government and replaced it with another government. You missed that one? Watch Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Lyndon Johnson and his cronies (Castro, the Russians, the CIA, the FBI, the mafia, et al.) had Kennedy assassinated.

Bedell continued in an Internet rant from 2006 associated with him:

Oliver Stone's fiction became fact for conspiracy theorists.

The sheer size of the United States economy … makes the United States government a tempting prize for any organisation or collection of bandits ruthless and clever enough to seize it. A criminal organisation able to conduct its activities from within the centre of power of the United States government would have powerful advantages over other criminal groups … This organisation … would see the sacrifice of thousands of its citizens, in an event such as the September 11 attacks, as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control. This collection of gangsters would find it in their interest to foment conflict and initiate wars throughout the world, in order to divert attention from their misconduct and criminality… This seizure of the United States government by an international criminal conspiracy is a long-established reality.

What's the Harm? Beliefs drive behaviors.

Whose reality is this? Right wing militias. Back in the 1990s there was a surge in militias and extremists groups, which waned in the final years of the decade, but are now apparently making a comeback. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who tracks such groups, there were 42 paramilitary militias in 2008 and 127 in 2009. So-called “Patriot” groups also increased, from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009. According to an April 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security, the current anti-government climate “parallels” what federal officials saw in the 1990s: “Rightwing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda, but they have not yet turned to attack planning.”

Not yet is the key phrase here.

What’s the harm? Now you know the answer.

The generator they plan to build was designed and patented by another company, Maglev Energy, Inc. They claim to be able to generate electricity with magnets. Here is their description of their technology:

A running prototype using a new way to control attract – repel forces generated by permanent and electromagnet interactions.  Our unique configuration and intellectual property manipulates these forces to apply its product towards useful work. With chip technology, laser measuring devices, and MagLev Energy, Inc. (MEI) developed proprietary algorithms, this prototype produces clean, renewable, and better power conversion ratios than fossil fuels.

Most skeptics should instantly recognize this description as an utter scam – we are in Dennis Lee and Orbo territory here. You simply cannot generate free energy by cleverly interacting magnets. This seems to be the perpetual free-energy deception – whether self-deception or conscious fraud.

Notice the attempt to dazzle with technology terms – wow, they use chip technology and lasers. That space-age (i.e. 1960s) technology.

They further claim that their generators use less fossil fuel than conventional generators – “or no fuel at all.” What seems to be the scam here is that they have a fancy generator they claim is more fuel efficient than a typical generator. This in itself is not an amazing claim. Generators can burn fossil fuel in an engine that uses the energy to rotate magnets inside a coil that generates an electrical current. There are cheap and basic generators and more sophisticated and expensive generators. Building an elaborate generator that shaves off a few percentage points of energy loss is nothing new or amazing.

Free energy scam often use conventional generators as a bait and switch. They produce a fancy looking generator that burns gasoline (or some other conventional fossil fuel) and claim a higher efficiency than what you can buy at Home Depot. But then they claim that the same technology that provides an incremental increase in efficiency can be extrapolated to produce energy with less and less fuel, until you have a device that uses no fuel at all. They can then show investors and politicians their conventional generator to back up their claims – hey, it’s actually making electricity. And of course they have a “prototype” of the free-energy version (which just needs a couple of tweaks).

There is of course the pesky problem of thermodynamics. You cannot make energy from nothing – there is no free lunch. Current generator technology is pushing up against the barrier of efficiency, and any gains at this point are going to be minimal and diminishing – approaching 100% efficiency asymptotically but never reaching it. The first law of thermodynamic says you can never surpass 100% efficiency (sometime called “over unity”), and the second law of thermodynamics says you cannot reach 100% efficiency (there is always something lost to entropy).

Maglev Energy promises consumers:

Reduction or elimination of home power bills – Using conventional fuels, an MEI generator will reduce home electric bills by 50% or more. When coupled with solar or wind, power bills can be completely eliminated.

Sure – burn fossil fuel and make your own electricity and you will reduce your electric bill. Duh. (That is the Bloom Box model.) But is it cost-effective? And where are you getting the fuel from. If you have natural gas being pumped into your house maybe you can decrease your electric bill while you increase your gas bill. Or will you need to bury a huge tank in your yard?

The last line is classic – “coupled with solar or wind” – right – and that doughnut is “part of this nutritious breakfast.” Of course, you could just install wind or solar, which themselves would have to be analyzed for cost-effectiveness.

The public’s attention has been focused recently on the monetary and environmental cost of energy, and “renewable” energies is a hot buzzword. It is no surprise that we are seeing an explosion of companies looking to make money off this fascination. We may be in the midst of an energy scam bubble.

Here’s a tip for the media – get a clue. The information is out there, just exercise some Google skilz before writing that gullible report on the latest scam.

And here’s a tip for politicians and investors – get a clue. Consult with an actual scientist before investing in the latest free-energy con. Politicians in Utah and Odessa are hoping to gain attention for being so environmentally responsible and forward-looking. But instead they will simply be the targets of a round of ridicule from those with a clue.

A Fresh New Look

I’m not normally prone to mystical cats or too much Internet craziness, but since I’ll be off on the Skeptics of the Carribean cruise with Randi and lots of other fun loving folks next week, I thought I would leave you all with some silliness to ponder.

We all need some time off and after the last few weeks with all its slings and arrows, I need some serious rest and relaxtion. Too much investigation and no play makes Mark a dull boy. I’ll be back with a fresh new outlook – and plenty of stories to tell.

Please watch this video and remember that just like John Edward; with the right editor, even a cat can appear to have mediumsitic abilities.

Yes, kitty is a very BAD medium, but aren’t they all really?

Until Next Time,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bTbAsmPOKo

Meeeooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.