Finally some action – Montreal police are investigating Markuze

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First, a bit of context for folks who don’t know. Dennis Markuze of Montreal is a fully certified 100% solid gold kook who, using an assortment of pseudonyms when online (including David Mabus and Hebert Marxuxe) has been issuing a torrent of threating emails and tweets to many skeptic bloggers. When I say “torrent”, I’m not being poetical, its a factual description. To give you a feel for what its like,  PZ wrote the other day …

Every morning when I get up and get on the computer, the first thing I do is delete the pile of spam from Dennis Markuze, each of which is usually cross-posted to 50 to 100 other people. Every time I fire up Twitter, the first thing I do is clear the garbage Dennis Markuze has left there; yesterday I blocked and reported spam from over 25 Markuze accounts, amounting to several hundred messages.

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Argument From Authority – Baroness Greenfield on Autism

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She is at it again, making silly pronouncements, this time it is Autism. Least you missed it, in New Scientist, she has been casually linking internet use with autism. (So no not vaccines, just using the Internet). Now, since this is Baroness Greenfield, CBE,  scientist, writer, broadcaster, and member of the House of Lords, specializes in the physiology of the brain, and has worked to research and bring attention to Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease – we can just take her word for it … right?

Exactly, the old “I’m a doctor just trust me” line simply does not cut it when it comes to claims like this. So what do you need? How about some actual “Evidence”.

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Antioxidants – The Evidence is: they don’t work

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When it comes to  antioxidant supplements I’ve been as guilty as most and have indeed in the past purchased and popped a few of these with the thought in the back of my mind that I was being health. Alas, I was simply fooling myself, the weight of evidence now available suggests that the antioxidant supplements on sale today either do nothing or might even cause harm to your long term health.

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Not Understanding the word “Atheist”

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You would think folks would understand the word “Atheist”, but to my complete astonishment some sections of the media don’t. Jesse Bogan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports … “Halfmann, essentially an atheist,” writes Brogan, ”testified that he needed the book [the Satanic Bible] to practice his religion, which, he said, primarily meant following the … Read more

Cosmos is coming back

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Do you remember Cal Sagan on Cosmos? Well, plans are afoot to bring it back in 2013. Sadly Carl is no longer with us, so it will be Neil deGrasse Tyson leading the charge. He is truly a great choice to do this. At one point Sagan himself went out of his way to recruit Tyson. During an interview with writer Daniel Simone (in the November 2, 2007 issue of Dan’s Paper here) Tyson said,

“Interestingly, when I applied to Cornell, my application dripped of my passion for the study and research of the Universe. Somehow the admissions office brought my application to the attention of the late Dr. Sagan, and he actually took the initiative and care to contact me. He was very inspirational and a most powerful influence. Dr. Sagan was as great as the universe, an effective mentor.”

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Islamic Justifications – apostates from Islam must be killed

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Challenge an Islamic cleric regarding their immoral “compulsion”, and they will argue that there is no compulsion, because no one is forced to enter Islam (yea right, I’m  skeptical about that claim, but let us take it at face value for the moment).

If you then make the observation that they do indeed believe that apostates from Islam (folks who used to by Muslim, but renounce it) must be killed, then in what universe is this not “compulsion”? Well, the answer, which happens to be one used by many clerics to justify this insanity, goes like this …”after somebody chooses to enter Islam, they cannot be allowed to leave. To attempt to leave Islam is akin to treason, and every country in the world punishes treason by death.”.

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