James Randi puts spotlight on five promoters of nonsense

The James Randi Educational Foundation has "honored" what it terms to be the "Five Worst Promoters of Nonsense" for the past year. Among the honorees is CVS Pharmacy:

for their work to support the manufacturers of scam “homeopathic” medications who sell up to $870 million a year in quack remedies to U.S. consumers. Homeopathic remedies contain none of the active ingredient they claim, and homeopathy has been shown to be useless in randomized clinical trials. CVS/pharmacy sells these quack products in thousands of stores across the U.S., right alongside real medicine, with no warning to consumers. Instead of giving their customers the facts about homeopathy, CVS/pharmacy executives are cashing in themselves by offering their own store-brand of the popular homeopathic product oscillococcinum. Oscillococcinum is made by grinding up the liver of a duck, putting none of it onto tiny sugar pills—that’s right, none of it—and then advertising the plain sugar pills as an effective treatment for flu symptoms.

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Ham and Eggheads

Ken Ham is the head of Answers In Genesis, an organization that promotes and perpetuates the Creationist view that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, that homo sapiens sapien trod the same ground at the same time as dinosaurs, the the story of Noah is literally true, and that evolution is All Wrong. He’s an Australian and a biblical literalist. He built the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, in 2007. Check the link for an overview by an (admittedly) biased source, but for simple clarity is hard to beat. It is a fraud of research, flagrantly anti-science, and laughable in its assertions (in my opinion). Ken Ham is one of the more public figures in our current national spasm of extreme religiosity. He’s attempting to have built another show-piece in Kentucky, a theme park based on Noah and the Flood. The problem with this, however, is that tax dollars are being used in its construction and it is a blatantly religious enterprise. In the meantime, Ken Ham and Answers In Genesis have recently been disinvited from a conference on homeschooling.

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Randi’s $1M challenge to homeopathy

In 2009, James Randi declared that homeopathy qualified for his million dollar challenge. He said then

Homeopathy DOES NOT WORK. It's quackery, pure and simple. It's a farce, a fake, and flummery. Prove it works, and win the million dollars.
On Saturday, February 5th, he released a statement challenging the homeopathic manufacturers to submit to a double blind test and to the retail outlets to label the products for what they are - NOT MEDICINE! Erich posted a piece “Overdosing on homeopathic drugs” last May which has enough links for someone to see for themselves how absurd this concept is. By their philosophy, we should all be sick from some harmful strain of e. coli because at some point all water has been touched by such, and it will, of course retain that memory. Or does it only retain the memory of the “good” stuff? Go get ‘em, Mr. Randi!

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9/11 as an excuse to say stupid things.

I work in a big office building located in downtown St. Louis, the "Bank of America Plaza." Early this week, I was interviewed for a newspaper article, and I needed an updated photo of myself. A coworker offered to snap that photo using a small digital camera. We want down the elevator to the first floor public lobby of the building, at street level, where we found a large neutral colored wall that we could use as a backdrop for my photo. I stood in front of the wall and my coworker stood about 10 feet away from me. As she took a photo of me a security guard suddenly approached. Me: "In the lobby? In a public lobby?" Guard: "You may not take any pictures here. It’s because of 9/11 and homeland security." Me: "I understand that your employers have instructed you to say these sorts of things, but what you have just told me is about the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. My coworker is simply trying to take a picture of me in front of a wall." Guard: "Sir you cannot continue doing this. You will need to take pictures elsewhere." We left. Apparently, taking pictures of me threatens the United States. Or maybe the threat was taking a picture of the wall behind me. Certainly, the guard made it clear that the building owners prohibit any sort of photos in the lobby. We walked across the street and threatened the United States by taking my photo inside the lobby of a office building across the street, where friendly security guards don’t appreciate the risk of what we were doing. Instead, they naively laughed at our stories about security guards in my own office building.

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Obama justice and the lies about Wikileaks

Glenn Greenwald has been working around the clock to shed meaningful light on the media claims, many of them lies, regarding Wikileaks. Here's Greenwald's comment on the biggest and most common lie one hears these days:

Anyone listening to most media accounts would believe that WikiLeaks has indiscriminately published all 250,000 of the diplomatic cables it possesses, and Gitlin -- in the course of denouncing Julian Assange -- bolsters this falsehood: "Wikileaks’s huge data dump, including the names of agents and recent diplomatic cables, is indiscriminate" and Assange is "fighting for a world of total transparency." The reality is the exact opposite -- literally -- of what Gitlin told TNR readers. WikiLeaks has posted to its website only 960 of the 251,297 diplomatic cables it has. Almost every one of these cables was first published by one of its newspaper partners which are disclosing them

Greenwald also exposes a corrupt frame being pushed by the media - that Wikileaks is perpetrating a massive injustice. This has it upside-down, according to Greenwald:
To recap "Obama justice": if you create an illegal worldwide torture regime, illegally spy on Americans without warrants, abduct people with no legal authority, or invade and destroy another country based on false claims, then you are fully protected. But if you expose any of the evils secretly perpetrated as part of those lawless actions -- by publishing the truth about what was done -- then you are an Evil Criminal who deserves the harshest possible prosecution.
You'll find a hot list of media lies exposed by Glenn Greenwald here. And you'll find much more at this same link. See also, the video interview of Greenwald by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. What are the government attacks on Wikileaks really about? Greenwald argues that these attacks on WikiLeaks constitute "a literal war over who controls the Internet and the purposes to which it can be used." Western governments have made it clear that citizens cannot freely band together to launch honest and blistering criticism against their government. Without even being accused of any crime, western governments, led by the United States, have used extra-judicial means to take Wikipedia off the Internet. And see here. You can sense the government end game in your bones: The Internet will be for sports and entertainment, not for free-wheeling citizen journalism. In short, the U.S. government will use its massive power to make sure that the Internet becomes just like most newspapers and radio and television stations. Don't you dare tell citizens that we are pumping out an unrelenting stream of lies! Don't you dare tell them that we are killing twice twice as many civilians as we are admitting! Don't tell them that we are spilling blood and treasure to prop up corrupt leaders. Go back to your sports events, soap operas and so-called reality shows! Greenwald also points out the hypocrisy of the mainstream media:

Journalists cheering for the prosecution of Assange are laying the foundation for the criminalization of their own profession, or at least of the few who actually do investigative journalism. There is simply no coherent way to argue that what WikiLeaks did with these cables is criminal, but what the NYT, the Guardian and other papers did is not.

In conclusion, Greenwald mentions that the U.S. Department of State is purportedly preparing to celebrates "World Press Freedom Day.

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