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You don't know the difference between your opinion and evidence?

https://www.webmd.com/diet/fea...

Benzyl Alcohol, Benzoic Acid, and Sodium Benzoate are safe:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Azodicarbonamide is safe:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Aspartame is safe:
https://jamanetwork.com/journa...

No evidence that organic based foods are safer than regular foods (a review of 240 studies)
http://annals.org/aim/article-...

No evidence that GMOs pose health risks:
https://www.csicop.org/si/show...

What is actually going on here:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.o...

This is an especially worthless leak because the documents dealing with the thing that crashed in Roswell in 1947 were already declassified back in the mid 1990's.

My freshman physics teacher, and undergraduate college advisor, worked on project mogul. He was part of the team that built the craft that crashed in Roswell in 1947. I learned college physics from one of the beings that built the craft that crashed in Roswell and started a UFO 'craze'! (He was a human being, but that is still a being.) New Mexico Tech was an amazing school. Professors like Charlie Moore, Sterling Colgate, and Bernie Vonnegut (Kurt's brother) made it a pretty exciting place.

I don't really understand the purpose of the 'leak' unless it is to show that some people who work with Hillary Clinton have some pretty wacky beliefs. Has anyone been paying attention to politics for the last few decades? This is not startling in any way. Finding evidence of a rational person, without wacky beliefs, involved in politics would be a world shattering revelation.

This is an especially worthless leak because the documents dealing with the thing that crashed in Roswell in 1947 were already declassified back in the mid 1990's.

My freshman physics teacher, and undergraduate college advisor, worked on project mogul. He was part of the team that built the craft that crashed in Roswell in 1947. I learned college physics from one of the beings that built the craft that crashed in Roswell and started a UFO 'craze'! (He was a human being, but that is still a being.) New Mexico Tech was an amazing school. Professors like Charlie Moore, Sterling Colgate, and Bernie Vonnegut (Kurt's brother) made it a pretty exciting place.

I don't really understand the purpose of the 'leak' unless it is to show that some people who work with Hillary Clinton have some pretty wacky beliefs. Has anyone been paying attention to politics for the last few decades? This is not startling in any way. Finding evidence of a rational person, without wacky beliefs, involved in politics would be a world shattering revelation.

The casimir effect exists, yes. You can not derive free energy from it or any other "zero-pointenergy-tapping-machine", though. See http://www.csicop.org/si/show/...

How about any source that isn't a blog or religious organization webpage? (heck this one even has "blog" in the URL)

Hey look, I can do the same thing, only in the opposite direction.

For those who avoid Googling, this thought experiment is by Galileo Galilei.

Something not entirely different: in Otto Frisch's delightful memoir "What Little I Remember" he relates a story about Niels Bohr and him, which can also be read here (search on the page for "thought experiments" or - even better - just read the whole transcript); in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes this is told as follows:

He [Bohr] was traveling through Germany to determine who needed help. [This was in the 1930s.] "To me it was a great experience," Frisch writes, "to be suddenly confronted with Niels Bohr - an almost legendary name for me - and to see him smile at me like a kindly father; he took me by my waistcoat button and said: 'I hope you will come and work with us sometime; we like people who can carry out "thought experiments"!'" (Frisch had recently verified the prediction of quantum theory that an atom recoils when it emits a photon, a movement previously considered too slight to meaasure.)

His aunt was Lise Meitner, and together they gave a correct interpretation of experiment by Otto Hahn: "We [Frisch and Lise Meitner] walked up and down in the snow, I on skis and she on foot (she said and proved that she could get along just as fast that way), and gradually the idea took shape that this was no chipping or cracking of the nucleus but rather a process to be explained by Bohr's idea that the nucleus was like a liquid drop; such a drop might elongate and divide itself."

I highly recommend Frisch's memoir. From it another Bohr story. Frisch was invited to Bohr's home, and on seeing a horseshoe hanging above the door and said to Bohr: "Surely you don't believe in that?"; Bohr's reply: "Of course not, but I'm told it works even if you don't believe in it!"

A quote by Frisch: "Scientists have one thing in common with children: curiosity. To be a good scientist you must have kept this trait of childhood, and perhaps it is not easy to retain just one trait. A scientist has to be curious like a child; perhaps one can understand that there are other childish features he hasn't grown out of."

My "Research" shows that 52% of 12-13 year olds don't actually understand the words "porn" and "addicted" and 86% of teenagers lie when answering questions about sex or violence.

Once again, fantasy can't match reality.

The Kinsey Institute did studies to find out what teenagers meant by the words they use. They found out that most teenagers didn't think that oral sex was "having sex". The Journal of the American Medical Association published their results. This was significant because that was when Bill Clinton was being impeached after saying that he didn't "have sex" with Monica Lewinsky. The Executive Vice President of the American Medical Association, Ratclife Anderson, a right-wing Republican, freaked out and fired the editor of JAMA, George Lundberg.

Proof I'm not making this up http://www.csicop.org/speciala...

> Placebo has no physiological effect (like homeopathy).

> More info here: http://www.csicop.org/si/show/... [csicop.org]

I'm afraid that the article you just cited specifically says:

> And finally there are real physiological effects resulting from the ritual of treatment.

So I';m afraid that even your primary source disagrees with your claim to some extent.

This represents a gross misunderstanding of the placebo effect.

Placebo has no physiological effect (like homeopathy). Often people taking placebo, homeopathy, etc. will *report* feeling better - but this does not mean they are better in any meaningful sense of the word.

More info here: http://www.csicop.org/si/show/...

It is very unethical to sell somebody a treatment which does not *treat* anything.

The third link, and the page that the statement was published on, is by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry . They feel that the media is giving undue credibility to the deniers by allowing them to co-opt their name. "The mission of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry is to promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims."

Yes my numbers were wrong. The conclusion, however, was not. See Shooting for the Sun
If you do gravity assist, you can do that for escape velocity as well.

Found it!
http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/shooting_for_the_sun/

here's a nice summary:
http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/shooting_for_the_sun/

From Earth's surface it only takes 16 km/sec to reach escape velocity for Sun (and your rocket can just fall into Alpha Centauri) because Earth's velocity around Sun gives you head start, but from earth's surface it takes 32 km/sec to cancel Earth's orbital velocity and reach Sun.

http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/shooting_for_the_sun/

This is why Sol is the worst target possible.

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/polygraphs_and_the_national_labs_dangerous_ruse_undermines_national_securit/

If only there were some options other than nuclear fission and burning brown coal in an open pit!

Oh, wait, there are.

Here in reality, decentralized heterogenous power production would be inherently better for human culture and society, since it has less tendency to create economic disparities large enough to engender wholesale regulatory capture or militarization of power production, has fewer military vulnerabilities, and employs more working people gainfully (instead of funneling money to banksters), and would potentially allow a less expensive grid to carry more total power.

Solar, wind, hydro, and most importantly carbon-neutral biomass energy plants spotted all over the country on a true "smart grid" is the way to go. Solve dozens of social and economic problems while eliminating the pollution caused by burning petroleum.

Incidentally, I'm not the first to figure this out. Nikola Tesla talked about the idiocy of burning limited resources in 1915, before we compounded the problem by building terrestrial fission plants.

We get the Skeptical Inquirer - http://www.csicop.org/si/ - "the official journal of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Six times per year Skeptical Inquirer publishes critical scientific evaluations of all manner of controversial and extraordinary claims, including but not limited to paranormal and fringe-science matters, and informed discussion of all relevant issues..."

Also, Cook's Illustrated - http://www.cooksillustrated.com/ - which has some nice "evidence based" cookery with a bit of "Consumer Reports" thrown in. We ignore the note from the publisher each issue which is just crazy talk....

And Consumer Reports - http://www.consumerreports.org/ - their technology reviews are not always as well informed as I would like them to be, but they try to maintain a level of unbiasedness that is quite admirable.

I've read several of your books, used to have a subscription to "Skeptical Inquirer", and generally support your activities and those of other skeptics. (I sometimes point out that the emperor has no clothes on this very site :-)

Your books, and transcripts and stories of skeptic investigations, hold a generally belittling attitude towards the people you're investigating. Not at all the dispassionate, "here's the evidence, here's our conclusions" type of prose that is customary in scientific literature.

Regarding this tone of voice, what advice can you give to someone who does public writing? Has this attitude helped your cause, or served to impede it? If you were given the chance to start over, would you take the same attitude?

Basically, is "snark" a good writing style?

Nota Bene: For those who think this is a troll (it's not), I grabbed "Flim Flam" by James Randy off of my bookshelf (the first of his books I could find). Opening at random and starting from chapter 6 (Erich von Daniken &c) reads sentences/fragments such as: "The only facts in his four books [named] that I depend on are the page numbers", "perpetrated ... a literary diddle of enormous scope", [Chapter 8] "Along with Freudian psychiatry, this madness has persisted to the present day".

I found the book informative and interesting, but the tone, sometimes nuanced and sometimes explicit, fairly screams "prejudice!" to the reader. To my mind, the style detracts from the credibility.

Online, tone of voice is everything. We have an opportunity to find out whether snark writing is more effective than dispassionate, and perhaps that will inform online writing.

The ulcers story is in fact another example where the outsiders with the radical new theory really weren't. There was a Skeptical Inquirer article which fortunately was on the web.

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/bacteria_ulcers_and_ostracism_h._pylori_and_the_making_of_a_myth/

Summary:
-- research studies take time. Given this, scientists accepted the theory reasonably fast.
-- the scientist who tested the theory on himself didn't develop an ulcer.
-- existing non-antibiotic treatments did work, though they were not as good at preventing recurrences.

That a single study showing positive results for ESP was flawed in some way, is a natural starting position.

Ah, but Bem's 2011 paper was not flawed at all. He successfully and convincingly demonstrated his lack of understanding of statistical techniques and his ineptitude in application of said techniques. He also illustrated the failings of the peer review process in minor fields. His incompetent attempt at "validation" of ESP was the most persuasive evidence of all, in fact.

This overwhelming ignorance of statistics is prevalent throughout the social "sciences" and is almost as widespread in medical fields. Bem is not the first to misunderstand and misuse t-tests or to fail to distinguish exploratory and confirmatory analysis. Those in fundamentally innumerate fields should not play with numbers (especially using packaged statistical software) except under supervision of a qualified adult. They are emphatically not qualified to certify themselves as competent in statistics or any other area outside their specialization.

First, if you're interested in magazines, find a good newspaper/magazine shop, as bookstores — even those with seemingly largish "magazine sections" — can't compare in terms of either selection or knowledge.

As far as subscribing to foreign magazines, have you tried contacting the publisher? If they can't help you, then you're unlikely to find a significantly better price than the news shop.

With few exceptions, widely distributed US technology magazines tend to be very "advertiser friendly," and, consequently, even non-review feature articles in US technology magazines tend to be overwhelmingly "slanted" towards tools and technologies over, e.g., techniques and non-product-related news. As this has basically turned me off the genre, it's nice to hear that the situation might be better elsewhere.

Even outside technology, there seems to be a similar negative correlation between "commercialism" and quality in the magazine industry. Off the top of my head, examples of generally interesting and "not unabashedly commercial" magazines include Harpers , Foreign Affairs , and the Skeptical Inquirer .

Skeptical Inquirer

This article on CSICOP has detailed descriptions on several alleged cases of "spontaneous human combustion," and explanations for what probably actually happened in each one. http://www.csicop.org/si/show/not-so-spontaneous_human_combustion/

Chopra also wants to create a woo equivalent of the Templeton Prize for this kind of crap. As others have mentioned - this is old news and something of a personal obsession with Penrose and requires numerous leaps of faith to follow. Penrose has been taken down by Victor Stenger quite some time ago - http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/is_the_brain_a_quantum_device/

Broken record time, but yes. Such subversion of the peer review process did show up. The culprits weren't the ones you expect.

In general however, I think that this study is rather pessimistic. And anyway, it hasn't been peer reviewed, so who knows... ;-)

(yes, I did read TFA, but not the paper

You really should read a little into the damn thing, and not just right-wing blogs...

In early 2003, the small journal Climate Research published a paper by climate change “skeptics” Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which challenged the established view that the late twentieth century saw anomalously high temperatures. The paper didn’t present original research; instead, it was a literature review. Soon and Baliunas examined a wide range of “proxy records” for past temperatures, based on studies of ice cores, corals, tree rings, and other sources. They concluded that few of the records showed anything particularly unusual about twentieth century temperatures, especially when compared with the so-called “Medieval Warm Period” a thousand years ago.

Soon and Baliunas had specifically sent their paper to one Chris de Freitas at Climate Research, an editor known for opposing curbs on carbon dioxide emissions. He in turn sent the paper out for review and then accepted it for publication. That’s when the controversy began.

Soon mainstream climate scientists fought back. Thirteen authored a devastating critique of the work in the American Geophysical Union publication Eos. After seeing the critique, Climate Research editor-in-chief Hans von Storch decided he had to make changes in the journal’s editorial process. But when journal colleagues refused to go along, von Storch announced his resignation.

Several other Climate Research editors subsequently resigned over the Soon and Baliunas paper. Even journal publisher Otto Kinne eventually admitted that the paper suffered from serious flaws, basically agreeing with its critics. But by that point in time, Inhofe had already devoted a Senate hearing to trumpeting the new study. However dubious, it made a massive splash.

(source here, all emphasis mine).

I realize that you confused context with right wing punditry, but it's not.

Here are some links (provided to you via Arts and Letters Daily):

The Associated Press
Sci Am
Discover
James Randy
Roger Kimball

The Man's last essay. It's titeled Oprah Winfrey: Bright (but Gullible) Billionaire.

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/bacteria_ulcers_and_ostracism_h._pylori_and_the_making_of_a_myth/

The bacteria causing ulcers idea has been distorted by the media. It was proven that bacteria caused ulcers, however:

1) There were in fact a lot of papers published on the subject.
2) Proving that an infectious agent causes a disease requires being able to reproduce the disease. This did not happen for a while. Even the scientist who experimented on himself didn't actually get an ulcer.
3) Many healthy people have the same bacteria but don't get ulcers.
4) The existing non-antibiotic treatments for ulcers did work. The antibiotics just prevented a relapse, and the correct treatment is to use both (i.e. not to avoid the existing anti-ulcer drugs)
5) The length of time it took for the medical community to accept the theory was reasonable, considering the steps you need to go through to prove it, the length of time required, and the research needed. Trials take time.

There wasn't any suppression.

• Power Line Panic and Mobile Mania is written by a physicist.
• A Growing Hysteria

• Power Line Panic and Mobile Mania is written by a physicist.
• A Growing Hysteria

The odds are 100%, as this has always been the ACTUAL method used by woo-woo, acupuncture, "complementary alternative" medicine peddlers who to this day are still selling the laughable fraud of "acupuncture-only anesthesia" surgery.

There was more to the Climate Research publication than that. The paper was submitted to an editor that was more sympathetic to anti-AGW papers, which is fine. That is normal par-for-the-course stuff when submitting a paper, if you're allowed to select an editor to submit it to for that journal you will of course submit it to the one who tends to agree with your viewpoint the most. And normally this is fine; scientists will have different viewpoints. However one thing should come above all viewpoints: whether the science is sound.

Apparently, the paper in question at Climate Research was approved by the single editor (as per the rules of that journal) and allowed in, despite heavy criticism from the other editors who viewed it as that particular editor ignoring what was wrong with the science of the paper to voice a viewpoint. This caused a majority of the editors to resign their posts at Climate Research, including the guy who was going to become lead editor the very next week. This is what Michael Mann was referring to. The journal had indeed became illegitimate because of the majority of editors leaving the journal in protest.

Here is a description of the events, the paper in question, and the critiques of the paper that were ignored by the editor. Which, obviously, goes kind of against the whole concept of "peer review" if your peers' opinions are ignored and a unilateral decision is made. This seems like a perfectly legitimate comment by Mann to me, as the journal had lost credibility for failing for adhere to the peer review process and publishing faulty research.

I'm admittedly unfamiliar with the events at GRL though.

NCCAM started as a promise to put "complimentary and alternative medicine" (CAM) to scientific scrutiny, with politically predictable results.

As much as I love science (and how!), I'm ambivalent about even the idea of NCCAM. Testing herbal remedies... I don't know, maybe we'll find something great. But testing things like homeopathy, which even NCCAM admits "a number of its key concepts are not consistent with the current understanding of science, particularly chemistry and physics," is just a waste of resources.

The way the large percentages for sexual propositioning/harassment on the internet are pretty misleading. In order to get that number they are counting fairly tame stuff such as mildly lewd comments from friends over IM and the like. For example, a teenager asking another teenager if the other was a virgin would count or possibly even asking "hey, did you end up making out with that cute guy." When one looks at what one would normally call a real problem, such as sexual solicitation by strangers and the like one gets under 3%. See http://www.csicop.org/si/show/predator_panic_a_closer_look/.

you've just lost 99% of average readers

This is just Sturgeon's law. It is also the definition of "average". The average person doesn't give a rat's ass about any topic you want to name. It has nothing to do with highbrow notions of philosophy.

Of course, given enough words, you can explain any concept.

I doubt that. Given enough words (and a few pictures) you can explain arbitrarily complex expressions of concepts that our brains have evolved to handle. You will run aground past some point with underlying concepts of physics and mathematics, precisely because our brains aren't formatted to visualize a tesseract or grasp the collapse of the wave function.

On the other hand, one might assert that after some point words become a hindrance when trying to express ideas that (for good or bad) are disconnected from the underlying reality. You can read all the philosophy books you want, but the arguments will never gel into a single coherent picture of reality - because each author has a different notion of what that is. Truth is to be found in the synthesis of disparate ideas, but a lot of synthesis involves discarding dreck.

And then you are asserting a grabbag of disconnected notions:

• most readers aren't interested in hearing the full explanation

  and you can fool most of the people most of the time...

• They're fine with a glossed over version

  As are we all for various purposes under various conditions at various times.

• to the point of being a flat out lie... and they won't be able to tell

  The big lie! But then, they would accept the big truth, too. The issue is perhaps that our public communication channels require no referees, no peer review.

• Worse, they may believe themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to detect a false explanation when, in fact, they aren't.

  And this was the link back to the other blog entry. Perhaps we should require all students to have a subscription to the Skeptical Inquirer.

The modern world at least supports the notion of subverting the dominant paradigm. The real issue here isn't the ability to discern truth - it is the ability to discern the opposite

The Skeptical Inquirer ran an article a little over a year ago about the anti-vax movement. Highly recommended reading.

Not that uncommon of a belief in Nigeria. You really underestimate the level of superstition in some African countries. Not only a "witch hunts" and killings a regular enough thing, but so are ritual killings to cut off body parts for sale to traditional animistic shamans.

You didn't think the whole world has adopted modern, Western sensibilities about the presence of supernatural monsters and black sorcerers behind every rock and tree? Take away the use of human body parts in tribal rituals, we weren't all that different 400 years ago or even 200 years ago. We all get a good laugh about it, but it's a real cultural problem there.

Do not equate it as rigorously tested science or medicine though.

Actually, chiropractics has been tested for a number of complaints. The medical consensus is that it "may be a useful approach in alleviating pain for a very limited set of disorders associated with the back or spine". It is known to be utterly useless for a great many others, such as arthritis, high blood pressure, or ear infections.

Nevertheless, chiropractors routinely claim to be able to treat such conditions. For example, 75% of those approached in one survey claimed to be able to treat arthritis and/or high blood pressure. In another survey, 80% of chiropractors claimed to be able to treat ear infections in children.
http://www.csicop.org/si/2008-01/thyer.html

This is quite disturbing, as it suggests that only 20-25% of chiropractors were aware of the limits of their therapies. The vast majority were willing to misapply chiropractics in potentially harmful ways.

I'd be much more interested in some of the evidence-based medicine exposes of mainstream medicine.

Then you might be interested in reading the article The Wholesale Sedation of America's Youth in the Nov/Dec '08 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

I'd be much more interested in some of the evidence-based medicine exposes of mainstream medicine.

Then you might be interested in reading the article The Wholesale Sedation of America's Youth in the Nov/Dec '08 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

As for Sagan himself on the issue, his research seems more speculative rather than concrete. Remember he also predicted that the first Iraq war would lead to global cooling because of the particulate matter generated from the oil fires Saddam threatened to set. Well indeed Saddam did set those fires as he threatened and it had no measurable impact on our climate.

He never predicted "global cooling", even so his predictions were still wrong. In the autumn of 1990, Sagan made his most serious scientific blunder. Short version: Sagan assumed that the soot from the fires could reach stratosphere, which then would endanger food production in Asia. He was wrong about that - however, the ecology of Kuwait was damaged, temperatures going down more than 4 degrees C.

Also, Sagan was only one of 5 people who wrote the paper on Nuclear Winter. A simple oil well fire (no matter how big) simply can't reach the stratosphere, an atomic explosion does - and thousands do to.

There is a newer paper on Nuclear Winter: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006JD008235.shtml

No, the exception is not politically motivated. It's an important factor in determining the nature of a belief.

A belief can be based on no evidence at all, can even contradict the available evidence, without it being a sign of mental problems. Even the most skeptical people have such beliefs when you look closely enough. They arise because of the nature of our brains (check out http://www.csicop.org/si/9505/belief.html.

It's when someone clings to a manifestly false belief in the absence of any social support -- indeed often in the face of seriously adverse social consequences -- that the medical community starts to consider it a medical problem. Such beliefs are often accompanied by hallucinations and can be a symptom of chemical imbalance in the brain.

There's a lot more to being delusional than just being wrong. Anybody who thinks otherwise is obviously deluded.

Here is a well researched and referenced article on anti-vaccinationism that you might want to read:
http://www.csicop.org/si/2007-06/novella.html
(Article discusses it mostly from an autism angle, since that's where most of the anti-vaccinationists are at.)
Yes, vaccines can contain thimerosal (which contains mercury). And lots of other scary sounding things. But scary sounding and harmful are not the same thing, and there is always the question of dose, and whether the negative effects, if any, outweigh the negative effects of cancelling vaccine administration.
If you still maintain there are good reasons not to vaccinate, then you had better present us with something better than a silly YouTube video. You've got to back up your claims with evidence, especially when you say things like 'WHO, the worldwide eugenics organization'.
Which brings me to another point: your whole post has all the tell-tale signs of a typical conspiracy theory. A big organization that conspires to something nefarious and everyone you meet - 'sheeple' - is with them. If people would just look at it, they would see. Anyone denying your claims is just part of them. That kind of thinking has lead you to take a position that is both ridiculous in the extreme (the same author of the article above has discussed conspiracy theories as well) as conspiracy theories always collapse under their own weight, and sort of pre-immunised (oh sweet irony) against reality by being constructed as a totally circular and unfalsifiable belief system.

Check out some of the linked examples here. Etta smith in particular had potential non-psychic access to the information she gave. Or Nancy Myere. The only time psychics are precise or accurate is when the knowledge is available some other way.

Try "The Belief Engine": http://www.csicop.org/si/9505/belief.html

He's just mad that only Buzz gets any attention these days.

Anti-Vaccination Fever: The Shot Hurt Around the World, Sensationalist media, religious fanatics, and alternative medical practitioners fanned the fires created by questionable research to spawn worldwide epidemics of a disease that had almost been forgotten.

For vaccines, a good well-sourced overview can be found here: http://astore.amazon.com/medical-bookstore-20/detail/1881217302 [amazon.com].

Ah, yes. That cutting-edge research from 2002 with one out of three reviews on the page commenting on how biased it is. There's a good source of information.

Actually, there have been a number of studies recently looking at the association between vaccines and various illnesses/diseases/symptoms, particularly vaccines and autism. Every single one that I've seen published by a reputable scientist has found no link.

There's also an article in the Jan 2008 Skeptical Inquirer about vaccine safety (particularly regarding autism).

Lots of random charts in a book do not necessarily prove anything, except, possibly, that the shrinking number of pirates caused the rise in average global temperature. You need to have a context and know where the chart came from.

We can argue logical fallacies all day but what it comes down to is that the science does not back up the conspiracy theorist claims. This is not the first study done. These studies have consistently shown no link between Autism and vaccinations.

The only studies that have shown a supposed connection were poorly conducted, flawed and probably constructed with an end goal in mind. These "scientists" were getting kickbacks from personal injury attorneys looking to make money.

Here's a great article that goes into the well established science and corruption by some "scientists": http://csicop.org/si/2007-06/novella.html

Now Slashdot has been invaded! Is there nowhere I can go to escape these conspiracist nutbags? I will make a feeble attempt to counteract this inane review of an inane book, with a list of various debunking links:

September 11th
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/911myths/
http://www.debunking911.com/index.html
http://www.911myths.com/
http://wtc.nist.gov/

Income Tax and the Federal Reserve
http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/jsiegel/Personal/taxes/IncomeTax.htm
http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/flaherty/Federal_Reserve.html

Other
http://www.debunker.com/conspiracy.html
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000140.html

General
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory
http://www.urban75.org/info/conspiraloons.html
http://www.csicop.org/si/9012/critical-thinking.html