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Comments and Articles

The illustration is "Attempting the Impossible" by René Magritte
(click on the picture to see a larger version.)

There are sites in the collection which have comments associated with them.

• 1-100
• 101-

There are also some commentaries and magazine articles I have written which apply to a category or more than one site. Some of these have appeared in the following publications.

• 
  The journal of the Australian Skeptics
• 
  Australasian Science
• 
  Australian Doctor
• 
  Issues

Health Fraud

• The 90th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle
• Bogus Challenges
• CAM or SCAM?
• Cancer 100 Challenge
• CRA vs Iridology
• Dangerous Practitioners - Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• The Dietary Supplement Experiment Begins
• Don't hold your breath waiting for change
• Dr Sandra Trademark
• Drug interactions
• Faith healer? Fraud!
• Fighting the Medi-scams
• Homeopathy - all the idiocy that fits
• Homeopathy - How can honest people sell this rubbish?
• How many people do those doctors kill?
• How not to do science - Everyone retracts except Dr Wakefield
• Ignorance is Strength
• Is that a cart or a barrow that horse is pushing?
• Let's be balanced!
• "Limited only by the laws of physics"
• The mass media does its job. Not.
• Multiple Chemical Stupidity?
• The Myth of "The Myth of Mental Illness"
• Obituary - Stephen Jay Gould
• Pan Pharmaceuticals - if it ducks like a quack
• Pasteur's Last Words
• Polypharmacy
• Professor Boyd Haley
• Progress? We don’t need no stinking progress.
• Quackery
• Quackery Down Under
• The Ragtag Posse of Snake-oil Vigilantes
• Still Deluded After All These Years
• Targeting the susceptible
• Then it came for me
• Three Dead Children
• Transcript of the murder of Candace Newmaker
• True Believers
• Truth and Fiction
• Watch out, doctors, the quacks are after your patients!
• You could just die laughing

Plus:

• The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing (Andy Lewis)
• Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions (Oliver Wendell Holmes)
• Homo Neanderthalensis (H.L. Mencken)
• Mannatech Using Disputed Study to Boost Sales of Its Products (David Evans)
• The Median Isn't the Message (Stephen Jay Gould)
• Shaken Baby Syndrome (Pamela Rowse RN)

Racism

• Subtle Racism

Plus:

• I have a Dream (Martin Luther King Jr)
• Redfern Speech - December 10, 1992 (Paul Keating)

Religion

• "Blasphemy" comes before "Science" in the dictionary
• Bogus Challenges
• Creation/Evolution Debate
• Creation/Evolution Debate - Part 1
• Creation/Evolution Debate - Part 2
• Creation/Evolution Debate - Part 3
• Earthquakes and God
• Faith healer? Fraud!
• Ian Plimer was right. They do tell lies for God
• Literature v Literalism
• Polite request to creationists
• Someone gets upset
• Why am I a skeptic?

Plus:

• An Agnostic's Apology (Sir Leslie Stephen)
• Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic? (Bertrand Russell)
• Among the Believers - a night out with Benny Hinn (John Sweatman)
• The Antichrist (Friedrich Nietzsche [translation by H.L. Mencken])
• Bible Teaching and Religious Practice (Mark Twain)
• A Free Man's Worship (Bertrand Russell)
• Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? (Bertrand Russell)
• A Letter Concerning Toleration (John Locke)
• Memorial Service - Where is the grave-yard of dead gods? (H.L. Mencken)
• The Necessity Of Atheism (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
• Of Miracles (David Hume)
• Of Miracles and Their Uses (Thomas Hobbes)
• Of Religion (Thomas Hobbes)
• On the Value of Scepticism (Bertrand Russell)
• An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish (Bertrand Russell)
• The Skepticism of Believers (Sir Leslie Stephen)
• The Ten Commandments (Mark Twain)
• Theology and Falsification (Antony Flew)
• Thoughts of God (Mark Twain)
• The War Prayer (Mark Twain)
• What is an Agnostic? (Bertrand Russell)
• What Is the Soul? (Bertrand Russell)
• Why I Am A Rationalist (Bertrand Russell)
• Why I Am an Unbeliever (Carl Van Doren)
• Why I Am Not A Christian (Bertrand Russell)

Creationism

• "Blasphemy" comes before "Science" in the dictionary
• Bogus Challenges
• Creation/Evolution Debate
• Creation/Evolution Debate - Part 1
• Creation/Evolution Debate - Part 2
• Creation/Evolution Debate - Part 3
• Ian Plimer was right. They do tell lies for God
• Literal interpretation of the Bible
• Literature v Literalism
• Obituary - Stephen Jay Gould
• Polite request to creationists
• Science books? We don't need no stinkin' science books

Plus:

• 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense (John Rennie)
• Creationist Deception Exposed (Barry Williams)
• Homo Neanderthalensis (H.L. Mencken)
• The Information Challenge (Richard Dawkins)
• A Refutation of Deism (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
• A scientist and Christian talks about Intelligent Design (David Goldney)
• Theology and Falsification (Antony Flew)

Anti-vaccination liars

• The 90th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle
• Answer me this, anti-vaccinators
• Bogus Challenges
• Child Abuse
• Dante and Virgil descend to Hurstville
• Death By Lethal Vaccine Injection
• How not to do science - Everyone retracts except Dr Wakefield
• If it's good enough for doctors, it's good enough for liars
• Liars just can't help themselves
• Lies about abortions and vaccines
• Lies about vaccines and foetuses
• Pictures of children suffering from "harmless" diseases
• Professor Boyd Haley
• See how "harmless" measles is.
• Vaccines

Plus:

• Anti-immunisation scare: The inconvenient facts (Dr Stephen Basser)
• Fatal Exemption (Paul Offitt)
• Shaken Baby Syndrome (Pamela Rowse RN)

Pseudoscience

• The 90th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle
• The Bear's Progress - SkeptoBear's 2004 World Tour
• The Bermuda Triangle
• CAM or SCAM?
• Coincidences
• Faith, Fact and Fiction : The demarcation of science and non-science
• Have you heard the one about ... ?
• The Magical Mystery Museum
• Multiple Chemical Stupidity?
• Obituary - Stephen Jay Gould
• Pasteur's Last Words
• The Power of Coincidence
• Progress? We don’t need no stinking progress.
• Psychic parasites
• Psychological testing
• Publication in the peer-reviewed literature
• Science as she is spoke
• The science goes round and round, and it comes out here
• Someone gets upset
• Still Deluded After All These Years
• True Believers
• Why am I a skeptic?

Plus:

• The Grand Academy of Lagado (Jonathon Swift)
• Homo Neanderthalensis (H.L. Mencken)
• Of Reason and Science (Thomas Hobbes)
• On Astrologers (Bertrand Russell)
• On the Value of Scepticism (Bertrand Russell)
• An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish (Bertrand Russell)
• Path to the truth is littered with useful failures (Umberto Eco)
• Stupid Skeptic Tricks (D. Owens)
• What is a kook? (Michael Davis)
• What Is the Soul? (Bertrand Russell)

Multi-Level Marketing, Pyramid Schemes, Scams and Frauds

• Advertisements
• Creating Distrust with Multi-level Marketing
• Doing the sums with MLM
• MLM adventures
• Multi-level Marketing Doesn't Add Up
• Multi-Level Marketing spam collection
• The Multi-Level Mirage
• The Ratbags Dream
• Thoughts about multi-level marketing

Plus:

• Mannatech Using Disputed Study to Boost Sales of Its Products (David Evans)
• Report of G Robert Blakey - Amway (G Robert Blakey)

Other topics

• Censorship and intolerance at iVillage
• Free speech
• Full Canvas Jacket
• Jack Shulman gives me an award
• Mary Daly and Feminist Nonsense (a tautology)
• MindBodySpirit Festival, November 1999
• Penis enlargement spam collection
• Y2K - Is there still time to panic?

Plus:

• MindBodySpirit Festival, May 2004 (Belinda Bowditch)
• Remembrance Day Speech (Paul Keating)

Book reviews

• The Cancer Cure That Worked! by Barry Lynes
• The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel
• The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel
• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
• The End of Faith : Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris
• Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science by Martin Gardner
• Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore (Film)
• God : The Interview by Terry Lane
• Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe by Victor Stenger
• How to Poison Your Spouse the Natural Way by Jay Mann
• Masters of Deception by Eric Scheibeler
• Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction by Charles Wynn and Arthur Wiggins
• The Root of All Evil? by Richard Dawkins (TV program)
• Science and Religion : Are They Compatible? by Paul Kurtz, Barry Karr and Ranjit Sandhu (Editors)
• The Sins of Scripture by John Shelby Spong

• "The Danger of Knowing for Sure" - An essay I wrote about skepticism, following the events of September 11, 2001 (This also appeared as a guest editorial in the Skeptic in Vol 21:4, Summer 2001)
• The Ragtag Posse of Snake-oil Vigilantes - The remnants of a superseded RatbagsDotCom project.