Posts Tagged telegraph
The Real Cost Of Psychic Tipsters
In a news item that made it into the papers pretty much across the board, a police force has admitted following-up leads provided by psychic mediums in their investigations into a man’s death. The revelation, which has led to wide scale derision and outcry, came from constabulary in the Dyfed-Powys Police force, regarding the investigation into the death of 32 year old Welshman Carlos Assaf. Whe he was found hangd in his home in March, the immediate assumption was suicide – but when the police were presented by the claims of self-proclaimed psychics, a wider investigation was launched. Read the rest of this entry »
Cosmic Ordering: Real Or No Real?
Posted by Marsh in Media, Self-Help, Skepticism on September 28th, 2009
Noel Edmonds, host of Deal or No Deal
This week it’s emerged that bearded box-opener Noel Edmonds of the granny-pleasing game show ‘Deal or No Deal‘ has something other than dumb luck and a penchant for stripey jumpers on his side. Noel, who’s career was saved by the quiz show after his popularity plummeted with the demise of his long-running 90s show ‘Noel’s House Party‘, has pinned his recent success firmly on ‘Cosmic Ordering‘.
For the uninitiated of our listeners, Cosmic Ordering is the mystical self-help movement whereby followers are encouraged to write down a wish list of things they want to come true and submit it to the cosmos and wait for it to happen. In that way it’s a lot like the Oprah-tastic self-help piddle ‘The Law of Atraction‘, essentially telling people that if you wish hard enough, anything you want will come to you.
In Noel’s case he was turned on to the power of the cosmos by that sure-fire source of life expertise – his reflexologist. Because, obviously, anyone who spends their day magically rubbing the feet of strangers clearly has the secret to getting ahead in life… but enough of the ad hominems. Instead lets look at this from a professional, respectable angle. Oh, sorry, mistake – let’s look at this in the Daily Mail. Read the rest of this entry »
Do Angels Believe In The Telegraph?
Posted by Marsh in Religion, Skepticism, paranormal on September 17th, 2009
I thought I’d read it all when it comes to the Telegraph. Homeopathy to cure cancer? Sure. UFOs that are really really not Chinese lanterns? Uh-huh. The moon landing was hoaxed? Gotcha. Telegraph, thy mysteries bore me and thy secrets hold no shock.
Except, I was wrong. That’s fine though, I’m always happy to admit when I’m wrong (I am! What do you know, anyway?!). So it was with equal parts incredulity and glee I allowed my love/hate affair with the Telegraph to take me in its warm and scientifically-bereft arms with the headline ‘Do you believe in angels?‘
No, I don’t. Nor should you. Silly Telegraph.
Still, it’s been a while since we wrote about them, and it’s rude of me to deny the Telegraph their fun, so let’s see what it’s all about. Read the rest of this entry »
Succussed, Not Stirred – Homeopathy and Annabel Croft
Posted by Marsh in Homeopathy, Media, Pseudomedicine, Public Health on June 25th, 2009
This week the Telegraph’s informed us how former tennis star and TV-pundit Annabel Croft has come to rely on magic and water, after her ovarian cysts were ‘cured’ using Homeopathic means. After developing the naturally-occurring cysts in 2003, the Kent-born player was informed by her GP that she potentially faced an operation to remove the benign growths. However, as the article informs us, upon the advice of a friend (not the advice of her doctor, you might want to note), she visited local homeopath Hilery Dorrian. Annabel explains:
“When I saw Hilery, I was astonished to see my ideas of health turned on their head. She explained to me that homeopathy treats the real causes of illness in the body, not just the symptoms – as conventional medicine does… Hilery didn’t perform a physical examination. Instead, she asked me about my background, my personality, my emotions, what made me stressed – even my parents’ health. She constructed a picture of me and gave me a remedy made up exactly to treat my left ovary.”
It’s hard to say, really, at what point the alarm bells should have been ringing. Perhaps when the diagnosis involved no physical examination at all – that would have struck me as odd. Or perhaps when she was diagnostically asked about her personality and her emotions, when her real physical pain was already known to be caused by erroneous fluid-filled sacs on her ovaries – that would seem a bit weird. Or perhaps when Hilery trotted out a meaningless fallacy that conventional medicine only treats the symptoms of an illness, not the cause – that would strike me immediately as completely, utterly and patently absurd (anti-biotics, for example, kill bacteria and infections – they don’t go near your symptoms, you’ll still cough and wheeze right up until the causal infection in your chest begins clear). Read the rest of this entry »
UFOs Spotted Over Lake District. Really. UFOs. No Fooling. OK, Maybe SOME Fooling…
Posted by Marsh in Media, Merseyside, UFOs on June 16th, 2009
So the Lake District is the latest area of England to be visited by UFOs. Following on from the ones spotted in Shropshire, Cambridgeshire, London and… erm, well… Merseyside. Yes, Merseyside. That sound you can hear is us, dropping the ball on that one. Aliens in our back gardens, and there we were out ‘mobbing’ local ‘psychics’. Boy were our faces red.
But as it happens, the Merseyside UFOs weren’t aliens, after all. I’ll let you have a moment to stop reeling from that shock revelation. Done? Good. They were countermeasure flares deployed in a navy training routine. Even the woo-tastic Telegraph is happy to go with this explanation, so it must really hold water – give those guys half an inch of wiggle room and it seems they’re the first ones to don their tin-foil hats and hum the theme tune to the X-Files. And the BBC are not much better – ‘Do-Dee-Derr-Derrr…Do-Dee-Do-Derr-Derr-Derr…‘ As it happens, I was half-way through an ‘it’s probably something straightforward’ type post when it emerged that it was, in fact, something straightforward. ’Oh,’ thought I, ‘that’s that then. No need to write on UFOs, it’ll be ages before another one of those comes up.’ But UFOs, like buses and clichés, rarely come along one at a time… Read the rest of this entry »
