Empire of the Odd

There’s nothing better than a wild UFO conspiracy theory — unless it’s a UFO theory that wraps in a debunked comet, the Catholic Church, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Conspiracy theorists believe that Comet Elenin is rapidly approaching Earth, and that it’s a perfect cube. A cube piloted by cyborgs who seek to assimiliate the human race into their collective. A Borg Cube, in other words.Yes, the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation “were being prophetic” when they created the Borg, writes extraterrestrial expert Alex Collier over at the Canadian National Newspaper.

[[[MORE]]]

Everyone has been touched by cancer in one way or another. If you haven’t had it yourself, the odds are extremely high you know someone who has, and who has died from it. I’ve lost loved ones to cancer, and it’s awful; it can take years filled with tests, hope, lack of hope, expensive therapy… and in the end the odds are what they are. It all makes for desperate times for those involved, with an emotional distress level that is beyond my ability to describe.

There are people out there who claim they can cure cancer, or have therapies that can mediate it. Some of these people are simply con artists, ready to swoop in as soon as they smell blood in the water, vermin that they are. Others are honest but wrong, thinking they have stumbled on some therapy that no one else has found. However, time and again, when these alternative methods are tested rigorously using controlled, properly done studies, they are shown not to work. In general this does not stop people from making the claims, however.

In Houston, Texas, is a man named Stanislaw Burzynski. He claims he has a method for treating cancer. He calls it antineoplaston therapy. However, according to the National Cancer Institute, “No randomized, controlled trials showing the effectiveness of antineoplastons have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.” That’s a bad sign. Furthermore, the FDA has not approved of antineoplaston therapy for use. Also telling is that “… other investigators have not been able to obtain the same results reported by Dr. Burzynski and his team”. Yet, despite this, Burzynski charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for people to get his therapy — though he has to say they’re participating in research trials, since the FDA won’t allow him to use his ideas as an actual treatment.

Those are red flags, to be sure.

[[[MORE]]]

Australian journalist Steve Cannane of the ABC program Lateline e-mailed us early this morning with this stunning new report which aired only a few hours ago in that country.

Valeska Paris tells Cannane that she joined Scientology’s hardcore Sea Organization — signing its standard billion-year contract — at only 14 years of age. Three years later, afterher stepfather committed suicide and her mother denounced Scientology on French television, Paris was ordered to “disconnect” from her family. She says that church leaderDavid Miscavige then enforced that disconnection by having her put on the cruise ship, the Freewinds, that sails the Caribbean and caters to high-level church members.

Paris was told she’d be on the ship for two weeks. Instead, she says she was held there against her will for 12 years.

For the first six years, she tells Cannane, she couldn’t leave the ship without an escort. When he asks her if she tried to leave, she answers, “I’d been in Scientology my whole life. It’s not like I knew how to escape.”

Another former Sea Org member, Ramana Dienes-Browning, backed up Paris’s claims, but ABC got denials from Scientology, which says that each of them is lying.

[[[MORE]]]

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/11/valeska_paris_scientology_freewinds.php

Skepticism Makes The World Go Round: Chiropractic cures for your DNA?

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.