Now that the Montel Williams Show is no longer being filmed we won’t be privy to this spectical anymore, but at the end of each year, Sylvia Browne, a self-proclaimed psychic would issue her predictions for the next year.   Last year I noted that her predictions for 2007 were very very wrong.   However, it seems her predictions for 2008 are, believe it or not, even worse.

Now that the year 2008 is over, we can look back and laugh at just how amazingly, ridiculously wrong she was.

2008 was a year with a large number of economic news stories but she missed every single one of them.   She said the job market would improve (it got worse.) and also that the auto industry would improve dramatically due to the introduction of hybrid vehicles.

Predicting the introduction of hybrid vehicles by US automakers is certainly not difficult because by the end of 2007 there were already hybrids on the market and their market-share was improving. While hybrids continue to gain in popularity they have not turned around the auto market.

US auto-makers are still retooling for hybrid production. GM’s first next-generation hybrid is slated for introduction in 2010. Ford hopes to expand hybrid production in 2009 and introduce plug-in hybrids in 2010 or 2010. Chrysler expects to produce electric drivetrain vehicles within the next five to seven years.

No expansion or change in fortunes in 2008, that is for sure.  She completely missed the dramatic and worldwide slump in the economy.  Medical stocks have done no better than other stocks and many have done worse.

Robert S. Lancaster continues in his recovery from the stroke he suffered this past summer.   Of course, we all wish him the best.

Yes, the following video is real.   It comes directly from Failblog, because in this case, it was such a failure that it actually was recognized as one almost universally. A crazy lady finds that her sprinkler makes a rainbow.  What?   A rainbow?   Those are supposed to be in the sky!   And it’s not raining either!  And where’s the leprechaun?  Clearly this is being caused by HAARP and chemtrails and fluoride in our water!

This video is now hosted with the failblog logo, but it was originally posted by a youtube user with the name “dbootsthediva.” The original seems to have been taken down, but I’m pretty confident she is the one who posted it because she currently has about fourty five videos of a similar theme and quality.  It’s likely it was taken down once it hit the Failblog.

It can be hard to tell with these people, but just given how poor the quality of the videos are and how many there are up, I’m betting she really believes this stuff.   The account apparently belongs to a forty nine year old woman in California.   Usually when this kind of thing is a joke the account also has some more obvious tongue-in-cheek humor and other content of a more sane nature.  However this user’s comments, favorites and videos all are of the extreme paranoid kind.

Personally, I can’t imagine what it must be like to live in such a bizzare world of fantasy terror.  Clearly some of these people suffer from mental illness, but some seem to be able to function and understand their world while at the same time displaying these illogical beliefs.   It must be quite an existance.

Here are some others from the same Youtube user:

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The toof fairy has been making her rounds trying to get kids who live near nuclear plants to hand over some teeth to prove that they were exposed to fission byproducts in recent years.   Now, however, it seems that the original study started back in the 1950’s and concerned nuclear weapon tests, or to be more acurate, the attempt to lump nuclear weapons and nuclear energy into the same issue.

I’d be very surprised if they found anything, given the tiny amounts of fallout we’re talking about.   I’d be equally surprised if they didn’t claim to fing something, given that the scientifically dishonest Radiation and Public Health Project that is conducting the “study”.

Via the St. Louise Dispatch:

Baby tooth study resumes, seeking links between fallout radiation and cancer

Questionnaires will soon be sent to thousands of men who donated their baby teeth half a century ago to scientists seeking to learn whether radioactive fallout in milk the donors drank as children affected their health later in life.

It’s the latest step in a study that began in the 1950s and 1960s at Washington University, but then stalled for decades.

Fifty years ago, concern about atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons spurred a group of local scientists and other area residents to begin the project, then called the St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey.

An early apparent link between fallout and health problems was established by the study. But now, more than 40 years later, the study is resuming. Researchers now hope to find links between fallout and instances of cancer in children born in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Letters containing health questionnaires will go out in the new year to the donors of 6,340 baby teeth. Those teeth have been kept in storage since the original study.

Preliminary results of the new study are expected by the middle of 2009, a New York-based scientist says.

The scientist, Joseph Mangano, is executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. He said in a telephone interview that his research group has had possession of 85,000 donated baby teeth since 2001 but lacked the money until recently to begin a full study of the cancer risk posed by nuclear tests.

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This time it’s from a politician.  Geez, who would ever think a politician would mislead the public about the facts?    Still, it’s an unfortunate and persistent myth that replacing fossil fuels with nuclear fission will lead us to a ‘peak uranium’ crisis in a few years or decades.

Is uranium going to hit a”Hubbert Peak”?

Hubbert didn’t think so!

“There is promise, however, provided mankind can solve its international problems and not destroy itself with nuclear weapons, and provided world population (which is now expanding at such a rate as to double in less than a century) can somehow be brought under control, that we may at last have found an energy supply adequate for our needs for at least the next few centuries of the foreseeable future.”   ~M. King Hubbert

Some counter points to this whole notion of “Peak Uranium”

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Lake Superior State University is known for one tradition that has been going on for thirty four years:  “The Banished Word List.” The list is basically a collection of fifteen words of the year that have been so overused, so misused so hyped, so trendy that they have come to define everything annoying and lame about the previous year.   The list therefore suggests that, for the good of society these words and phrases simply need to be banished from the English language (and presumably any other language that their equivalent is overused in.)

It’s all in good fun, of course, but the list has become enough of an institution to get some major press coverage. The words are selected by staff and professors based on nominations which are submitted by website visitors as well as those in the news media, politics and education.

Of the fifteen words, guess which one came in number one.    Here’s a clue…

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I was flipping through the channels today when I saw the word “natural” come up.  Obviously I stopped to see what kind of product it would be, as the word seems to be a buzzword for every bad science scheme out there.   This time it’s pizza.   Yes, that’s right.  A **NEW** natural pizza from Pizza Hut.

Pizza Hut, for those who might not live in the United States is a chain of pizza resteraunts.   In my opinion, however, calling Pizza Hut products pizza is a little insulting to anyone who has ever slaved over a brick oven in Brooklyn to make a real pizza, the way pizza should be.   To be more acurate, Pizza Hut is to Pizza what McDonalds is to slow cooked barbecue.

But I digress…

The **NEW** “Natural Pizza” is their latest thing.  It promises to have natural peperoni, natural sauce, natural cheese and all the other natural fixings.  Thus it tastes far more “natural” than other pizzas, which presumably are “unnatural.”

So just what the hell is a natural pizza?   It’s an interesting question.   If we define “natural” as being created by something other than mankind (or one of mankind’s creations, because a robot-created pizza would not be natural) then it seems this pizza would not fit the bill.   Maybe I’m missing something, but I’ve never been hiking in the woods and suddenly come across a patch of wild pizza.

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There’s a big to-do about the fact that some shipping company has placed a bunch of solar panels on one of their big international freighters.  Ironically, it happens to be a car carrier.   Like all solar projects, it seems this one was damn expensive and offers a very low return.

I think these guys may even have done me a favor because one way I like to demonstrate how useless solar power tends to be is to compare solar power projects to things like locomotives or ships or aircraft engines.  It’s a good way of showing how tiny they are when they don’t even come close to the power of a medium sized vessel.  Well, here’s the perfect example!

The solar panels provide absolutely no energy for the propulsion of the ship.  They would hardly amount to anything if used for propulsion.   The system, which is rated at forty kilowatts is supposedly able to provide 7% of the ships electrical power, amounting to about .3% of the ship’s total power output.   However the way it is worded indicates that by .3% of the ship’s power output they mean at full power output.   Thus, if the ship is experiencing the most favorable conditions of extremely dry and clear air, at exactly noon on the summer solstice, the solar cells can theoretically put out .3% of the ship’s power.

I’m glad that the tiny .3% number was noted in the original article, even if I personally think that’s being too generous.

Via Engadget:

We’d heard that Nippon Oil and Nippon Yusen were working on a million-dollar solar upgrade for a car freighter called the Auriga Leader back in August, and it looks like things have gone as planned — the cargo ship launched today from Kobe, Japan. The $1.68m project involved the installation of 328 solar panels, which produce 40 kilowatts of power — a measly 0.3 percent of the engine power required to move the 656-foot, 60,000-ton ship when fully loaded with 6,400 cars, but enough for seven percent of the juice required for lighting and other systems. That’s a slow start, but we’ll take what we can get, we suppose — now let’s bolt on some of those new record-high efficiency panels and see what happens.

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Omega Pharmaceuticals is a European company which manufacturers non-prescription health and medical products.   The products they manufacture include some at least appear to be legitimate, such as a treatment for hair lice as well as some that are a bit more questionable, such as “natural” health products.

Not long ago the company came out with a product called the “E-Waves Chip” which appears to be another run-of-the-mill “radiation blocker” that you stick on your cell phone to stop those nasty electrosmog emissions from messing with your positive vibes.

From one site:

Omega Pharma say that the chip offsets the electromagnetic radiation from the phone - reducing headaches and other symptoms - and neutralizes the heating effect associated with holding a phone up to your head.

…

From the Omega Pharma site -  “the E-Waves Phone Chip beams a quantum physical information wave that is in counter-phase with the harmful components of the electromagnetic waves.”

Of course, this is all a load of crap.  There’s no way that a little button stuck on a cell phone could block the radiation from it, and even if it could, there’s no reason to think that it would have any health benefit.

Well, it seems that enough people called them on the idiocy of the product to actually make a difference.

From Reuters:

BRUSSELS, Dec 15 (Reuters ) - Belgian health products distributor Omega Pharma (OMEP.BR) has withdrawn from sale a chip it launched last week to counter potentially damaging radiation from mobile phones.

“After the launch… a storm of protest broke out during which scientific proof of doctors and professors was brought into doubt,” the company said.

Omega Pharma’s shares traded down about 2 percent at of 0919 GMT against the Belgian blue-chip index which was up about 0.2 percent.

The company, which sells non-prescription products to pharmacists, said it had decided to repeat some tests and make the results known as soon as possible.

It said that the E-Waves Phone Chip reduced the heating effect of a mobile phone, but not to the degree it had initially indicated. (Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop; Editing by Erica Billingham)

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You may remember that there was a lot of talk about how a rail maintiance facility was really a concentration camp run by the government and preparing to become part of a program to slaughter millions. You may have also seen a recent post describing how this mentality has spread beyond the US all the way to New Zealand.

Well now it seems that there’s a new passtime relating that’s becoming popular:  find a local abandoned or semi-abandoned facility, speculate about how it’s really part of a massive and sinister conspiracy, make a video, post it on the net, spread the idiocy.

It also seems that things are getting even more diverse.   The wacky nutjob conspiracy theorist world has always been a male dominated field, but apparently women are now getting involved and showing that they can be just as bad at videography as men and every bit as paranoid and delusional.

Okay, let me just say the following:

1.  The bars on the windows and other security measures are to stop vandalism and prevent the liability of someone breaking in and hurting themselves. Also if there are items still stored in the building, they probably would like them not to be stolen or broken.

2.  The property is probably still owned by the government.  Such properties are often not completely abandoned but kept in a state known as “mothballed.”  They might be reused in the future due to base realignment, a local natural disaster or something like that.  Thus some preventative maintiance is done on the buildings.   Also, some items and fixtures may be kept on the premises.  On occasion such buildings are used for miscellaneous storage.

3.  The gas line is probably for heating.

The area where I used to live had a large national guard armory that was basically disused.  There was still a military presence there in the form of a recruiting station but otherwise it was mostly a big vacant warehouse-like building that was once used to stockpile civil defense stuff.   After being disused for a few years, they started renting it out to sales fairs.   The one I remember was a computer fair that occured a couple of times a year, where vendors would set up tables to sell computers and accessories.  I got my first computer to be equipped with a CD-Rom and Modem there in 1995.

A rare piece of extremely good, yet all to obvious advice in the mainstream media turned up in the London Times.   It seems that the paper is advising readers that the fact that someone is well known for their acting, music or sexy bod does not necessarily mean you should put any value on their health advice.  Obvious though this may sound, there are plenty of people who do consider the advice of celebrities on matters they know absolutely nothing on.   Many people seem to think that the conviction or apparent sensatiry of a celebrity is more important than the factual acuracy of the statements made.   (And when it comes to conviction and sencerity, lets not forget many of these people are actors to begin with and make their living on being dramatic.)

From the article:

From Madonna’s quest to “neutralise radiation” to Tom Cruise’s dismissals of psychiatry, celebrities are seldom shy about expressing their views on health and science – even when they appear not to know what they are talking about.

A roll call of public figures such as Cruise and Delia Smith have offered bogus advice or “quackery” this year, according to scientists and doctors. The charity Sense About Science is concerned that celebrities mislead the public when they endorse theories, diets or health products while misrepresenting the science involved.

Some – such as Oprah Winfrey and Kate Moss – espouse “detox” regimes, while others, such as Sharon and Kelly Osbourne, believe (mistakenly) that the Pill can cause cancer.

Nor are politicians exempt from lending credence to health myths. The US President-elect is among several American public figures who continue to suggest that the MMR vaccination is a potential cause of autism, despite an overwhelming weight of scientific evidence to the contrary.

And yes, it’s true that Obama made statements indicating he believed that vaccinations may be linked to autism.  However, McCain made an even stronger statement on the topic. I don’t want to excuse bad science by noting worse, so I’ll just say that both of them need to be smacked hard enough to wake up and smell the reality brewing.

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