I'm 52 years old and, for 50 of those years, me and Frank have been watching liars - individuals, groups, and society at large - telling whoppers that, regularly, have to be dispelled:

"Being thinner doesn’t necessarily make you happier or healthier."

It'll take another 50 for that to take hold,...

 

The things believers find confusing are, themselves, confusing:

  “Costco has Bibles for sale under the genre of FICTION. Hmmmm." 

 Meanwhile, Whole Foods has homeopathy for sale under the guise of MEDICINE. Hmmmm,...

 

"At this writing, I have been coughing for 72 days. Not on and off coughing, but continuously, every day and every night, for two and a half months. And not just coughing, but whooping: doubled over, body clenched, sucking violently for air, my face reddening and my eyes watering. Sometimes, I cough so hard, I vomit. Other times, I pee myself. Both of these symptoms have become blessedly less frequent, and I have yet to break a rib coughing—also a common side effect. Nor do I still have the fatigue that felled me, often, at my desk and made me sleep for 16 hours a night on the weekends. Now I rarely choke on things like water, though it turns out laughing, which I do a lot of, is an easy trigger for a violent, paralyzing cough that doctors refer to not as a cough, but a paroxysm.

…Led by discredited doctors and, incredibly, a former Playmate, the movement has frightened new parents with claptrap about autism, Alzheimer’s, aluminum, and formaldehyde. The movement that was once a fringe freak show has become a menace, with foot soldiers whose main weapon is their self-righteousness. For them, vaccinating their children is merely a consumer choice, like joining an organic food co-op or sending their kids to a Montessori school or drinking coconut water.

Thanks a lot, anti-vaccine parents. You took an ethical stand against big pharma and the autism your baby was not going to get anyway, and, by doing so, killed some babies and gave me, an otherwise healthy 31-year-old woman, the whooping cough in the year 2013. I understand your wanting to raise your own children as you see fit, science be damned, but you're selfishly jeopardizing more than your own children. Carry your baby around in a sling, feed her organic banana mash while you drink your ethical coffee, fine, but what gives you denialists the right to put my health at risk—to cause me to catch a debilitating, humiliating, and frightening cough that, two months after I finished my last course of antibiotics (how’s that for supporting big pharma?), still makes me convulse several times a day like some kind of tragic nineteenth-century heroine? "

“Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.”

“Coeliacs make up only one in 100 of the population, while one in five of us is buying gluten-free products. Surveys of US consumers show that, of these, only five per cent are buying to combat coeliac disease, with the vast majority citing their reasons as 'digestive health', 'nutritional value' and 'to help me lose weight'. People have been eating bread since biblical times without reporting adverse effects.”

"We've already gone against what seems to be a law. So why not break other rules? Why not defy right down to the laws of physics?”

"Don’t get a flu shot, warns conservative talk show host Michael Savage, because you just can’t trust the government."

Americans spend an estimated $5 billion a year on unproven herbal supplements that promise everything from fighting off colds to curbing hot flashes and boosting memory. But now there is a new reason for supplement buyers to beware: DNA tests show that many pills labeled as healing herbs are little more than powdered rice and weeds.