It was the Weirdest of Times

RFK Jr. continues to find more and more reasons to blame acetaminophen for autism.

Donald Trump is no stranger to outlandish conspiracies or strange social media posts. But, by any measure, his post on Saturday night a couple of weeks ago was particularly bizarre. The president posted (and later removed) a clip on Truth Social of a fake Fox News segment with Lara Trump detailing the White House's announcement of the world's first Medbed hospital and a national MedBed card system (two things that very much do not exist). Fox News told The Verge that the Medbed segment, “_never aired on Fox News Channel or any other Fox News Media platforms._”

Recently a group of well-known scientists and academics, some of whom were once regular speakers at Skeptics conferences around the world, published a book called “The War on Science”. Collated by physicist Lawrence Krauss, the 39 essays in the book are written by authors such as Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson, Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker, Peter Boghossian, Niall Ferguson, Alan Sokal and Gad Saad.

As a calendar geek, I was surprised to hear calendar conversion raised as a reason the rapture didn't happen as predicted.

Earlier this month the UK Coroner ruled that British health blogger Kate Shemirani, who promoted conspiracy theories, had "adversely influenced" her daughter, Paloma Shemirani, to refuse chemotherapy, causing her death from cancer on the 24th of July 2024.

I was in the middle of compiling a “Fortnight in Skeptical History” article when I realised that over two years, back when the newsletter was released weekly, I had already covered both weeks in the period from October 13th to October 26th. While I had to scrap that idea, I saw my entry for Zholia Alemi and was curious about the progress of her legal case in the UK. I covered Alemi in my October 2023 article about fake doctors or doctors who worked fraudulently in New Zealand. As I wrote back then:

In the last few months NASA has announced the detection of a third extrasolar object, named ATLAS, on its way through the solar system - following Oumuamua (in 2017) and Borisov (in 2019). We've only been detecting these objects that aren't gravitationally bound to our sun - visitors that fly through our solar system and then continue on their way, never to return - for the past decade or so, and there's good reason for this. Several projects have been created recently that attempt to detect objects that have the potential to collide with earth, such as Pan-STARRS (the Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System) and ATLAS (the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System). These two projects found Oumuamua and Comet Atlas respectively, whereas the other extrasolar object, Comet Borisov, was discovered by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov (an awesome guy who spotted it using one of the many telescopes he has designed and built himself and operates at his personal observatory).