I'm doing something a bit different this week. The image below is a famous crop circle meant to represent pi. It's not pareidolia it's just a standard crop circle.

What I'm more interested in is the way people see and interpret these things. How does someone look at a bit of graffiti made in hay and come to the conclusion that a sentient being came from another planet do do a drive by tagging? I'm not going to bother going into the realities of crop circles here, there's enough information elsewhere. But really, aliens? How did they get this kind of thing past the budget committee?

This week we were joined by Nigel for another round table discussion. As usual, it was an hour of free association. We did have a general direction in mind and followed it... sort of.

As reported on TMZ, we've learned the story making the rounds detailing the terrible condition of Michael Jackson's body is a fake.

A report in The Sun gave harrowing details of the body, but we've learned the "autopsy report" was fabricated and completely false.

UPDATE: The Los Angeles County coroner just released the following statement:

"The report that is being published did not come from this office. I don't know where the information came from, or who that information came from. It is not accurate. Some of it is totally false."

The Truth of the Matter ....

We have learned at Rational Alchemy that in fact the cause of death was probably Farrah Fawcett Major who's last words were, "May all the children in the world be safe" .....

Well that's it then .... mystery solved.

QED

SYDNEY (Reuters) - The mystery of crop circles in poppy fields in Australia's southern island state of Tasmania has been solved -- stoned wallabies are eating the poppy heads and hopping around in circles.

"We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," the state's top lawmaker Lara Giddings told local media on Thursday.

"Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high," she said.

Many people believe crop circles that mysteriously appear in fields around the world are created by aliens.

Poppy producer Tasmanian Alkaloids said livestock which ate the poppies were known to "act weird" -- including deer and sheep in the state's highlands.

"There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles," said field operations manager Rick Rockliff.

Australia produces about 50 percent of the world's raw material for morphine and related opiates.

(Reporting by Michael Perry; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

Before I get into Rush Limbaugh's latest bit of insanity, a little background. On June 16, 2009 the FDA sent a warning to Matrixx Initiatives, the maker of Zicam, due to a potential hazard from its use. Zicam uses a zinc compound as its active ingredient in fighting the common cold. Though the studies linking zinc to cold relief have been found to be flawed, though zinc has been shown to be harmful to nasal passages, and though there is no evidence of its usefulness Matrixx has continued to promote Zicam as a powerful cold remedy. Zicam was marketed as homeopathic in order to benefit from the FDA exemptions enjoyed by homeopathic quackery. Homeopathic remedies, being only water, are safe on their own. However, Zicam was not actually homeopathic as it contained an active ingredient, zinc. In 2006, Matrixx Initiatives paid a $12 million settlement due to claims that its product could permanently destroy a users sense of smell. The FDA finally acted and required Zicam be regulated in order to be sold. Deeming this too expensive, Matrixx pulled it from US shelves.

Matrixx continues to proclaim Zicam safe, hardly surprising due to the amount of revenue the product generates. Oddly though, Zicam has a new defender. Rush Limbaugh's radio show is sponsored by Zicam and has been so for several years. As part of his advertising, Rush has provided personal testimonials of its effectiveness and his endorsement. In a breathtaking example of his utter absence from reality, Rush has declared the FDA's actions against Zicam as a personal political attack on himself! The Democrats, it would seem, issued a warning against a dangerous product in order to discredit Rush Limbaugh. The man has lost the rest of what little sense he ever had.

This week we were joined by Dr. Morgan Levy to discuss placebo medicine and the concept of using it without deception as a form of treatment in a process called Non-Pharmacological Intervention. Nigel also joined us briefly for an update on next weeks show.

We also discussed the mad, cockroach like scrambling of Chiropractors from the McTimoney Association in Britain. Below is the e-mail sent out to members urging them to cover up their own deceit. Thanks to archive.org, it's too late.

The e-mail: http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2009/06/chiropractors-told-to-take-down-their.html

And here are some of the archived websites: http://yaxu.org/tmp/chiros.html

I'll have more on this in a later post.

Follow link for full on-going story. As reported in RA's news section by Brian.

'Witch hunt' forces chiropractors to take down their websites

This link takes you to the Guardian Newspaper (UK).

It was only a few years ago that there was a handful of channels on the TV and most of what you watched was reported in clear, concise ways after doing the due diligence of real research. Without a doubt there where a couple of snafu's along the way but nothing that would be considered serious.

What we are now facing is an endless sea of channels all trying to find content. And let's be honest, when you view some of these channels the quality of the content is of little interest. It's also become obvious that the "channel owners" have little regard for what is actually being shown or the truthfulness of the programs. They need one thing. Filled air time; and the all important advertizing dollar.

A very good example of this is John Edwards. Time again he is proved to be basically a fraud, he disappears for a sabbatical, re-invents himself and is back on again.

There is another facet that has also fuelled this explosion of questionable programming. Camcorders (that can produce TV quality) and editing stations are now relatively inexpensive. What used to cost $200k for dual cameras + editing station can now be achieved for about $15k to $25k. So what I believe we are also seeing is the advent of production companies that have no real formal training in the ethics of what they are doing.

This is especially true (where the cost is a video cam plugged into the computer and some $25 video editing software) on places like YouTube.

Lets go back to TV and one of my favorite examples. This is a show that has good production value, is well acted out, for the unknowing looks like they are using real scientific equipment and a great editing technique. Ghost Hunters (and to a lesser extent the UFO show).

The problem we are now seeing is that people tune in to shows like that and believe what they are seeing. There is not a single Ghost Hunters episode where the conclusion was: Yes, we have evidence that will stand up to scientific inquiry.

Are these people gullible? Sadly the answer is yes. Let us not forget that watchers of TV have been obsessed by characters on Soap operas and have lost the ability to differentiate between the actor and the character.

Jenny McCarthy is a classic case. Oprah Winfrey sadly has given her time to spread the non-sense about autism and vaccinations (there is no proof at all that vaccinations have and can cause autism). Being a proven bad journalist and only a talk show host sadly many people watch her show and do not seem to understand that it is a show "for entertainment purposes only". The format of the show is designed to make it look like a real journalistic show with vetted guests that have researched data to pass on.

Let us look at vaccinations. Jenny M never lived in a pre-vaccination world. She has no clue at all at what diseases like polio, meningitis 'C', diphtheria well the list goes on. We no longer need to vaccinate against smallpox. Why? Because vaccinations wiped the disease out.

I have two friends in the UK, one suffered from polio and one from meningitis. (Late 50's before vaccines where available). Both these people have suffered their entire lives. Today with modern vaccines they would have been saved. Do people like Jenny McCarthy really want these diseases to make a fully fledged comeback?

So let us make an assumption. Vaccinations might cause autism. The debate should / would be, what is more important? The slim chance that autism develops or the return of proven killer diseases that made getting through childhood a real gamble. Make up your own mind.

(And before you ask. yes the picture to the right is of that scientifically trained, biological researcher Jenny McCarthy. As you can see by her name tag she does have all the credentials for the stuffy world of research.)

Are you still with me?

What we are seeing more and more on the internet is the classical, "I need to make a point therefore I will outright lie about it and make it look real" or "I need a certain conclusion therefore I'll just use the bits that prove it and ignore all the evidence against it". We are seeing this explosion across many fronts. This has classically been used by Creationists / Intelligent design, UFO exploiters, mediums and a growing group of "conspiracy theory writers".

A small visit to YouTube will offer you a prolific number of incredibly badly made videos that supposedly prove "God exists" or "Intelligent Design Proven" and what is really worrying are the numbers of people who seem to be watching these videos and leaving positive comments.

There is however one video (that I stumbled on) that has compelling information, this video has remarkable animation and introduces the now famous term "irreducible complexity" that was introduced by biochemist Michael Behe in his 1996.

But this was a classic case of wanting a conclusion and finding "proof". Just because something in the natural world (in this case the simple cell with an incredibly complex swimming method) is not necessarily understood by today's scientists does not mean that it is therefore created by "Intelligent Design".

There is a far simpler explanation. We just don't understand it yet and it does not in any way disprove Evolution, but that's not conclusion they needed. To a layman (who's willing to take what hears as is) it's good convincing stuff.

It would take a pinball wizard (someone who's death, dumb and blind) not to conclude that "Intelligent Design" was of course the method used to extract the religious aspects out of the equation and try to force this "Intelligent Design" through the school systems. Giving them a subliminal method for talking about God.

But wait there's more.

Do you find it strange that the Intelligent Design people only look at the one God principle of this? Intelligent Design does not mean there has to be a God that created all life on this earth. There are in fact two possibilities.

1/ A mystical being who lives in space and time, can create matter at a whim. Is invisible to all human kind. And has a warped sense of humor by not only creating life but also all diseases that plague humanity. Has a lot of problems with structural engineering and thought earth quakes should be good for a giggle or two.

Or

2/ Aliens with an IQ bordering on 1000 who decided that our planet would be a good place to setup a scientific experiment. (This assumes they have mastered travelling the vast distances of space).

Just because we don't yet understand the principles that created life in the first place does not mean anymore than, we don't yet know.

Much of the search for life outside of Earth's biological oasis has focused on examining the conditions on the other planets in our solar system and probing the cosmos for other Earth-like planets in distant planetary systems.

But one team of astronomers is approaching the question of life elsewhere in the universe by looking for life's potential beginning.

Aparna Venkatesan, of the University of San Francisco, and Lynn Rothschild, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., are using models of star formation and destruction to determine when in the roughly 13.7 billion-year history of the universe the biogenic elements - those essential to life as we know it - might have been pervasive enough to allow life to form.

We can pin down the emergence of life on Earth to somewhere around 3.5 billion years ago. Venkatesan and Rothschild want to find out what happens when you broaden the question to life throughout the universe.

"Can you blast that open? Could you really start really talking about life in the universe at 12 billion years? And that's the question that we're talking about," Rothschild said.

With basic estimates of the elements produced by the first several generations of stars, the pair has so far found that "most of [the essential elements] can be created fairly quickly in the early universe," Venkatesan said.

Venkatesan presented their first findings last week at the 214th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, Calif.

Nothing more to be said. Watch the video.