It's award season

Two in institutes that promote evidence as foundations of decision making have recently given some awards to a bunch of people that promote beliefs supported by little to no evidence. The first award is the first is the National Centre for Science Education's annual UpChucky award for creationist of the year and, the second are a set of awards from the James Randi Educational Foundation called the Pigasus Awards.

UpChucky award taken from the NCSE

I have mentioned Ken Ham is two previous posts here and, here. Ken received the UpChucky award from the NCSE and has finally be recognised for all his hard work at being an ignorant fool and spreading garbage or, as my friend Paul elegantly put it, "aurally raping" people. Nice one Hamo, you deserve it. Give yourself a pat on the back for being recognised for your genius. I actually just had a watch of a couple of videos over at the AiG website with Ken spurting something about how natural selection is not evolution. He reckons that evolution cannot occur in the way that evilutionsists "claim" it does because it requires new information to originate in the genetic material of plants and animals. It always blows me away to hear people making claims without any evidence (although Ken does have stories from a book that at its newest parts are about 2000 years old and not corroborated by any other source) that are completely contrary to what we can, and have observed. Gene duplication for example is a well documented occurrence that absolutely adds new information to the genome on which selection (or neutral processes) can act.

The second set of awards from James Randi include a few different categories:

• The Scientist Pigasus Award goes to NASA Engineer Richard B. Hoover, who recently announced for the third time in 14 years that he had found evidence of microscopic life in meteorites. Along with the crackpot Journal of Cosmology—a now-defunct publication founded in 2009 to publish articles advancing the scientifically unsupported idea that life began before the first stars formed and was spread throughout the early universe on meteors—Hoover pitched his warmed-over ideas to Fox News, an outlet not known for their attention to facts. Predictably, Fox News ran with the story, convincing many people that NASA had discovered extraterrestrial life.
  

• The Funder Pigasus Award goes to CVS/pharmacy, for their work to support the manufacturers of scam “homeopathic” medications who sell up to $870 million a year in quack remedies to U.S. consumers. Homeopathic remedies contain none of the active ingredient they claim, and homeopathy has been shown to be useless in randomized clinical trials. CVS/pharmacy sells these quack products in thousands of stores across the U.S., right alongside real medicine, with no warning to consumers. Instead of giving their customers the facts about homeopathy, CVS/pharmacy executives are cashing in themselves by offering their own store-brand of the popular homeopathic product oscillococcinum. Oscillococcinum is made by grinding up the liver of a duck, putting none of it onto tiny sugar pills—that’s right, none of it—and then advertising the plain sugar pills as an effective treatment for flu symptoms.
  

• The Media Pigasus Award goes to Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has done such a disservice to his TV viewers by promoting quack medical practices that he is now the first person to win a Pigasus two years in a row. Dr. Oz is a Harvard-educated cardiac physician who, through his syndicated TV show, has promoted faith healing, "energy medicine," and other quack theories that have no scientific basis. Oz has appeared on ABC News to give legitimacy to the claims of Brazilian faith healer “John of God,” who uses old carnival tricks to take money from the seriously ill. He's hosted Ayurvedic guru Yogi Cameron on his show to promote nonsense "tongue examination" as a way of diagnosing health problems. This year, he really went off the deep end. In March 2011, Dr. Oz endorsed "psychic" huckster and past Pigasus winner John Edward, who pretends to talk to dead people. Oz even suggested that bereaved families should visit psychic mediums to receive (faked) messages from their dead relatives as a form of grief counseling.
  

• The Refusal to Face Reality Award goes to Andrew Wakefield, the researcher who launched the modern anti-vaccine panic with unfounded statements linking the MMR vaccine with autism that were not borne out by any research, even his own. In 2010, The Lancet retracted his paper on the MMR vaccine, and this year the British medical journal BMJ called Wakefield’s paper an outright fraud, finding “clear evidence of falsification of data” and that “he sought to exploit the ensuing MMR scare for financial gain,” taking more than $674,000 from lawyers who intended to sue vaccine manufacturers. Yet Wakefield continues to ask the public to believe he is the victim. In a recent article in NaturalNews, Wakefield called the American Academy of Pediatrics and The Lancet “instruments of a state that I don't really want to be associated with.”

But probably the best award of them all must be the "comback award" for Peter Popoff.

The Performer Pigasus Award—this year for “Best Comeback”—goes to televangelist Peter Popoff. Popoff made millions in the 1980s by pretending to heal the sick and receive information about audience members directly from god. He went bankrupt in 1987 after JREF founder James Randi exposed him for using a secret earpiece to receive information about audience members from his wife. Now he’s back to prey on victims of the economic recession. In paid infomercials on BET, Popoff offers “supernatural debt relief” in exchange for offerings of hundreds or even thousands of dollars. This business is so lucrative that according to recent IRS documents, Popoff took in $23.5 million and paid himself and his immediate family more than $1 million in one year alone.

How ridiculous. Are people buying his shit after he was publicly debunked.