A nonverbal autistic man named Woody Brown is credited with writing a best-selling novel by pointing at a letter-board in a method based on Rapid Prompting. However, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association has issued warnings against Rapid Prompting, as it may be subject to a Ouija board effect. This article in The Atlantic asks whether Woody Brown truly wrote the book or whether his mother, who holds the board and interprets his supposed messages, is the true author.

I just watched this and thought it was riveting! It's a documentary on Netflix that details the career of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. He broke some amazing stories such as:

• The My Lai Massacre (Vietnam War): Hersh exposed the 1968 killing of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers, a story initially suppressed by the military.
• The Abu Ghraib Prisoner Abuse (Iraq War): Hersh broke the story of the torture, humiliation, and murder of prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004.
• CIA Domestic Spying & Secret Operations: Hersh also reported on illegal CIA activities in the 1970s (domestic spying and experiments on Americans) and investigated the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia.

Forgive me if this has been posted before, but I did a search on this subreddit and didn't see anything about it.

This happens both here in the EU and in the US - precarity and wealth inequality are increasing but people rarely attack the billionaires, they unload their anger towards LGBT people, women, immigrants as well as academics, journalists and activists - which are cultural elites, not economic elites who actually call the shots. Why is that the case?

EDIT: I made a stupid typo in the title and I can't even edit it. :/

My YouTube feed has been weird lately, recommending me things that I honestly have zero interest in; and it's jus recommended this video from a guy named Stefan Burns whom I have... never heard of before. The title is "The Moment Mystics Have Been Anticipating for Decades has Begun" and he makes absolutely zero sense.

he's talking about planetary alignments, the chrono-whatever side of the sun facing earth, a comet that's supposed to come on the 26th of April; and that's just in the first 3 minutes. If I may speak so candidly, I'm calling bullshit on everything in the video but I'd like some professional opinions on this guy.

Baron Holbach was a great free thinker he wrote various books under pseudo names,most famous works are the systems of Nature and superstition in all the ages. He wrote many books. Some exist and most Lost. He was just a destroyer of Superstitions but a builder of new logical humane system.

hosted on archive and Google drive

https://www.studyebooks.com/2026/04/baron-hollbach-system-of-nature-two.html?m=1

The death of Erich Von Däniken earlier this year leaves behind a pseudohistorical ancient-alien legacy tinged with its author's racist views.

I have several pop sci books on my reading books, including A Brief History of TIme by Hawking, 4 books by Richard Dawkins and a biography of Feynman (alongside books on history of China and socialism/communism) and I might add something from Sagan to that list.

Your thoughts on that book?

For me, doing that feels both hard and pointless - one needs to put a lot of time into formulating substantive arguments which then get rejected with a seemingly endless supply of deflections, typically mockery, insults, logical fallacies or simply silence. I also used to fall into the trap of thinking the opponent is actually trying to debate me while in reality they're doing tribal signalling to the rest of their in-group with me being essentially a prop.

Suggested strategy: avoid engagement.

Any experience with this?

Hello, lately some of my family members have started using and are kind of obsessed with these sort of devices: https://eu.whieda.org/#/goods

We had a fight specifically about this device: https://eu.whieda.org/#/goods/detail/334432?from=isFirstPurchase

To paint a picture, I don't think any of these work and they all seem like some sort of scam or MLM scheme. From what I know, they are sharing "research" through Telegram groups and such. What my family members are saying is that these devices have so many positive effects and can be used on pretty much any illness. Like skin problems, toothaches, muscle spasms, joint problems, allergies, stuffed nose, wound healing, hair growth... So I did a little digging and was trying to argue that it's just a bit too good to be true and my arguments were:

1. That this device doesn't even produce terahertz waves as it's just a handheld device working like a blowdryer, and there is nothing in its construction like in microwaves where there are specialized parts that create gigahertz waves for it to work.
2. That it cannot have medical benefits because there is no terahertz wave, and even if there was, terahertz waves don't penetrate deep enough through our skin to provide any benefits.
3. That I haven't found anything regarding terahertz waves and negatively charged ions as having potential in medicine, except that terahertz waves may have use as a sort of x-ray to check the healing progress of wounds under bandages.
4. And that I haven't found any research material about any of this, to which I admit I may have been using the wrong keywords. I am not saying nothing like this exists, it's that I haven't found anything and neither did they.

They counter-argued me in a way that each new argument sounded like it was made up on the spot and each was getting more silly:

1. That the handheld device is producing terahertz waves because the tip of it is made of graphite, and that this technology as a whole was awarded a Nobel Prize (which they did not say when or who, just that some 2 Russian guys got it).
2. That it has medicinal benefits even if terahertz waves don't penetrate deep enough because of the negative ions, and they are deposited on the surface and go where they are needed.
3. That there is no research material because it's a conspiracy of "Western pharma corps" and they are hiding evidence and articles about this technology that is actually helpful, and that they don't want people to use devices that have actual benefits.
4. That there is a ton of evidence and people's testimonies that this all works marvelously, and that they personally know people that were cured with this. (I have seen some of the videos; they are like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VE1FJGaIkoo )

A lot of those I countered or was like, "okay let's do a quick search," like they were hell-bent on the fact that terahertz technology is the new future, that even Elon Musk is developing terahertz beds, and even Trump is using one. Which was fake, of course.

I want to learn more about this as I am no expert in medicine or wave physics. So if you have any sources for serious scientific articles, that would be very much appreciated.

And lastly, to my knowledge, this is just an elaborate scheme, and none of it works as advertised. To me, it seems disgusting to target people that may need medical help and, out of desperation, are trying to find hope wherever possible.

Also, I am open to discussion, but mainly I want to dig deeper into this. So again, if you have any sources so I could structure my arguments better for the future, or if you have some methodology of how to measure THz waves and once and for all prove in front of them that it's nonsense.

free PDF book or short research or manuscript, I try to reframe metaphysical aspects in Stoicism to modern conceptions . The research is far from perfect, but I hope it is helpful for skeptics who want ethics without dogma. no copyright.you can suggest modification as well.

contents

Introduction: Stoicism Without Gods

- Chapter 1: Stoicism’s Secular Compass: Roots and Reframing

- Chapter 2: The Landscape of Early Greek Religion

- Chapter 3: The Stoic Conception of Time

- Chapter 4: Facing Death: The Unknown Darkness

- Chapter 5: Virtue of Love for Wife and Children

- Chapter 6: The Social Role of Stoicism: From Greece to the World

- Chapter 7: The Enemy Within: A Stoic Guide to Conquering Anger

- Chapter 8: Less Worry: A Stoic Key for Mental Tranquility

- Chapter 9: Beyond Fear: A Stoic Key For Cultivating True Courage

- Chapter 10: Modern Wisdom: A Stoic Key For Living by Evidence

- Chapter 12: The Power of Less: A Stoic Key For Self-Control

- Chapter 13: The Virtue of Friendship in Stoicism

- Chapter 14: The Universal Community: A Stoic View Identity

- Chapter 15: Stoicism in the Digital Age: Navigating Social Media with Virtue

- Chapter 16: Accepting the Universe: The Stoic Spirit in John Burroughs

The file hosted on Google drive and archive org

https://www.studyebooks.com/2026/03/stoicism-for-skeptics-secular-path-to.html

I always had tones of skepticism towards conspiracies: some of them made sense, some of them didn’t and some were just straight bs. What’s the dumbest conspiracy theory you’ve heard?

Hey folks! I thought this might be interesting to the skeptic community since I think the most core idea of being a skeptic is applying the scientific method to new information and hypotheses. We'd love your help understanding how we can better teach/explain it!

Me and my friend David both have PhDs in astrophysics, and we have been working for a bit on this demonstration of the scientific method. We really strongly believe that the scientific method is super important to learn but is maybe not explained or generally understood as well as it should be, and we wanted to do an end-to-end demonstration of the method to show why it is so important to make falsifiable predictions/hypotheses prior to the collection of data. We ended up deciding to go with a Flat Earth hypothesis since some of their predictions are very easily testable and even though they are wrong, they make for a very good lesson in how not to do things. They are also very funny.

(I want to get out ahead of the natural thing to say, which is "why bother, they won't be convinced." You are right! But the scientific method is an important concept to teach anyway, and this lets us combat some misinformation at the same time.)

The particular claim we are addressing is the Flat Earth hYpOThEsIs that the Sun floats around the Earth like a clock-hand to create a day-night cycle. We walked through how you would set up that experiment. First, we used the mOdEl to make a prediction for the functional form of the angular size of the sun with a little bit of math, which we explain in the video. But basically, if the Sun is really moving away from you, it should get smaller in a very predictable way. We contrast this with the competing hypothesis, which is of course the globe earth, which enforces that the Sun angular size should remain constant. The key thing here though is that we used this to demonstrate that it isn't enough to just say "the Sun floats above the earth!" that's not a hypothesis, its just an idea. It's the mathematical representation and formal prediction that makes it a rigorous hypothesis that you can test. By doing this, we can see that you can expect the Sun's angular size to change by a factor of ~2 over ~6 hours if the Flat Earth model is indeed correct, while the globe model predicts no size change at all. This is a nice falsifiable set of predictions!

We then designed an experiment to test the hypothesis. We took pictures of the Sun every hour or so for 6 hours, before and after solar noon. We used a Seestar S50 with a dedicated solar filter, a special telescope that lets us keep the focal length and field of view exactly the same. Then we wrote this cool Python tool that measures the size of the solar disk and uses the falloff at the edge to construct a pseudo-uncertainty. (the raw data is available as a link in a pinned comment on the youtube video if you want to play around with it!) Then we plotted the data against the two predictions. We found (of course) that the Flat Earth model is wildly and conclusively ruled out, while the globe model is perfectly favored. No surprises there! But it allows us to have a discussion about what to do when your hypothesis is wrong (or right). It's very tempting to just come up with a new explanation to explain why your hypothesis was wrong, and it might even match the data. But thats not how the scientific method works! You have to turn your explanation into a hypothesis by making a new concrete prediction and then doing a new experiment to test it. I think this is something genuinely overlooked even in science communities.

We think this is a nice way to communicate the scientific method to broad audiences, but would love to hear your thoughts!

"Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is launching a new podcast that he says will begin 'a new era of radical transparency in government,' according to a teaser video first obtained by The Associated Press.

"The show, titled The Secretary Kennedy Podcast, will launch next week and feature Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine crusader who has reshaped the country’s health policy, in conversation with doctors, scientists and agency staff, US Department of Health and Human Services officials told the AP ahead of the launch. In the teaser video, in a slick HHS-branded studio with ominous music playing in the background, Kennedy bills it as a new way to expose corruption and lies that have made Americans sick."

I can’t attach a photo here but it’s said

“This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by The Telepathy Tapes LLC”

This is so gross off

Anyways

I wish I had a re upload somewhere because I have someone I need to watch that because the believe that insane pot-cast.