Progressives love to get celebrity endorsements for their beliefs, and for good reason; while the right is stuck with Clint Eastwood wandering around unintelligibly - and he disagrees with about half their platform - the other side's famous true believers are all thin and pretty and stay on message. No independent thinking like Dirty Harry and if you have a crackpot, anti-science belief, some left-wing celebrity does too.

I am a lot more skeptical than most people who call themselves Skeptics; I am skeptical about more than Bigfoot and religion, I am even skeptical that (a) all Democratic politicians are pro-science while Republicans are not and (b) either of their voters are genetically super smart just by filling out a voter registration form. Skeptics can't violate those pet positions or a few others - James Randi learned that when he dared to ask if numerical models about global warming were accurate. There's skepticism, and then there is people not buying tickets to your conference if you ask the wrong questions, and you had better know the difference.

There are few things as irritating as scientists taking complex topics and reducing them to sound bites that are invariably wrong.  They pick up the wrong data, manipulate it with a bit of correlation and suddenly they're off and running on a new study which promises to be as ridiculous as the last.

Currently there is one entitled "The role of Genes in Political Behavior", that would have people rolling in the aisles if it weren't so pathetic.

On-Cor Frozen Foods of Geneva, Illinois has the funniest product recall you will read today.

Now, product recalls are not generally humorous. As Ian Froeb at Riverfront Times rightly notes, they are usually about serious stuff like listeria, E. coli, salmonella - and that is just in the organic food section. 

Physician John Smallberries said to me, “Twenty years ago, I didn’t even know what the word autism meant. It was rare.” But since then something has shifted. 

Whether it was music, vaccines, GMOs, or some combination of those, an astounding 1 in 110 children are now diagnosed as being 'on the spectrum', with boys 4 to 5 times likely to be diagnosed.  

What could be damaging the health and well-being of so many of our children? 

Do plants have muscles?  Strictly speaking, no, but time-lapse photography shows that they can be quite thuggish in behaviour.

The Olympics are coming to a close and now the British get to reflect on what, if anything, has changed in the world due to a gaming event designed to make the world a smaller and better place.

Kimberly Gerry-Tucker's memoir is not just another Asperger's autobiography; it is much more than that. From rich recollections of a childhood where things were often more real than people, where words often failed to come out, where one call almost feel the textures Kim paints with her words to the story of a how a family copes with the diagnosis, illness, and subsequent death of the husband and father from ALS, Under the Banana Moon is a window into Kim's world and her unique way of seeing and experiencing it.