Tell Me Lies (Tell Me Sweet Little Lies)

"I wonder what would happen if a religious group sold 'miracles' with the vague promise that there was a scientific basis for it.

The mystery is why,...junk medicine has become so popular, so much so that that there are now five NHS-funded homeopathic hospitals (yes, taking precious money away from liposuctions for the morbidly obese). As my boss Damian Thompson pointed out in his excellent (grovel) book Counterknowledge, homeopathy is just one part of a trend for irrational belief, from junk history to creationism to conspiracy theories, all of them far more widely held now than they were a generation or two ago.

It’s probably not enough to argue the Chestertonian point that the decline of organised religion has led to paradoxical irrationality, 'misinformation packaged as fact', although there is an element of truth in it (organised religions do at least have mechanisms for dealing with phoneys). Part of the reason that increasing numbers seem to reject western medicine – mankind’s greatest legacy, as anyone who has attended a birth will attest – has to be the wider anti-Westernism in the air, especially coming from the education system, where even established medical and scientific facts are presented as merely 'subjective',...."

-- Ed West, putting two-and-two together - something that's also becoming increasingly difficult for many these days - though math is math, and we've supposedly moved waaaay past beliefs from the days of The Telegraph.

"At one recent session on the Berkeley campus, Scheer (who became the resident leftist columnist for the Los Angeles Times after leaving Ramparts) assured the audience that Ramparts not only smashed retrograde national taboos but 'had very high standards. No question we were putting out as good a journal as anyone in the country. . . . We were edited by professionals, it had to be well written, fact-checked. And the fact is that we did not screw up. I can’t think of a major error.'

Readers can learn from the book, for example, that [Warren] Hinckle indulged every crackpot conspiracy theorist on the JFK assassination. Early in 1967, Ramparts published staff member David Welsh’s claim that there were three assassins in Dallas in 1963. Our resident ex–FBI agent, Bill Turner, then wrote two articles supporting New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA agent controlled by conspirators deep within the U.S. government. 'Very high standards,' indeed."

-- Sol Stern, giving us another view of how we've got the pop history we now live with - Oliver Stone's paranoid JFK comes to mind as a film influenced by Ramparts's outlook - that we seemingly can't get away from, without the likes of The City Journal.

"[Stephen] Bassett tracks mainstream news coverage of alien-related material. His firm, Paradigm Research Group, has found that the number of English-language articles mentioning the topic increased nearly sixfold between 2006 and 2008—and when we spoke, 2009 was on a record-setting pace. His tally doesn’t include the tabloids, he adds, or recent coverage on CNN, Fox News, ABC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, and, of course, the Sci-Fi Channel. From ghost hunters and UFO hunters to alien autopsies and secret societies, the schedules of previously sober TV stations now resemble a giant nightly X-Conference."

-- Timothy Lavin, reflecting on George Norry's Coast To Coast, AM - America's much-loved, late-night paranormal gabfest - and what it has in common with the deceptively-titled, Ramparts-influenced, "mainstream" media of today, in The Atlantic.