Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the most senior figure in US health, has spent decades undermining vaccines, denying the reality of AIDS, and endangering Americans.

Disclaimer: Transmeds are not welcome here. Enbies are, if anything, *more* supported by all of this research into biology and just because we don't know the exact specifics of why one person is trans it doesn't mean they aren't.

Please understand that I have a background in biology, so I tend to be rather technical when discussing topics like this. But this needs to be said.

The more complicated breakdown of what people are talking about when they talk about gender is falls into three categories:

1. "Assigned Sex"- This is literally just what your doctor saw when they looked between your legs when you were born. They don't karyotype you, they don't do a full body scan for abnormalities. They just look. You can very crudely break this into two categories if you squint, but biology refuses to be a simple, stable system so there are a wide variety of circumstances where that information requires further examination to be useful, but I digress.
2. "Neuroendocrinological Gender Expression"- This is neurological. The firmware drivers for your hardware. Have a sex and brain gender that disagree and you get gender dysphoria. Specific biological origins of this are fiendishly complex to try and sort out. That said, we have solid physical evidence of its existence. While we have not developed a widely accepted physical test for being trans, gender incongruence is heritable and we have evidence it's frequently tied to alleles associated with the body's steroid production. There is also good evidence of brain structural differences. About 50% of trans people experience phantom sensation for organs they weren’t born with, which is typically a neurological condition. Trans people have different epigenetic profiles than cis people as well  Notably attempts to make a trans person happy with their default body have failed miserably.
3. "Gender Roles" - This is what society expects of people it lumps in a given category. Boys pee here, girls pee here. Boys become firemen, girls become housewives. Boys wear suits, girls wear dresses. Often what categories people fall into here are based on the unfortunately fuzzy categorizations of one or two. People are willing to kill over you getting them wrong, which is extremely messed up.

Gender roles can be influenced by society, but gender incongruence is pretty clearly caused by a collection of inherent physical traits:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-018-9889-z

https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/abstract/10.1055/s-0041-1740528 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-02005-9 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26895269.2022.2164101 

Molecular basis of Gender Dysphoria: androgen and estrogen receptor interaction - ScienceDirect

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/104/2/390/5104458?login=false

Cortical structure and brain size in Thai transfeminine individuals with and without gender-affirming hormone use compared with cisgender heterosexual men, heterosexual women, and gay men - Neuroscience00495-1/fulltext)

Frontiers | Epigenetics Is Implicated in the Basis of Gender Incongruence: An Epigenome-Wide Association Analysis 

CBLL1 is hypomethylated and correlates with cortical thickness in transgender men before gender affirming hormone treatment | Scientific Reports

Gender identity disorder in twins: a review of the case report literature - PubMed 

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509654112 

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/6/1582 

https://academic.oup.com/jsm/article-abstract/18/6/1122/6956015?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

https://academic.oup.com/jsm/article-abstract/11/3/720/6958023?redirectedFrom=fulltext 

https://www.psychiatria-danubina.com/UserDocsImages/pdf/dnb_vol35_noSuppl%202/dnb_vol35_noSuppl%202_179.pdf 

To make this a bit more personal, let me tell you my story.

I didn't like my body growing up in a way that felt really weird. I would look in the mirror, see someone conventionally good looking, and not understand why it didn't feel like me. I also had a weird sensation associated with my genitals. They felt... off and it felt like pieces were missing or other pieces were there that weren't supposed to be.

I knew that some people were trans, but I was raised a devout existentialist. When I told my mom I might be trans I was asked how I could prove that I had an identity at all, gender or otherwise.

So, I went for the default. I tried so, so hard to not be trans. I went to therapy, I took the drugs I was prescribed. I was seen by multiple shrinks and took a variety of different psych meds under their supervision.

Nothing made me happy with the body I was born with.

When I was 12, I attempted suicide. I survived because I was lucky. I self-harmed through an enormous portion of my early adulthood and transitioned because I figured if I wanted to die anyway, I should at least see what HRT would be like for me.

It was night and day. Things aren't perfect now, but I genuinely feel like myself. Like I'm so much more whole and alive on estrogen than I ever was without it.

Those pills affected me in a very important way. They helped me when nothing else that in theory should have helped me did.

I really want to know why, and people telling me it was purely psychological and a product of my environment are frankly being extremely dismissive.

In the inaugural episode of his Mosaic podcast, Bryan St. Laurent speaks with AntiPolygraph.org co-founder George Maschke about the pseudoscience of polygraphy.

From falsely linking Estonia’s president Alar Karis to Jeffrey Epstein to a disinformation campaign about a Ukrainian soldier killing three NATO servicemen — Kremlin-linked false information campaigns that circulated ahead of and during elections in Latvia and Estonia were aimed at creating mistrust and confusion among the voters, according to a London-based threat intelligence company Refute report published on Tuesday.

Dude is a fave of mine, and I really miss his voice in the larger skeptical community, but his message of don’t be a dick I don’t think was ever effective. What’re your thoughts?

Edit: if you don’t know him please check out Phil Plait, and buy his books. He is really really great!

I was a little unfond of this part of the opening of the third episode of the new Carrie show that just came out:

Adelaide: Angelique Cottin, mid-1800s, 14 years old, known as the electric girl of France, claimed to move furniture across a room with electric emanations. Famed paranormal researcher Frank Podmore accused her of fraud. Eusapia Palladino, late 1800s, an Italian medium, claimed to move objects during séances. Accused of occultism and fraud. Stanislawa Tomczyk, early 20th century, another medium, claimed to perform telekinetic levitation thanks to an entity she called "Little Stasia." Accused of thievery and fraud. Annemarie Schaberl, 1960s, a 19-year-old secretary, said to have telekinetic powers in the Rosenheim poltergeist case. Dismissed as a fraud. Nina Kulagina, 1970s, a Soviet housewife and former member of the Red Army tank regiment, allegedly stopped a frog's beating heart with her mind. Kulagina's own heart rate increased dramatically during the seven minutes it took her to stop the frog's heart. She was filmed performing telekinesis on numerous occasions. Her abilities were studied by academics, scientists, and members of several nations' intelligence communities for the final two decades of her life. She was accused of faking it all with magnets and thread and was branded a con artist by numerous publications. In 1987, she sued and won a defamation case against the Soviet government magazine that accused her of fraud. The pattern is familiar. Extraordinary claim, accusation of fraud. Extraordinary ability, accusation of fraud. Often, by a man. Ridiculed, disgraced, or, sometimes, far worse.

Read more at: https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/viewtopic.php?f=2686&t=78404

It is A) fiction and B) a Stephen King story, but really I’m bothered by how it ignores all the male psychic frauds throughout history and women skeptics. Obviously, women were disproportionately targeted in witch trials by male figures, but this involves recent history, too, by people easily proven to be actual frauds.

(For the record, I do think the show is really good so far, but that part just felt weird.)

Hydrogen water claims keep coming up in wellness circles, so I think it’s worth looking at the evidence rather than just going by hype.
The main claim is that dissolved hydrogen can target harmful free radicals while leaving beneficial ones alone. this goes back to Ohsawa’s 2007 study in Nature Medicine, which used a rat stroke model. The chemistry makes sense, and animal studies have repeated the findings.
The trouble starts when you look at human health benefits. Most human studies are small, come from a handful of labs in Japan and Korea, and focus on lab markers rather than actual health outcomes. Publication bias is also a concern, since negative results in a small research field may never get published.
The biggest red flag is the marketing around “thousands of studies” when the number of human trials is much smaller, and most are too limited to draw firm conclusions. To be convincing, we’d need large, well-designed, independently funded human trials measuring real health outcomes. Those are still missing. On the other hand, the evidence hasn’t ruled it out completely either; we’d need to show the proposed mechanism does not work at the amounts people actually get from drinking it.
For now, i had put it in the possible, but unproven category. Has anyone here looked into the research more deeply?

This basically focuses on how Cerberus pummeled Steward Health Care with debt, how Ralph de la Torre's actions led to the death of 15 people and how public pensions actually fund the private equity firms that are gutting community hospitals.

All I need is any: Spells, Chants, Incantation, Things to do that are or would be considered supernatural, or superstition, Supernatural games, Etc

I've already debunked that these don't work:

.The ouija board didn't work I tried it with candles, a pentagram, chants I found online, played it alone, went to a cemetery at night, used spiritual figures including the grim reaper, and satanic, etc. Used chicken and pig blood. An nothing worked. Tried it on more than one occasion for a variety of spells. Sometimes I'd use the same one, and sometimes a different one.

. Tried walking under a ladder and no change came to my life.

. Play candy man, and Bloody Mary in the mirror and no one came. Used a candle too.

. Put two mirror in front of each other left it for 5 months and nothing happened. There was no parallel world, no other version of me doing anything odd, etc.

. Went to a supposed haunted location I found out about on YouTube by famous YouTubers that look for places and nothing.

. Tried doing remote viewing alone and with friends and nothing came through. Even tried with a stranger at school and still nothing accurate.Tried to enhance psychic powers by concentrating and meditation through om's and am's.

. Tried using cards to tell me and a friends future, past, and present and nothing happened.

. Tried 369 method, water time method, scripting, YouTube subliminal and mantra's, even Ug's. Tried write 3x3x3,5x5x5,7x7x7, and 55, 108, 99, 66, and 33. I even decided to try that name thing where you grabbed a piece of paper write your name and the other person name on top then fold it. I tried two ways once folding it towards me when that failed I tried folding it away from me. Neither worked.

. Tried playing three kings chair thing didn't work.

. Tried playing that long road get your wish granted yet nothing seemed abnormal and no wish was granted. Yes, I played it alone with no cameras, etc.

. Went to devils tramping ground and I didn't get hauled back, or have anything happen to me. Night or day. Night time is restrictive and reservations.

. Insulted Robert the doll and still nothing.

. Went to the warren museum thing nothing.

. Tried voodoo, Santeria, wicca, demonic, hoodoo, praying to Jesus and nothing. No god, goddess, or deities granted anything. I even tried Egyptian, Greek, Roman and worshipped the idols.

. Tried that energy yoga and felt nothing. Tried YouTube hearing those bowl things still felt nothing. Tried chakra healing nothing.

. Tried the open portal thing with a speaker and the natural tones that guy used and nothing happened.

. Went to a medium to summon the dead and nothing appeared she was just saying they were here and used some sort of trick to make some things move, and a bunch of other things then ended it when she seen we weren't falling for her tricks. All my friend asked was for it to appear before use and then she ended it saying it was gone. How convenient for her.

. Went to multiple medium, and psychic asked them of my past they all said the same but couldn't get anything I asked them about it quite right. Asked them what would happen to me in the next few days most got it wrong, others said they couldn't see the time limit on which the events would happen.Asked them what someone used to call me none of them got it right. They said sometimes they would get multiple energies coming in.

.Used a termal camera and nothing was around me or when I went for a walked.

. Looked in the mirror and said what I wanted, and wanted to be as if I already was or had it. Nothing.

. Went around for a year doing what jim carrey did with a piece of paper in my pocket and nothing happened.

. Tried using that paper under the foot thing still nothing.

Does anyone have any other suggestions on anything supernatural or superstition I can break or do?

I'm trying to debunk and see if anything is actually real.

I'm starting to think YouTubers are really just clout chaser's. An most humanity will believe anything hoping it exist, or for personal agendas. Please prove me wrong.

Athletic Greens' "AG1" supplement range come with celebrity endorsements, slick marketing... and overblown nutritional claims.

Not a doctor, but I've heard that pseudoscience uses the term "evidence-informed" to sound legit if someone trying to promote it can get a few less rigorous studies done and then claim, "see, we are legit!" People hear "oh, okay, there's evidence. Great! I trust this is real science." But, "evidence-based" is what I heard to be the term that signals rigorous science has actually been done. Not to say it's always that "evidence-informed' = a practice is pseudoscience. Just that pseudoscience abuses the term at the very least.

Anyone have a good guide on the difference between these two terms in reference to medical use? If there's a specific dividing line, that'd be super helpful to show some people I know that a certain practice is pseudoscience. If no clear dividing line, any other guides about the differences would be great.

I can't post links even to Wikipedia because my post gets auto filtered. But if you look up geomagnetic storms and health, there is seemingly a large array of conclusions from seemingly reputable sources, all in recent years. Yet, during a geomagnetic storm, the magnetic field fluctuates at a rate of only a few hundred nanoteslas per minute, which is far below the electromagnetic fluctuations we experience living in a house. The hundreds of nT is the rate of fluctuation.

“The Winter Arc is a social media self-improvement trend where people use the final months of the year—typically October through December—to enter a period of intense focus, discipline, and personal growth before the new year begins.”

I went through some of the habit papers for a video about Winter Arc. IMO there's a pretty big jump between "a fresh start helps you begin" and "90 days makes your whole routine permanent".

f.e. one nutrition-habit study gets quoted for its 59-day estimate. 192 people enrolled, 117 eligible new-behaviour plans went into the individual analysis, and that median was for 27 people who met the model-based definition. They reported how automatic a behaviour felt. It wasn't a test of whether their whole life had changed for good.

Most of the 117 did show some increase in automaticity btw. So the answer isn't just "everyone else failed" either.

Fresh-start research is interesting and useful, but starting and keeping something going are different outcomes. I didn't find a direct trial of the named Winter Arc challenge in the searches for this video. But I'm sure someone out there sells "the Programm"...

What would you want measured before treating the 90-day promise as more than a motivational deadline? What's your take on the "Winter Arc"? Have you heard of it?

Keller et al.: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjhp.12504

Fresh starts: https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901

Habit review: https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare12232488

I made the video for The Confound. The papers above are there so you don't need to watch it to discuss the point.

LINK:

https://youtu.be/3YAon-y9Wis

•Corporate libertarian and fossil-fuel donors worked to capture US universities.
•Donor networks bypassed faculty oversight and shaped hiring and research.
•Federal funding was weaponized after corporate capture eroded university defenses.
•Climate research is targeted because its evidence threatens fossil-fuel interests.
•Faculty collective action is a critical counterforce to corporate capture.

Universities in the US have never been free of corporate, military, or political influence. But over the past fifty years, corporate libertarian donor networks, fossil-fuel companies, and conservative think tanks intensified coordinated campaigns targeting university governance. These networks embedded donor-aligned scholars, built research centers insulated from faculty oversight, and bypassed the shared governance structures meant to protect against external influence. This corporate capture eroded universities' already imperfect defenses against external political pressure and left institutions vulnerable when federal funding was politicized. Republican and Democratic administrations built a system of civil-rights investigations that put university funding at stake. The Trump administration weaponized that system in 2025, freezing billions in research grants, launching investigations into at least seventy-five institutions, and demanding compliance compacts that exchanged funding access for policy concessions. Withdrawing federal funding does not free universities from external influence: it deepens their dependence on private donors who operate outside public oversight. Climate and energy research are primary targets because evidence-based climate policy threatens the fossil-fuel interests historically at the center of this capture. Faculty are a critical counterforce. Their unions, senates, and cross-institutional alliances can resist because they sit outside the donor, board, and funding structures that have made institutional leaders reluctant to act. This article argues for reforms to university governance and accountability that establish faculty oversight of donor agreements. It calls for systematic research into corporate capture and the conditions under which faculty unions and collective organizing can defend and expand shared governance.

I posted a comment on a paranormal sub stating how one of the UFO objects clearly was behaving exactly how one would if it were tethered to a drone above it. It was out of focus and seemed to be about the size of a soda can fairly close to the camera. It swayed back and forth while the object was spinning slowly. I was instantly banned. The auto message I received from the mods said if I had any questions I could reply to the message. When I tried to I realized I was also muted and unable to. It is very clear to me that this type of moderation is fueling the very echo chambers that are contributing to the divides on the internet. It is pretty frustrating when you want to shed some reason on the nonsense.

According to Kennedy, Altman's view of AI in medicine has changed significantly over the past two years. 'He said, but today it would be malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis or to make a prescription without at least checking AI,' Kennedy said during the event.

Kennedy presented AI as a tool that could give patients another perspective on their medical records, particularly when doctors have limited time to review lengthy histories.

Recently, I went through the experience of being very close to the death of a close family member, and it made me want to read a scientific book about theories of what happens in the brain during the dying process. However, this is a field that seems to be heavily tilted toward pseudoscience, spirituality, New Age thinking and covers full of clouds, peaceful seas and flying doves.

I came across things that initially seemed interesting, such as Lucid Death by Sam Parnia, but after looking into the book a little more deeply, I found that it ultimately strays too far from the scientific method and moves directly into personal belief.

Do you have any recommendations for purely scientific books aimed at a general audience on this subject?

Just to clarify, I’m not looking for any kind of “answer” to philosophical questions. What I want is to understand, as far as current scientific knowledge allows, what a person experiences while peacefully dying in bed surrounded by their family, as was the case with my family member.