Text by Michael Shermer. Thanks to Tim for sending this to me.

James Patterson on how astrology is just new age bigotry. Apologies if it’s slow to load – videos from the comedy central site seem to be taking a few seconds to appear for some reason.

A reader kindly alerted me to the good stuff that can be found over at Despair, Inc. You can find other hilarious videos on their site, but they’re also known for creating the demotivational poster. You can see a selection of Despair’s posters in the video below.

Motivational speakers are massive purveyors of woo these days, and unfortunately many poor employees have to suffer their BS because their clueless bosses buy into it so easily.

The Daily Show’s parody of Large Hadron Collider scare-mongers. Does a good job tackling the false balance that helped to propogate this nonsense. Most cringingly, the “expert” that has featured so much in the media explains that there’s a 50% chance that the LHC will destroy the universe, since it either will happen or it won’t: 50:50. *sigh*

I’ve been educating myself a little more about the LHC today. Some of you may or may not remember the fabulous satirical show Brass Eye. Well, the creator of that show, Chris Morris, has actually done a much more serious and pretty interesting podcast, interviewing several chaps at CERN.

Skeptics should know about Brass Eye. It poked fun at media idiocy and each episode duped celebrities and media personalities to get behind the most ridiculous made-up causes (similar to the dihydrogen monoxide hoax).

UK viewers can watch every episode of Brass Eye here, including an episode on science, which should be available to non-UK viewers here.

Kurt Metzger takes on the BS that is Kinoki Foot Pads. This starts from about 1:35 in the video. I don’t usually warn for explicit material on this blog, but even though they bleep the swearing, there is some quite sexually explicit stuff running up to 1:35.

If you don’t know about Kinoki Foot Pads, here’s one of their ads. Quick, call now and they’ll “double your offer”! That’s the ancient Japanese way.

Colbert explains the discovery of the remains of Predator X.

Stan tries to explain how mediums work to a credulous crowd.