Could you imagine using your own children as weapons in the lunatic denial of the connection between HIV and AIDS? Could you imagine being HIV positive and publicly breastfeeding your baby as a statement that the possibility of causing harm to the child was non existent? How you would feel if your three-year-old daughter died of an AIDS-related illness, something which you denied could happen?

Sane people like you or me would do nothing to harm our children, and we would be horrified at the death of one of them. If we didn't believe in the disease before the child died, we would certainly believe in its existence afterwards. But we are not AIDS-denier Christine Maggiore, whose web site was still talking about her two healthy children months after one of them had been killed by the mother's stupidity and arrogance.

The usual collection of clowns pretending to be doctors has been brought out to say why Eliza Jane died of things that she did not die of and the usual lies have been told about what was in the autopsy report. To nobody's surprise, familiar names from the anti-vaccination crusade have appeared here as well, such as Harold Buttram and Mohammed Al-Bayati who were both waist-deep in defending murderer Alan Yurko. To these whores working for expert witness fees it is almost irrelevant that a child has died as long as they can use the death to further their agendas and line their pockets.

AIDS is a serious illness, and anyone denying a link between AIDS and HIV is complicit in the deaths of those who don't get effective treatment or who believe the lies. To allow your ignorance to kill your own child and to continue the denial after the child's death indicates the kind of psychopathology that should never be seen outside a very secure mental institution or a cell on death row.

You might think that something named "The Discovery Institute" might be somehow involved in the process of discovery. In this case you would be wrong, because this "discovery" institute is committed to the propagation of received wisdom and dogma. The purpose of this organisation is to get biblical creationism taught in schools in place of science. To get around the inevitable problems created by constitutions and courts which forbid (or at least inhibit) the blurring of the lines between religion and reality, the link with Genesis and creationism is denied and something called "Intelligent Design" is offered in its place as some sort of scientific theory. The fact that this supposed theory makes no testable predictions and can therefore never be tested is (deliberately) overlooked on the quite reasonable assumption that most people are unaware of what it means to talk about the methods and principles of scientific knowledge. The fact that the only possible "Intelligent Designer" is the God of First Cause is denied on the quite reasonable assumption that most people are unaware of the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. Like the more common and familiar version of creationism peddled by outfits like Answers in Genesis, this version relies on an ignorance of both science and religion. At least AiG is honest about what they are doing.

It is almost an article of religious faith among proponents of alternative medicine that there is no such thing as Attention Deficit Disorder or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. These are considered to be inventions of the pharmaceutical industry to sell the drug Ritalin, which is always described as "untested" despite having been in use for decades. (Strangely, using something for a long time is proof of its effectiveness if it is quackery.)

Rather inconsistently, the quacks like to tell us that even though these conditions don't exist, they can be treated by the application of the appropriate nostrums and techniques. In this case, the treatment consists of sticking a hose into the child's rectum and pumping in some fluids with magical qualities. Of course, no "cure" is claimed (because that might invite examination by regulatory authorities) and therefore the enema-giver has no responsibility beyond the timely deposit of the child's parents' money into the bank.

I haven't heard much lately about David Oates and his theory that everything we say has a hidden meaning encoded in the sounds if we were to hear them in reverse. I have always been a bit suspicious of this because I often have difficulty in figuring out how to say things forward without having to add a different meaning and work out what it will all sound like backwards before I say it forwards. I wonder if Latin died out because the verbs are at the ends of the sentences and it was just too difficult for the speakers of the language to work out the backwards part while rearranging the thought order for forward talk. In fact, now that I think about it further this is obviously what happened. Res ipsa loquitor.

My apple-cheeked old grandmother always told me to not be backwards in coming forward, so I have given Mr Oates an Encouragement Award to show him that the world needs to hear more about his findings, after all, as it says on the site: "David has been compared to Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Nicola Tesla and his work described as being of Nobel calibre with far reaching ramifications is such fields as law and psychology", and we wouldn't want those ramifications to go to waste.