Pseudoscience
Respectful Insolence
Category archives for Pseudoscience
Answering the Friday mailbag: Morgellons disease “expert” Marc Neumann is very unhappy with Orac
Posted by Orac on February 12, 2010 It’s been a busy week between blogging about Andrew Wakefield and covering the Winkler County Nurse trial, which ended with the jury’s acquitting Anne Mitchell, RN after less than an hour of deliberation. Consequently, I’m a bit tired today. Fortunately, there’s the mail bag, the perfect lazy blogging tool that will allow me to generate…
J.B. Handley wants to touch Andrew Wakefield’s monkey(s)
Posted by Orac on February 11, 2010 “Would you like to touch my monkey? Touch him! Love him!“ J. B. Handley wants to touch see Andrew Wakefield’s monkeys. How do I know this? Well, there’s just the little matter of his entitling his most recent excretion of flaming stupidity Show me the monkeys! and repeating “Show me the monkeys!” eleven times in…
How not to report science and medical news, vaccine edition
Posted by Orac on February 4, 2010 I realize I complain periodically about when I get into what seems to me to be a rut in which I’m writing pretty much only about anti-vaccine lunacy. This is just such a week, when the news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, first with Andrew Wakefield’s being found to have…
A pyromaniac in a field of straw man or a black hole of burning stupid incinerating every straw man in the universe? Mike Adams attacks skepticism
Posted by Orac on January 25, 2010 Mike Adams is confused. I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn’t have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there…
Tying up loose ends from 2009: Deepak Chopra versus Michael Shermer
Posted by Orac on January 5, 2010 Over the holidays, I stayed at home for a combination of some relaxation and some grant writing. (I know, weird.) As I was perusing some of the links I saved during that time, it occurs to me that I totally forgot about one particularly amazing bit of hilarity, courtesy of our old “friend” Deepak Chopra.…
Crank magnetism strikes again
Posted by Orac on December 18, 2009 Since I happen to have fallen into the topic of anthropogenic global warming, before I move back to medical topics I might as well have a little fun. Certainly, I could use some, given that I just wrote two posts in which I felt forced to criticize someone whom I admire greatly. Besides, it’s been…
James Randi, anthropogenic global warming, and skepticism, revisited one last time (I hope)
Posted by Orac on December 18, 2009 Yesterday, I wrote one of my typical Orac-ian length posts that was unusual. What was unusual about it was not its length. Rather, what was unusual about it was the target of its criticism, perhaps one of the last people in the world I would ever have expected to have to have taken issue with,…
I’ve decided to chill this weekend after five years of insanity. However, while you anxiously await yet another hemidecade of Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful, what better way to do so than checking out the awesome Tim Minchin and his most excellent nine minute beat poem “Storm”: Who says skepticism and art don’t mix?
Five years
Posted by Orac on December 11, 2009 Has it really been that long? It was a dismally overcast Saturday five years ago when, on a whim after having read a TIME Magazine article about how 2004 was supposedly the Year of the Blogger, I sat down in front of my computer, found Blogspot, and the first incarnation of Respectful Insolence was born.…
Deepak Chopra and his Choprawoo translated: “Skeptics, take my ill-informed speculations seriously!”
Posted by Orac on December 2, 2009 He’s baaaack. Deepak Chopra. Remember him? It’s been a while since I’ve said much about him and him alone. True, I’ve gone after him this year when he joined up with three other major league woo-meisters Dean Ornish, Rustum Roy, and Andrew Weil to try to try to help Senator Tom Harkin hijack the health…
The anti-vaccine movement shows just how low it can go
Posted by Orac on December 1, 2009 I debated whether or not to blog about this. The reason is that I suspect that gathering a lot of attention and controversy is exactly what Generation Rescue wanted when it posted what I’m about to blog about. On the other hand, no matter how low my opinion is of the principals who run Generation…
The “vindication of all kooks” corollary to the principle of crank magnetism
Posted by Orac on November 30, 2009 A couple of years ago, fellow ScienceBlogger Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism Blog coined a most excellent term to describe all manners of pseuodscience, quackery, and crankery. The term, “crank magnetism,” describes the tendency of cranks not to mind it when they see crankery in others. More specifically, it describes how cranks of one variety…
Your Friday Dose of Woo: The physics of homeopathy and “nanocrystalloids”
Posted by Orac on November 27, 2009 I happen to be fortunate enough this year to have taken the Friday after Thanksgiving off, and it is a very good thing indeed. However, this morning, having indulged in the American tradition of stuffing myself full of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and various other most excellent and hearty foods, all accompanied by some hearty…
Complain to CBS: CBS resident anti-vaccine propagandist Sharyl Attkisson sucks up to anti-vaccine pseudoscientist Andrew Wakefield
Posted by Orac on October 8, 2009 Watch CBS News Videos Online A number of you sent me this link. It’s to a video (above) of Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News’ resident anti-vaccine propagandist, putting on a nauseating display of sucking up to Andrew Wakefield over his recent monkey study, the one that I deconstructed yesterday to show it for the lousy science…
Thanks, Dr. Oppel, we need to see a lot more of this
Posted by Orac on September 7, 2009 If there’s been a theme running through this blog, it’s been the importance of science and critical thinking. The main focus of this emphasis on skepticism, of course, has been medicine, which makes sense, given that I’m a doctor and a cancer researcher, but I don’t limit myself to just medicine. However, as part of…
Creationism X Holocaust denial = stupidity2
Posted by Orac on September 1, 2009 Seventy years ago today, the massed armies of the Third Reich poured across the Polish border, marking the official start of World War II. It would require nearly six years, millions of deaths, and the combined might of the Soviet Union, United States, Great Britain, and numerous other nations to bring the war to an…
In which Orac defends Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum…
Posted by Orac on August 26, 2009 I realize that I’m possibly stepping into proverbial lion’s den with this one, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.…
Everything you ever needed to know about conspiracy theories
Posted by Orac on August 9, 2009 Too bad it’s missing one big one. There’s nothing about the birther movement there: See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor. I think that about sums it all up: moon hoax, 9/11, the Illuminati, the Masons. What more could there be?
Senator Tom Harkin’s and Representative Darrell Issa’s war on medical science
Posted by Orac on July 28, 2009 In discussions of that bastion of what Harriet Hall (a.k.a. The SkepDoc) likes to call “tooth fairy science,” where sometimes rigorous science, sometimes not, is applied to the study of hypotheses that are utterly implausible and incredible from a basic science standpoint (such as homeopathy or reiki), the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine…
Bill Maher and “anti-science”
Posted by Orac on July 27, 2009 Last week, I expressed my surprise and dismay that the Atheist Alliance International chose Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award. I was dismayed because Maher has championed pseudoscience, including dangerous antivaccine nonsense, germ theory denialism complete with repeating myths about Louis Pasteur supposedly recanting on his deathbed, a hostility towards “Western medicine” and an…
Bill Maher gets the Richard Dawkins Award? That’s like Jenny McCarthy getting an award for public health
Posted by Orac on July 23, 2009 Although I often don’t agree with him and have cooled on him lately, I still rather like–even admire–Richard Dawkins. While it’s true I’ve taken him to task for having a tin ear for bioethics, lamented his walking blindly right into charges of anti-Semitism (no, I don’t think he’s an anti-Semite), and half-defended/half-criticized him for seeming…
How can one know?
Posted by Orac on July 16, 2009 If there was one thing about going to TAM7 last week, it was the opportunity to contemplate among a thousand fellow skeptics just what critical thinking and reason mean. If there’s one thing about woo, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories in all their forms, it’s not just a lack of critical thinking and a plethora of…
The Kitty of Doom
Posted by Orac on July 8, 2009 Today, I’m leaving for The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas. I can’t wait to get there. Believe it or not, I’ll even be on a panel! While I’m there I’ll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I’m away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I’ll be reposting…
CBS News’ resident anti-vaccine propagandist Sharyl Attkisson dives into breast cancer crankery
Posted by Orac on July 1, 2009 Remember Sharyl Attkisson? She’s the CBS reporter who can really bring home the crazy when it comes to vaccines and autism, laying down some serious crankery (complete with many logical fallacies) and hit pieces on Dr. Paul Offit. Indeed, at times she gives Mike Adams a run for his money when it comes to laying…
Sean Hannity: Skeptic about “psychic medium” John Edward (not)
Posted by Orac on June 18, 2009 Last night, I was sitting on the couch, my laptop, appropriately enough, on my lap creating my paean to Homeopathy Awareness Week in which I had a little fun discussing homeopathic plutonium. Because Homeopathy Awareness week is not yet over, I’ll probably have one more bit of fun at the expense of The One Woo…