The monster says, "Arbeit macht frei"
When craving brains leads to bizarre proclamationsPosted on November 11, 2008 8:00 AM • 47 Comments
Respectful Insolence
"A statement of fact cannot be insolent." The miscellaneous ramblings of a surgeon/scientist on medicine,
quackery, science, pseudoscience, history, and pseudohistory (and anything else that interests him)
Who (or what) is Orac?
Orac is the nom de blog of a (not so) humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. (Continued here, along with a DISCLAIMER that you should read before reading any medical discussions here.)
Orac's old Blog is archived at Archived Insolence.
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Recent Posts
- Oh. Canada.
- Mandatory reading to rebut the antivaccine "too many too soon" propaganda
- Your Friday Dose of Woo: Soundscapes on the brain
- The 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: The trouble with Orac
- How I'm like Barack Obama
- Et tu, Anthony Edwards and Dustin Hoffman?
- When homeopaths kill by neglect
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- Welcome to the Age of Ignorance
- That'll teach 'em for using an actual valid placebo control
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- HCN on Mandatory reading to rebut the antivaccine "too many too soon" propaganda
- MissyMiss on Your Friday Dose of Woo: Soundscapes on the brain
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Science and Surgery
Hitler Zombie:
Enough with Radovan Karadzic, already! (Or, the mini-Hitler Zombie dodged)
Orac avoids the mini-Hitler Zombie of alternative medicine.Posted on July 23, 2008 3:00 PM • 29 Comments
Ben Stein and Jack Chick, two more crappy tastes that taste crappy together
What do Ben Stein and Jack Chick have in common?Posted on May 3, 2008 11:02 AM • 44 Comments
Far, far, sooner than expected, the monster returns to invade the Presidential campaign
It's another Hitler Zombie Massacree in the Presidential campaign, and, oh, you'd better not mess with Oprah.Posted on February 20, 2008 8:52 AM • 41 Comments
After a year's absence (except in reruns), the monster returns...for real
In nondescript dressing room in a nondescript studio in a nondescript office building in in a nondescript industrial park, a short, pudgy 63-year-old man with the stereotypical demeanor of a particularly boring economist was trying to squeeze into a pair...Posted on January 29, 2008 9:00 AM • 19 Comments
A trio of terror, part III: The search for everybody's favorite brain-eating Führer continues
Orac was happy, if such an emotion could be correctly ascribed to a the clear box of complex circuitry that was the basis of his intelligence and access to the sum total of all the knowledge of all the known worlds. He had become so disgusted with being put in the service of the petty tasks that humans demanded of him, tasks far beneath his capabilities. Such a lack of imagination!Posted on January 17, 2008 5:00 PM •
A trio of terror, part II: The rampage continues
"Who is it?" And elderly but still vigorous and extremely handsome black man poked his head out from behind the shower curtain, water dripping from his face. He saw nothing out of place. The bathroom looked as it always looked. Another thump. The man was becoming angry, but an icy fear gripped his heart momentarily. Was it a burglar intruding in his house? How could burglar have gotten through the security system? He turned off the spigot and wrapped himself with a bath towel. He stepped out of the shower. There was no sound except for the distant roar of a lawn mower. Cautiously, ever so slowly, he opened his bathroom door a crack, to see if he could see anything.Posted on January 17, 2008 1:01 PM • 1 Comments
A trio of terror, part I: The Hitler zombie escapes
In an office of a nondescript radio studio somewhere in the heartland of America, a nondescript man with graying hair and glasses, possessing the unctuous manner of a televangelist, sat perusing the script for the coming radio show. He was proud that he had built a nationwide movement and a syndicated radio show that was carried on many Christian radio stations throughout the land and looked forward to spreading the Gospel once again.Posted on January 17, 2008 9:00 AM • 1 Comments
What I did on my summer vacation: "Proof of "intelligent design" (and an old "friend")
One thing about being on vacation is that I had some time to sit back and think about things that I normally take for granted. For example, I spend a fair amount of time poking fun at adherents of "intelligent design" creationism, the claim that there are some biological structures that are too complex to have come about through evolution by natural selection (a concept they term "irreducible complexity") and therefore must have been "designed" by some "intelligence."Posted on October 16, 2007 8:54 AM • 6 Comments
Arthur Caplan finds the Hitler zombie in bioethics
In the most recent issue of Science, bioethicist Arthur Caplan points out how common flawed and overblown Hitler or Nazi analogies are during debates about stem cell research, end of life care, and clinical trials:Posted on August 27, 2007 12:01 AM • 1 Comments
The Hitler Zombie smells thimerosal
Unfortunately for the not quite living Führer, politicians' brains are a poor source of nourishment, even for an undead monster that had caused the deaths of tens of millions during life. It was soon hungry again, despite its primeval desire for eternal rest. It needed to hunt. Deep within the sulci of its rotting white matter, it craved something different than the same old brains that were prone to use the same old fallacious Nazi, Hitler, or Holocaust analogies, something that might sustain it longer and allow it to sleep as dead for longer.Posted on August 26, 2007 3:01 PM • 2 Comments
And on the seventh day, the Hitler zombie rested (I hope)
The Hitler zombie's been a busy undead Führer the last three weeks (1, 2, 3, 4), and it's time (I hope) for him to go back into his coffin for a while, assuming the politicians and pundits so enamored of letting him out don't open the casket again.Posted on August 26, 2007 8:01 AM • 1 Comments
I fought the Hitler zombie, and the Hitler zombie won...maybe
It would be no fun at all to write this blog if everyone always agreed with me. (Of course, it would be even less fun if everyone violently disagreed with me and, as some of the antivaxers did, angrily and gleefully wished that I should have an autistic child, but that's another issue.) In any case, every so often I'll post something that produces a reaction that surprises me. So it was as I was looking over some of the comments on yesterday's post...Posted on August 26, 2007 12:01 AM •
The Hitler Zombie wants more brains to eat
In any case, there's not much for me to add about the Durbin quote at this late date, given that fellow RINO John Cole at Balloon Juice handled the issue quite pretty well. Yes, Senator Durbin's remarks were over the top, although he did try to make a valid point on how the interrogation tactics at Gitmo resemble those of repressive regimes more than I'd like to admit; it's just that he botched his point.Posted on August 25, 2007 4:01 PM • 1 Comments
The zombie of Hitler's corpse is eating people's brains
Last week, inspired by this post, I discussed how quick politicians and pundits are these days to make fallacious comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis, pointing out that such comparisons are generally poorly thought out and serve more as a means of demonizing one's political opponents rather than making a serious comparison.Posted on August 25, 2007 8:03 AM • 5 Comments
Who's Hitler today?
An amusing post over at Beautiful Atrocities points out briefly that "in the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes." And then it illustrates the utter truth of that statement.Posted on August 8, 2007 9:02 AM • 8 Comments
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