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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.jpg 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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2005 Weblog Award

Hitler Zombie:

The monster says, "Arbeit macht frei"

When craving brains leads to bizarre proclamations

Enough with Radovan Karadzic, already! (Or, the mini-Hitler Zombie dodged)

Orac avoids the mini-Hitler Zombie of alternative medicine.

Ben Stein and Jack Chick, two more crappy tastes that taste crappy together

What do Ben Stein and Jack Chick have in common?

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.

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...

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!

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.

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.

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."

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:

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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