October 12, 2007
Chris DeMuth, the head of AEI, is announced he's stepping down from the position in the WSJ Op-Ed page (article free here - at AEI). His farewell is a call to crankery:
Every one of the right-of-center think tanks was founded in a spirit of opposition to the established order of things. Opposition…
October 12, 2007
One of the latest discussions going on at the 9/11 conspiracy sites is the big question of who are the 9/11 disinformation agents being paid by the government to spread lies and confusion about the events of 9/11. George Washington gives the simple 5 d's of disinformation to help you figure out…
October 12, 2007
Watching 30 Rock and the Office tonight I kept on seeing this commercial for a new show called "Phenomenon". The story goes:
The search for the impossible begins...there are those who claim special powers, but only one can be called the greatest. Now, the mind of Uri Geller, and the mastery of…
October 11, 2007
I will never forget the very first patient history I ever took. Part of medical school training is they send you onto the wards to gather patient histories and physicals so you learn to gather information effectively as a clinician. My first patient history was on a woman about 35 years old on…
October 10, 2007
The Infophile has this week's circle up at Infophilia. He has presented the posts in the context of logical puzzles, practically daring us to use our brains rather than just spoon-feeding us the skepticism.
See if you can figure them all out!
October 10, 2007
Greta Christina has sent me this link to her wonderful essay discussing the short memory required for HIV/AIDS denialism.
It is really a fantastic essay, personal and well-researched, and it covers a very important point. A lot of the anti-science attitudes we see are from people have no memory of…
October 10, 2007
The first from the NYT discusses the fallacy that childhood illness somehow builds up the immune system making them healthier adults. Rather, it emphasizes correctly, that exposure to lots of harmless antigens seems to be the key to making kids less susceptible to asthma and allergies, not…
October 10, 2007
The latest crankery from Adams is the evil male-chauvinist conspiracy to perpetuate breast cancer for fun and profit being led by none other than those dastardly villains of the American Cancer Society. With his stunning report and links to the thinkbeforeyoupink campaign, he rails against the…
October 8, 2007
Noted sockpuppet and sniveler Lee Siegel warns us that the new militant atheists may be closing the book on imagination. And for some reason the LA Times saw fit to publish this tripe.
In the last few years, so many books have rolled off the presses challenging God, belief and religion itself (…
October 6, 2007
A must-read from the Washington Post about how interrogations went in WWII.
For six decades, they held their silence.
The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at…
October 5, 2007
Good news from the political front. Hillary Clinton plans to re-establish the OTA if elected.
Fifth, we're going to stop substituting ideology for science and evidence, and we're going to start giving the American people again the facts on the issues that matter to them and their families. Over…
October 5, 2007
CNN suggests there are 5 (count them 5) alternative medicine treatments that actually work! How pathetic is it for altie-meds that the article is presented this way. You know, 5 altie-med therapies that work versus, well, all real pharmaceuticals that actually have proven medical effects. As…
October 4, 2007
Check out this fascinating new study from the Barna group that appears to show the damage that is being done to the Christian faith by the political actions of right wing fundamentalists. This should serve as a serious wake-up call for the culture warriors who are attempting to increase the role…
October 4, 2007
I'm thinking of lies from presidents and the resulting scandal. On the one hand we have the impeachment of Clinton for "I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky." On the other we have "We do not torture" from George W. Bush combined with the news that we do indeed torture people.
It…
October 4, 2007
The New England Journal has an article on the phenomenon known as chronic Lyme disease. Lyme disease, is a tick-borne infectious disease caused by an bacterium known as Borrelia burgdorferi carried by ticks in certain regions of the United States and Europe in which it is endemic. Here is the…
October 3, 2007
I'm loving the Non Sequiturs about Danae setting up her think tank.
I think Wiley must be reading the blog. Stop lurking and show yourself!
October 2, 2007
Have people seen the coverage of these Blackwater hearings?
The police officer, whom CNN is identifying only as Sarhan, said the Blackwater guards "seemed nervous" as they entered the square, throwing water bottles at the Iraqi police posted there and driving in the wrong direction. He said…
October 2, 2007
I too gagged when I saw this nonsense story from the Center for American Progress listing 100 things we'll lose with global warming. Sheril takes it apart for us, and I'm thankful.
October 2, 2007
PZ has found this wonderful cartoon that I think sums up the problem nicely.
Danae should go to work for AEI or Cato!
October 2, 2007
I realize it's fundamental to being a crank, but the persecution complex of the IDers is getting really old. The latest is Bruce Chapman at Evolution News and Views, who no longer satisfied with grasping at the mantle of Galileo, is now groping for Semmelweis and Lister as well. The idea being,…
October 2, 2007
Next for "making up disease" files, Ed Brayton brings us news of the latest crank idea from the masturbation-obsessed nuts over at World Nut Daily. It's the new plague of masturbation-induced impotence.
Pornographically Induced Impotence is now a national pandemic, raking in untold billions for…
October 2, 2007
I thought for sure the idiotic slugs that pass for security in our airports had mishandled this woman resulting in her death when they said she strangled herself while trying to escape from handcuffs. However, Slate reports indeed you can manage to screw up this maneuver and contort yourself into…
October 2, 2007
Here's some woo for you. Via Gizmodo we hear about this wonderful new waste of money, Mummywraps. Designed to protect your baby from "electro-smog", the non-existent threat of electromagnetic waves from radio and cell phone sources (that we have been exposed to constantly for decades with no…
October 1, 2007
I'd just comment like nuts if I were eligible for the 500,000th comment contest.
Call this an open thread. Go nuts! I'm too busy writing to blog anyway.
September 28, 2007
National Geographic brings us the "best science images of 2007" which includes this amazing CT reconstruction of the nose and sinuses.
Science magazine has the full set, but is behind a paywall.
Via BoingBoing and Neurophilosophy
September 28, 2007
Tim Lambert has coverage of the latest in the denialist attempt to discredit global warming science - the smearing of scientist James Hansen. Using the bogey-man of George Soros, they try to suggest that Hansen has been funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars.
How many people, for instance, know…
September 27, 2007
This week it's our friend Factition at Conspiracy Factory. However, he makes the poor decision to let the world know about our contacts with the Illuminati as part of our anti-conspiracy disinformation campaign.
Traitor!
September 26, 2007
This is seriously disturbing. Archbishop Francisco Chimoio, who is head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique, is telling people that condoms are laced with HIV and HAART therapy is designed to finish you off. This is in a country with double-digit HIV infection rates.
Archbishop Chimoio told our…
September 26, 2007
Here's what I'm reading this morning.
An Orangutan stole a womans pants in Malaysia. That's got to be embarrassing, but at the very least, you'd have a story to tell people for the rest of your life that is sure to entertain.
Congress, having solved all other problems is looking into the language…
September 26, 2007
I've largely been ignoring their stupid lately. But the sheer idiocy of a ID "mathematician" Granville Sewell takes the cake for this truly idiotic straw-man argument.
It starts with an interesting question though:
I speculated on what would happen if we constructed a gigantic computer model…
