choofnagle | October 18, 2007While Mark is in Begas, attempting to use his big brain to make money, you people are at my mercy!!1! Let us begin!
Check out today's Times for a book review of A. J. Jacob's The Year of Living Biblically, One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, the story of a secular Jew who attempts to incorporate rules from the good book into modern life:
..."If I wanted to understand my forefathers, this year would let me live like they did, but with less leprosy," he writes, sounding like Woody Allen on a bad day. So he made a list of scriptural strictures, the more peculiar…
denialism | October 18, 2007Today I'll be leaving for Las Vegas until Sunday so I'll leave it to my brother to post the next couple of days.
Until then, have fun, and don't let the cranks run wild in the comments.
denialism | October 18, 2007Sandy Szwarc continues to wage her war against the "obesity myth", and has fallen into the classic crank trap of the attack on scientific consensus. It's right up there with attacking peer-review as a sure sign you're about to listen to someone's anti-science propaganda.
She cites this article at the financial times by John Kay which lauds the Crichton view of science.
Michael Schrage's comment on politics and science (September 26) struck a raw nerve: and provoked an extended response from the president of the UK's Royal Society. Lord Rees advocates that we should base policy on something…
denialism | October 17, 2007WaPo reports on the appointment of Susan Orr:
The Bush administration again has appointed a chief of family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has been critical of contraception.
Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.
In a 2001 article in The Washington Post,…
denialism | October 17, 2007Pat at Screw loose change brings us the latest dishonesty (or carefully reinforced self-delusion) from the 9/11 troofers.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology released this letter (PDF) in response to the troofers, but failed to realize that the troofers will stoop to pretty pathetic lows to misrepresent what they say.
I'll present this as a quiz. Here's the full section from letter, guess which sentence the troofers quoted out of context to suggest that NIST failed to explain the collapse of the buildings.
The final section of your request asserts that the WTC Report's…
denialism | October 17, 2007I've postponed writing about Gore/IPCC Nobel largely because I wanted to see how the denialists would respond, and it has been interesting.
The problem is worsened by what Paul Krugman called Gore Derangement Syndrome:
So if science says that we have a big problem that can't be solved with tax cuts or bombs -- well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor's Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious…
denialism | October 17, 2007Archbishop apologizes for giving Communion to Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
And what a great article too! PZ would love this group.
On Oct. 7, Archbishop George Niederauer delivered the Eucharist to members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence - an activist group whose motto is "go forth and sin some more" - prompting cries of outrage from conservatives across the country and Catholics in San Francisco.
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The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, founded in San Francisco in 1979, are known for their white face paint, outrageous costumes, theatrics and support of the gay community. They…
denialism | October 17, 2007Short answer, no.
The latest is Dembski laughing with glee at the latest bigoted ramblings of James Watson who apparently has gone and said Africans are stupid and that's why Africa suffers. This is not the first, or last time that Watson will say something dumb, offensive, and backwards. Like some people who have received enough accolade that they are safe from any repercussions for their actions, he seems to just revel in being an ass. Like, as Zuska points out, his recent diagnosis of Rosalind Franklin as autistic, as if she was the asshole in that conflict.
As if Watson's…
choofnagle | October 16, 2007I'm doing the TRUST Seminar at Berkeley this week. Here's the info and abstract.
Date: Thursday, October 18, 2007
Time: 1:00 PM (lunch will be served)
Location: 540 A/B Cory Hall
ABSTRACT: In synthetic identity theft cases, an impostor creates a new identity using some information from a victim that is enhanced with fabricated personal information. For instance, the impostor may use a real Social Security number, but a falsified name and address. Since this synthetic identity is based on some real information, and sometimes supplemented with artfully created credit…
denialism | October 15, 2007The inability to achieve erection has been a source of consternation for men for, well, a really long time. But the recent history of treatments for impotence, wait, I mean Erectile Dysfunction, oh no, now they're calling it Male Sexual Dysfunction, represents a medical revolution. In the last 100 or so years, we've gone from nonspecific and largely ineffective treatments, to progressively more successful treatment, finally resulting in a highly specific and effective pharmaceutical solution to the problem. The goal of this post is to share a history of this unique field of medical…
denialism | October 12, 2007Chris 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 is the natural proclivity of the intellectual (it's what leads some smart people to become intellectuals rather than computer programmers), and is of course prerequisite to criticism and devotion to reform. And for conservatives, opposition lasted a very long time--in domestic policy, from the New…
denialism | October 12, 2007One 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 who the splitters are:
* Distracting, disrupting, or derailing 9/11 truth efforts;
* Dividing the truth movement; or
* Discrediting leading 9/11 activists
What inflated egos they have to tihnk the government is actually afraid of them or cares enough about their crankery to pay money to influence…
denialism | October 12, 2007Watching 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 Chris Angel will test them all before the world, and everything you see will be live.
I was cracking up because when they show Geller he's got this sign that bends behind him. I can't believe it, he still tries to milk this idea that he can bend metal like he's some kind of spoon-bending genius.
I'd…
denialism | October 11, 2007I 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 the orthopedics ward, who was a triple-amputee. She had her legs removed below the thigh, and one arm amputated below the elbow. The cause was imminently preventable. She had type II diabetes that was poorly controlled. She was obese, weighing about 180 lbs despite the removal of large parts of…
denialism | October 10, 2007The 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!
denialism | October 10, 2007Greta 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 what things were like before some medical intervention like vaccines, antibiotics, or in this case HAART. It's easy to think there's no problem with avoiding vaccination, or denying germ theory once the problem of these diseases are so well-controlled that there doesn't seem to be a tangible…
denialism | October 10, 2007The 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 exposure to harmful ones. In other words, let your kids go outside and eat dirt, but don't take them to chicken-pox parties (vaccinate them instead).
In a similar vein, Slate has an articleon eating more crap. While the point is made more carelessly, the idea is the same, that exposure to common…
denialism | October 10, 2007The 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 ribbons that are a "symbol of male-dominated control over women", and exposes the insidious lies of those who spend their lives looking for cures for this deadly disease.
In this report, you'll learn how the cancer industry -- which is dominated by powerful men -- uses the same tactics today to…
denialism | October 8, 2007Noted 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 (by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger and Christopher Hitchens, among others) that a visitor from another planet might think America was in the iron throes of priestly repression. You'd never know that we live in the age of Paris Hilton, HBO, Internet porn and flip-flops. The…
denialism | October 6, 2007A 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 Fort Hunt.
When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.
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"We got more information…