denialism | September 18, 2007I'm sad I missed the "Values Voters Presidential Debate", but I'm not alone. All the first-tier presidential candidates skipped it as well. The big winner was apparently Mike Huckabee according to the World Nut Daily, he apparently was the most hateful of them all. But the nuts are clearly upset at being snubbed by the candidates that actually have a chance of being nominated:
Debate panelist Rabbi Aryeh Spero of the Jewish Action Alliance asked, "How can we expect these no-show candidates to take on Osama bin Laden and other world leaders when they're afraid to show up and answer…
choofnagle | September 17, 2007The Journal's James Hookway informs us that a trial court judge in Manila, Judge Floro, has an interesting set of consultants: three elves, only visible to the judge himself! Belief in this trio has caused the country's supreme court to intervene and fire the judge.
...Mr. Floro, 54 years old, has become a media celebrity. He is now wielding his new clout to campaign for the return of his job -- and exact vengeance on the Supreme Court.
Helping him, he says, are his three invisible companions. "Angel" is the neutral force, he says. "Armand" is a benign influence. "Luis," whom Mr. Floro…
choofnagle | September 17, 2007Mark is totally outperforming me on this blog for many reasons, but my newest excuse is that I went to Austin for the weekend to see the Austin City Limits Festival. W00t!!1!
So, I'm going to be covering some divine articles that appeared over the weekend. First up: Verizon, it's OUR network, baby! The Journal reports:
Verizon Wireless appealed the Federal Communications Commission's rules for a coming radio spectrum auction, charging the agency with exceeding its authority in requiring carriers to open their networks to any devices and cellphone applications.
Yes, you read that right:…
denialism | September 17, 2007Shelly asks us to take part in her survey on science blogging. She wants to know who is reading science blogs, what do they want, what they don't want, and how science blogs can influence awareness of science.
Help her out, and take the survey.
denialism | September 17, 2007I knew eventually some crank would find John Ioaniddis' work and manage to misrepresent it against science, well, the first to bat are the HIV/AIDS cranks. Fresh off this bizarre declaration from Harvey Bialey that he'd won the war against HIV science and is now going home, they're back on the horse and using Ioannidis to hint all science is bunk (via selective bolding, wink wink, nudge nudge).
I've written previously about the importance of understanding Ioannidis' work, it emphasizes the critical role of replication in biological science, not that biological science doesn't work.
In fact,…
denialism | September 17, 2007Let's keep this ball rolling. On Friday we started talking about the importance of the OTA
It used to be, for about 20 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment, which worked for the legislative branch and provided non-partisan scientific reports relevant to policy discussions. It was a critical office, one that through thorough and complete analysis of the scientific literature gave politicians common facts from which to decide policy debates. In 1994, with the new Republican congress, the office was eliminated for the sake of…
denialism | September 17, 2007Box Turtle Bulletin has been tracking the latest ex-gay study that purports to show a 30-50% efficacy in making homosexuals into heterosexuals through the Exodus ex-gay ministry.
Initial problems with the study which went to a Christian publisher rather than peer review - the authors Stanton L. Jones and Mark Yarhouse (of Regent University have an interesting history in this field:
Jones and Yarhouse have collaborated at least three times before. They wrote "The Use, Misuse and Abuse of Science in the Ecclesiastical Homosexuality Debates," which appeared in the 2000 anthology Homosexuality…
denialism | September 16, 2007Denyse O'Leary points us to an upcoming criticism of the New York Times from the crank journal First Things. Their great sin? Allowing Dawkins, a critic of Behe, to review his latest book.
He notes the curious fact that the Times should never have given the book to Dawkins to review anyway, without giving Behe the right of reply (which it would never dare to do):
You see, it's only OK for critics to review their opponents when Behe does it for Time. How dare the New York Times allow Dawkins to then say something about Behe's work?
Then in yet another example of the ID cranks' stunning…
denialism | September 13, 2007So I was thinking. It isn't really enough to merely react constantly to anti-scientific behavior which seems to permeate the media, the interwebs, and policy discussions on Capitol Hill these days.
It used to be, for about 20 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment, which worked for the legislative branch and provided non-partisan scientific reports relevant to policy discussions. It was a critical office, one that through thorough and complete analysis of the scientific literature gave politicians common facts from which to…
denialism | September 13, 2007There have been two interesting court decisions, I think both decided correctly for science this week. In the first, a federal court has decided states may regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles. In particular, one statement from the judge seemed to come straight from the deck of cards.
"There is no question that the GHG (greenhouse gas) regulations present great challenges to automakers," Judge William Sessions III, sitting in the U.S. District Court in Burlington, wrote at the conclusion of his 240-page decision.
He added, "History suggests that the ingenuity of the industry…
denialism | September 13, 2007I thought I'd survey the readership for some ideas on how to make Denialism Blog more interesting and accessible to an international readership. One of the goals of the Scienceblogs' mothership Seed is to expand and get the whole world interested in scientific literacy as well as our little community and I realize that my topic is a little US-centric. However, I doubt that denialism is necessarily more prevalent in the US. For instance, the recent influence of HIV/AIDS denialism in Thabo Mbeki's South African government is of particular concern (see Nick's excellent overview of the problem…
denialism | September 13, 2007At Unscrewing the Inscrutable Brent Rasmussen brings us the 69th skeptics circle with a fun, old west feel.
One of the first entries was particularly interesting to me as an example of crank magnetism. The Socratic Gadfly found Lynn Marguilis embracing 9/11 conspiracies, which shouldn't be surprising given her HIV/AIDS denial - also requiring a conspiratorial world view.
It would be interesting to study this problem systematically, and see how many times a crank adopts more than one crank belief. I suspect given that it takes a certain kind of broken mind to believe this nonsense that…
denialism | September 11, 2007An art teacher has been "removed from the classroom" for proselytizing to his students about his vegan lifestyle. Apparently after being born-again into veganism, he wouldn't stop talking to kids about living "cruelty-free" during class. The kicker? He now wants to charge the school district with child endangerment for encouraging them to drink milk.
Dave Warwak, 44, also said he plans to ask the McHenry County state's attorney to file child-endangerment charges against the school district because the school continues to promote milk and other animal products as part of a healthy diet.…
denialism | September 10, 2007Who needs privacy concerns if RFID causes cancer. The small implantable microchips that have generated concern from privacy experts and readers of revelations alike have now been associated with sarcoma formation in animals.
A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had "induced" malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats.
"The transponders were the cause of the tumors," said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich.…
denialism | September 9, 2007I think most skeptical bloggers would agree that one common tactic one sees from denialists is whole-hog cut-and-paste rebuttals without attribution. For instance, on finds when arguing with evolution denialists that they'll just cut-and-paste tired creationist arguments into comment threads.
We wrote briefly about the latest attempt by global warming denialists to suggest that the scientific consensus does not support climate change. To start with, it was little more than a repeat of the previous debunked attempts, and was hardly original.
Well, for more proof they can't think originally…
choofnagle | September 9, 2007The 2007 Austin City Limits Festival starts later this week. There's a pretty amazing lineup of bands to hear for $80/day, including some of my favorites, Blonde Redhead, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and the Arcade Fire. My schedule of annoying indie bands is posted here.
denialism | September 7, 2007The Washington Post reports on the apparent jump in suicide rates since antidepressants got a black-box warning in 2004 after some reports suggested an increased suicide rate in youths after the initial prescription.
The article here (goddamn WaPo still can't figure out how to link anyone but themselves) shows a disturbing correlation:
METHOD: The authors examined U.S. and Dutch data on prescription rates for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) from 2003 to 2005 in children and adolescents (patients up to age 19), as well as suicide rates for children and adolescents, using…
denialism | September 6, 2007Another update on Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the surprisingly devastating attack on the honeybee that occurred last year that was responsible for huge losses of bee colonies and a great deal of concern about crops pollinated by this insect.
Originally we mocked the idea that CCD was caused by global warming and alarmist calls from people like Bill Maher that suggested a correlation between CCD and cell phone use (ha!). Critical at the time were initial experiments showing that irradiation of hives allowed recolonization, suggesting an infectious process. Now it seems this has been…
choofnagle | September 6, 2007In today's Journal, Robert Crandall and Hal Singer argue that America shouldn't drink the corporate average fuel economy standard (CAFE) Kool-Aid. Why? Well why do you think? Because the market is perfect and thus there is no problem! Bring on the Econ 101!
...if there was [sic] fuel-saving technology out there that cost $1,000 but generated $2,500 in the discounted present value of fuel savings over the life of the vehicle, carmakers would surely voluntarily embrace that technology...
No need for regulation there. With large numbers of vehicle producers and well-informed consumers,…
denialism | September 6, 2007The Washington Post reports on research that correcting mythical beliefs is more difficult than you'd think. The interesting finding seems to be that if you repeat the myth in the course of correcting it, people are more likely to forget the correct information and remember the myth!
When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.
Younger people did better at…