"Coming out"?

Very amusing comic, especially if you roll over the red button at the end.

(trying not to spoil the comic for those who haven't read it yet)

I use homeopathic logic. The less sense it has, the stronger my argument.

By diluting one's compassion one hundred million-fold, isn't it actually stronger?

Excellent find.

Technically, it's by diluting someone's hate that their compassion grows stronger right? So, by hating more, they love less, and by loving less, homeopathy says that their hate should grow more, so you get a double whammy, unless the large presence of hate already there cancels out the homeopathic compassion, which should nullify the love...or something like that. I wonder if homeopaths say you can treat, say, a poisoning, with a homeopathic dilution of that same poison, because now it's no longer dilute, right, and the homeopathic dilution thing is reversed so it loses it's opposite-curing mojo. Ugh, theoretical homeopathy makes even less sense than standard homeopathy.

Off topic, but Andrew Wakefield is getting pummeled in the news:

http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&cf=all&ncl=dcSQq1P9xZATABM0oyvTTZ…

Charles Sullivan beat me to it!

Here's a link the to the CNN story:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/01/05/autism.vaccines/index.html?hpt=T1&…

(CNN) -- A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an "elaborate fraud" that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.

An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible.

"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."

Blammo.

Indeed, I think we'll be hearing some gleeful Insolence on this soon:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/05/AR20110…

Good for the BMJ, calling a fraud a fraud!

Scottynuke: A-yep. In fact I have a feeling we not only know what Orac's next post is going to discuss, we even know what will be in its title: "Elaborate Fraud".

Just saw the Anderson Cooper interview. Could have been better but it was damn embarrassing to Wakefield. Mnookin followed and was good. Sanjay Gupta tried to recapture some small measure of contact with science.

Just saw the Anderson Cooper interview. Could have been better but it was damn embarrassing to Wakefield. Mnookin followed and was good. Sanjay Gupta tried to recapture some small measure of contact with science.

@#2 Roadstergal: Dad?! I didn't know you used the internet!

Good news about Wakefield, though.

I thought Cooper was pretty good for a layman, but Gupta could have done much better.

Good ol' Handley calls for a vax/no vax study, and the Parker/Spitzer duo just let it fly by. I'm going to lose my voice screaming at the TV machine.

The editor's note in latest issue of The Lancet refers to the predictions/wishes of the Lancet editor Squire Sprigge for the decade beginning 1911:

In addressing the profession, legislation was urged against the âgrasping charlatan and dangerous quackâ (echoing a letter about homoeopathy in the correspondence section).

The times the are a-changing.

I think that allegations of fraud would have been brought up sooner and would have been investigated more seriously if not for the draconian English libel laws.

if god is not human, god lacks human compassion or hate.
then by the theory of dilution, compassion or hate divided by zero means god's hate and compassion must be infinite.

now that i've cleared that up, i'll be off to cure world peace.