oracknows | November 9, 2006Here's a real example of religious insanity:
LONDON, Kentucky (AP) - A woman died after being bitten by a snake during a serpent-handling service at church, police said.
Linda Long, 48, of London, Ky, died Sunday at University of Kentucky Medical Center, said Brad Mitchell, a detective with the Laurel County Sheriff's Office said Tuesday. Long died about four hours after the bite was reported, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.
Officials said Long attended East London Holiness Church. Neighbours of the church told the newspaper the church practices serpent handling.
Snake handling is based…
oracknows | November 9, 2006I was sitting in my office around 7:45 AM yesterday morning, going through my messages and mail in preparation for a long day of animal protocol and grant writing interspersed with meetings, the radio playing in the background. It was Curtis and Kuby, the usual talking heads show with a conservative paired with a liberal that I listen to when I get up, on the way to work, and even in my office if I'm not operating, in clinic, or otherwise out of my office in the morning. Bret Schundler, former candidate for Governor of New Jersey was being interviewed about the election results and the loss…
oracknows | November 9, 2006Holy Reiki, Batman! This month's Skeptics Circle, hosted by Polite Company, has landed, and it's a doozy. In fact, it's a Circle of Heroes:
Observe the Skeptic:
often battle-hardened by years of living in a world gone mad with magical thinking and spurious logic;
frequently alone in the fight against codified irrationality;
forced to search far and wide for another candle in the darkness, hoping that one day enough candles together can create the flames of a new renaissance;
I like it.
Next up is someone who's hosted before, Jim Anderson at Decorabilia. Please note that, due to the…
oracknows | November 8, 2006Is there a connection between Scientology and the mercury militia? Kevin Leitch examines the evidence. As he points out, it's not as far-fetched as it might seem at first:
Everybody knows that Scientology has an almost rabid outlook on psychiatry and what they deem psychiatric labels. Its so bad that Xenu-lover John Travolta is allegedly hiding the fact of his son's autism for fear of offending his masters in Scientology.
Scientologists have a natural theoretical affinity with the mercury militia and in particular the DAN! ideology. They are firmly against medication and firmly in favour of '…
oracknows | November 8, 2006The new Tangled Bank is up at Eastern Blot. Had enough politics? Read some science, instead!
oracknows | November 8, 2006I've written before about how frequently alties like to point to testimonials as "evidence" that their treatments work. Indeed, from the very beginning, in one of the earliest posts I ever wrote, I explained just why breast cancer testimonials for alternative medicine should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Of course, most of these testimonials are either given by true believers or used by people selling alternative medicine, and they are used mainly to sell product. That's one reason why I've emphasized that evidence from well-designed clinical trials is the best way of assessing what…
oracknows | November 7, 2006I voted a couple hours ago, and polls have just closed in my part of the country. All over the eastern part of the U.S., the counting of the votes is shifting into high gear. This election year saw some truly disgusting negative ads all over the country. Too bad none of them were like this one:
oracknows | November 7, 2006Grand Rounds no. 3, vol. 7 has been posted at MSSP Nexus Blog. Time to get your weekly fix of the best of the medical blogosphere.
oracknows | November 7, 2006After not having written anything about the case of Abubakar Tariq Nadama, the five year old autistic boy who died as a result of chelation therapy administered to him to "cure" him of his autism, I revisited the case last week in light of the State of Pennsylvania filing charges against Dr. Kerry, the "alternative medicine" practitioner who delivered the lethal dose. I've now gotten a copy of the full list of charges, and it makes for some interesting reading if you can stand all the legalese. (The charges can also be found here.)
Here's the note in Tariq's medical chart from his initial…
oracknows | November 7, 2006The polls are now open where I live. Don't forget to get out there and vote!
Too bad we don't have a candidate like the one in the video to vote for. At least he's honest. Heck, if any candidate ran a campaign like the one in the video above, I might even vote for him! As it is now, for Senate I have the choice between a Republican tool and a totally corrupt Democrat.
oracknows | November 6, 2006OK, I wasn't planning on writing on the whole Haggard imbroglio again. (Famous last words, eh?) Then, via Andrew Sullivan, I came across this little post by a blogging evangelical pastor from Seattle named Mark Driscoll:
Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is…
oracknows | November 6, 2006I wasn't planning on writing about Ted Haggard. I mean, what's another fundamentalist preacher falling from grace and admitting that, yes, he did indeed purchase methamphetamine and in essence admitting that he did have sex with themale prostitute "massage therapist" who had accused him of doing so? What's another hypocritical preacher who preaches what he himself does not live up to? We've seen enough of their ilk. Schadenfreude aside, it's not particularly surprising, and it's only interesting because Haggard used to brag about his closeness with President Bush and his weekly phone calls…
oracknows | November 6, 2006While perusing the new Richard Dawkins website a while back, I came across an article that, if you know my interest in World War II, you'd know that I couldn't resist commenting on, and it's been in my "to write about" queue for a few weeks now. In it, Dawkins discusses the aerial bombing campaigns of World War II and contrasts our acceptance of such carnage then with our revulsion at the thought of inflicting so many civilian casualties now. His point is that the moral zeitgeist changes with time, which is something it would not do if religion's claim of unchanging morality were truly at the…
oracknows | November 5, 2006The title of this one made me laugh out loud: Fossilized Feces of Jesus Wreaks Havoc, and the article itself doesn't disappoint:
The recent discovery of a fossilized lump of human feces believed to have once emerged from the body of Jesus Christ, Son of God, has swept a whirlpool of excitement and controversy throughout the altars of the religious world. The sacred stool was unearthed last month by a construction worker during a hotel excavation project in the vicinity of Nahariya, northern Israel, and shortly thereafter flown to the Holy See where a multi-denominational consortium of…
oracknows | November 5, 2006Pediatric Grand Rounds, vol. 1, no. 5 has been posted at Tales from the Womb. Some good reading for your Sunday afternoon.
oracknows | November 5, 2006October was a very good month for Respectful Insolence, a very good month indeed. In fact, traffic for this blog reached an all-time high, edging out the previous best month (May 2006) by about 1,000 visits on Sitemeter. It just goes to show that, although traffic has more or less leveled off and is fluctuating around a mean, there's still room for bringing that Respectful Insolence to more of the blogosphere.
It's not as though I'm ever likely to catch PZ or Ed in traffic. (I'd need my traffic to go up nearly an order of magnitude ever to catch PZ; even I'm not deluded enough to see that…
oracknows | November 5, 2006I've been talking up My Chemical Romance's Welcome to the Black Parade as an album that takes punk, glam, Goth, and sprinkles in a touch of Queen here and there like seasoning to produce an irresistable, sometimes over-the-top, album full of theatricality, bombast, and anthemic choruses that make you want to sing along. Check out an example:
oracknows | November 4, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger and author of The Republican War on Science Chris Mooney was interviewed for one of my favorite podcasts, Point of Inquiry, the official podcast for The Center for Inquiry, this week. It's well worth checking out. I don't agree with everything in Mooney's book (which I finally finished reading about a month ago), but there's enough there that is hard to refute to make it nonetheless a rather disturbing piece of work
In fact, while I'm on the topic, I will also mention that Point of Inquiry is a consistently excellent podcast. I highly recommend adding it to your podcast…
oracknows | November 4, 2006A while back, I commented on the infamous Iranian "Holocaust Cartoon Contest," which Iran sponsored in response to the Danish cartoon imbroglio in which cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed triggered violent protests among Muslims last winter. Their stated goal, was to try to draw some sort of equivalency between their offense at having Mohammed mocked and what they expected would be the West's offense at having the Holocaust or attitudes towards the Holocaust mocked. The result, as I mentioned, was underwhelming; with a few exceptions, the contest didn't cause much reaction. Even Rabbis…
oracknows | November 3, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger Shelley Batts is a finalist for a student blogging scholarship. Not only is she a fine blogger, but she shares with me a connection with the University of Michigan, where she is now working on her Ph.D. and where I got both my undergraduate and graduate degrees.
So, with that combination of good blogging, fellow ScienceBlogger, and fellow Michigan student (albeit separated in time by about 16 years), I can't help but urge you all to vote for Shelley for the blogging scholarship. There's only one day to go, as voting ends at midnight on November 5. What other of the…