oracknows | March 2, 2010I hadn't really planned on writing anymore about animal rights extremists. The topic seemed as though it had played out over the few days. But those who've followed this blog know that I'm nothing if not tenacious when I grab onto a topic, and sometimes certain topics demand several posts. More importantly, over the last few days, I've had a minor infestation of animal rights extremists into my blog. Heck, Camille Marino even made an appearance. However, one animal rights apologist has been particularly persistent, someone named Douglas Watts, who's been a particularly persistent pest,…
oracknows | March 1, 2010I've had it with Dr. Oz.
Although I haven't seen his show today (for one thing, I work for a living; for another thing, even if I had today off I wouldn't waste it watching Dr. Oz's show), readers have informed me that yesterday, on March 1, 2010, Dr. Oz threw away whatever shred of respectability that he had left. On March 1, 2010, Dr. Oz had Deepak Chopra on his show.
But that wasn't enough.
After all, Chopra is a never-ending font of woo in categories too numerous to recount here, a small subset of which includes evolution, neuroscience, and medicine, but most of his woo is is fairly "…
oracknows | March 1, 2010In my recent rehashing, rebranding, and repurposing an article addressing many of the flaws in the so-called scientific arguments against animal research often made by animal rights activists and extremists, I only briefly discussed one common argument among many, namely that computer simulations can replace the use of animals in medical research by modeling human physiology. I pointed out that, for a simulation to be valid, we have to understand quite a bit about the system beforehand and that simulations aren't much good if they can't be tested against reality. Mark Chu-Carroll decided to…
oracknows | March 1, 2010I spent a lot of time writing about animal rights extremists who have threatened to harass the children of an investigator whom they view as a "vivisector" and how they fetishize the very violence they decry. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see that a fellow ScienceBlogger, namely Eric Michael Johnson of The Primate Diaries, appears to share some of the scientific misconceptions that the animal rights extremists when he prefaces an Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front with:
Vivisection, or what in polite society is merely called animal experimentation, is a barbaric practice that…
oracknows | February 26, 2010I realize that there are two huge target-rich articles out there that my readers have been clamoring for me to comment on. First, there's a particularly silly and simplistic article by Nicholas Kristof about how it's supposedly the "toxins" causing autism (an article in which he apparently doesn't realize that Current Opinions in Pediatrics is not really a peer-reviewed journal but rather publishes review articles by invitation), and then there's a fawning TIME Magazine article bout Jenny McCarthy. When two such--shall we say?--target-rich articles appear on the same day, I'd be falling all…
oracknows | February 25, 2010As much as I hate to bring more attention than I did a couple of days ago to the truly evil animal rights extremist website run by a truly despicable animal rights terrorist wannabe Camille Marino, a website whose very title, Negotiation Is Over (NIO) tells you everything you need to know about the attitude of the loons running the site, especially given their targeting of researchers' children for harassment, I can't help but notice that the efforts of fellow science bloggers and myself have been noticed, both at NIO and another animal rights site Thomas Paine Corner.
Good.
The reaction of…
oracknows | February 25, 2010Pity the poor Haitians.
Not only is their nation dirt poor, but to kick off 2010, they suffered an earthquake that killed approximately a quarter of a million people, left at least 300,000 injured, and resulted in 1,000,000 homeless. Huge swaths of its capital of Port au Prince and Léogâne, among other cities, had been leveled. The devastation was (and remains) almost beyond comprehension, and it will be years, if not decades, before Haiti can recover. Disease and hunger are rampant. In the immediate aftermath, looting and violence were common.
Unfortunately, disaster seems to attract…
oracknows | February 24, 2010I have to admit, this one made me chuckle.
In an earlier post today, in which I expressed my outrage at animal rights terrorists targeting an investigator's children for harassment at their school, I asked the following question:
That reminds me: Where were these animal rights loons when "Andrew Wakefield was torturing baby Macacque monkeys in the name of horrendously bad science designed to be used as a "made for court" study against vaccine manufacturers?
Paul Browne responded in the comments:
Perhaps crank magnetism also acts as a force field that protects cranks from other cranks.
I…
oracknows | February 24, 2010Remember Dario Ringach?
He's the scientist who has endured a prolonged campaign of harassment because of his animal research. I first heard of him in 2006, when, after a campaign of threatening phone calls, people frightening his children, and demonstrations in front of his home, gave up doing primate research. Terrorism and intimidation worked, but who could blame Dr. Ringach? He was afraid for his family. That's because it was more than just threatening e-mails and phone calls, but rather the campaign of intimidation included masked thugs banging on the windows of his house at night,…
oracknows | February 23, 2010How does homeopathy work? Heh.
Yes, this is in honor of my post earlier today.
I'm also appreciative that homeopaths have apparently diagnosed what's wrong with Parliament. Apparently it's emitting an angry purple aura.
oracknows | February 22, 2010Sometimes politicians actually get it right.
I know, I know, it makes me choke on my words to admit it, but sometimes politicians can actually get science right. I'm referring to something that happened in the U.K., yesterday, when the Science and Technology Select Committee delivered its verdict on homeopathy. Indeed, the Committee has gone so far as to call for the complete withdrawal of NHS funding and official licensing for homeopathy. The report is called Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, and I'll cut to the chase. This is what the report concluded:
By providing homeopathy on the NHS and…
oracknows | February 22, 2010I'm beginning to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn when it comes to the public zeitgeist regarding the anti-vaccine movement. Not only have there been a lot of stories lately that eschew the false "balance" that used to be so common in news stories about vaccines, but even comedy magazines are dumping on the anti-vaccine movement. For instance, Cracked.com has an article entitled 5 Things The Media Loves Pretending Are News. What's #5?
Let's ask the idiots about science:
When it comes to matters of opinion or personal beliefs, it is absolutely the duty of the news…
oracknows | February 21, 2010I must admit that I never saw it coming. At least, I never saw it coming this fast and this dramatically. After all, this is a saga that has been going on for twelve solid years now, and it's an investigation that has been going on at least since 2004. I'm referring, of course, to that (possibly former) hero of the anti-vaccine movement, the man who is arguably the most responsible for suffering and death due to the resurgence of measles in the U.K. because of his role in frightening parents about the MMR vaccine.
I'm referring to the fall of Andrew Wakefield
Wakefield has shown an incredible…
oracknows | February 20, 2010The news is finally filtering out to the rest of the world. As I pointed out a few days ago Dr. Steven Laureys admitted that Rom Houben, the unfortunate victim of a car crash that left him in what had been diagnosed as a persistent vegetative state, was in fact not able to communicate through the woo known as facilitated communication. This came as no surprise to anyone who has followed FC over the years. In fact, what had come as a surprise is that Dr. Laureys could have been so easily taken in by pseudoscience that had been so thoroughly debunked in the 1990s. To his credit, though, after a…
oracknows | February 19, 2010On Wednesday, Steve Novella did a nice analysis of the recent study showing that signs of autism can be detected as early as six months of age. However, it was flawed by one clear misstatement, which was brought to his attention in the comments and which he then promptly corrected. Not that that stopped our old "friend" J.B. Handley, chief anti-vaccine propagandist for Generation Rescue from leaping into the fray with a goalpost-shifting, disingenuous, and insulting misrepresentation of the overall point of Steve's post. Par for the course for Mr. Handley.
Today, Steve has responded with a…
oracknows | February 18, 2010What is it with cranks and trying to shut down criticism?
I know, I know. I've written about this before, but this week has been a banner week for a phenomenon that I consider a sine qua non of a crank or a quack, namely an intolerance of criticism. Seemingly, whenever a quack or a crank encounters serious criticism, the first reaction is almost never to try to argue based on facts, reason, and science, but rather to try to silence the person doing the criticizing. The tactics are many and varied, but the end goal is always the same: Suppress the criticism by any means necessary. The very…
oracknows | February 18, 2010Last night, it came to light from a posting on the Thoughtful House Yahoo! discussion group that Andrew Wakefield has apparently resigned from Thoughtful House. I have yet to see confirmation anywhere, although Brian Deer has chimed in that this comes as no surprise to him and that he suspects that Dr. Arthur Krigsman, Anyssa Ryland, and Jane Johnson are behind Wakefield's ouster. However, more interesting is this comment from Liz Ditz. In it, she points out a couple of interesting bits of background.
Tidbit #1 from 2008:
In 2007 alone, Thoughtful House saw 1,500 new patient requests -- or…
oracknows | February 17, 2010I'm hearing this from multiple sources, who are forwarding me this message from the Yahoo! Thoughtful House Group:
Dr. Wakefield has resigned from Thoughtful House
The needs of the children we serve must always come first. All of us at Thoughtful House are grateful to Dr. Wakefield for the valuable work he has done here. We fully support his decision to leave Thoughtful House in order to make sure that the controversy surrounding the recent findings of the General Medical Council does not interfere with the important work that our dedicated team of clinicians and researchers is doing on…
oracknows | February 17, 2010I happened to be listening to the Holocaust Denial On Trial podcast yesterday, specifically this episode which is a recording of a speech given by Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt about Holocaust denial and her experiences being sued for libel in Britain by arch Holocaust denier David Irving, who, much like the British Chiropractic Association taking advantage of the U.K.'s highly plaintiff-friendly libel laws to sue Simon Singh for libel now, took advantage of those same libel laws back in the late 1990s to sue Deborah Lipstadt. In the speech, she takes a position that I have argued on…