oracknows | October 19, 2009Every so often, as the health care reform initiative spearheaded by the Obama Administration wends its way through Congress (or, more precisely, wend their ways through Congress, given that there are multiple bills coming from multiple committees in both Houses), I've warned about various chicanery from woo-friendly legislators trying to legitimize by legislation where they've failed by science various "alternative" medicine practices. This began much earlier this year, when I pointed out how Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) invited the Four Horsemen of the Woo-pocalypse to the Senate to testify.…
oracknows | October 17, 2009Here we go again. The 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, anti-vaccine wingnut and lover of cancer quackery Bill Maher, decided to use the occasion of the season finale of Real Time with Bill Maher to answer some of the criticisms that have been leveled against him. All I can say is this: I'm incredibly grateful that this is the season finale of Maher's show. I don't think I can take much more of his moronic anti-science stances being proudly trumpeted.
It was painful to watch and showed very much that Bill Maher still doesn't get it. In fact, if anything, he escalated his quack…
oracknows | October 17, 2009I knew it! I knew there had to be an explanation that young earth creationists could come up with for all that evidence in support of evolution:
(WARNING: Borderline NSFW, depending on your job. Definitely offensive to fundamentalists.)
It's so obvious. Why didn't I think of it before?
From one skeptic to the 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award: Stop being an anti-vaccine loon
oracknows | October 16, 2009Well, here's something refreshing. In fact, it's so refreshing that I just had to link to it. Michael Shermer, renowned skeptic and the publisher of Skeptic, has decided to school the Atheist Alliance International 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, anti-vaccine kook Bill Maher, over the nonsense about alternative medicine, vaccines, and conspiracy theories about big pharma that Maher regularly likes to lay down.
Even better, he did it on what is normally a repository of anti-vaccine pseudoscience, The Huffington Post, in the form of An Open Letter to Bill Maher on Vaccinations.…
oracknows | October 16, 2009I'm back.
If there's one thing I've noticed in the nearly five years that I've been doing this blog thing, it's that getting started again after taking even a few days off is hard. There's a bit of paralysis that sets in. I get used to not having to think about what I want to write, and often there are a number of things that I almost certainly would have written about. Fortunately, for at least one of them, PalMD took care of it it for me. Otherwise, the blogger whose post he deconstructed would have tasted a bit of the ol' not-so-Respectful Insolence for in essence laying down a load of po-…
oracknows | October 15, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I was until last evening. Unfortunately, I got back too late and was too tired to lay down some fresh Insolence, Respectful or otherwise. Fear not, though. I'll get to it. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
By the way, even though this post is three years old, the problem described in it has only gotten worse in the…
oracknows | October 14, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, over the last few days I was in Chicago attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting. At least, that's where I was until last evening. Unfortunately, I got back home too late and was thus too tired to lay down some fresh Insolence, Respectful or otherwise, for your edification today. Fear not, though. I'll get to it. In the meantime, here's another blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
Well, this is encouraging to see: A…
oracknows | October 14, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon, and may not be able to post anything new before Thursday afternoon or Friday. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
It seems like only yesterday that I was…
oracknows | October 13, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
Alright, I'll come right out and admit it up front. There was no part one to this piece. Well, there was, but it wasn't on…
oracknows | October 13, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
I tried not to write about the altie obsession with "detoxification" again. Really, I did. It gets repetitive, and I don't…
oracknows | October 12, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you. Unfortunately, I see nothing that has changed since I originally wrote this. If anything, I underestimated the problem.…
oracknows | October 12, 2009No mà s! No mà s! I surrender!
I give up!
I tried. I really, really did try. I tried really, really hard not to look at the flaming idiocy of Bill Maher again, much less comment on it again. Here I am, in Chicago at the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, taking in all sorts of surgical goodness, trying to take a break from blogging. It's not so much to ask, is it? I didn't think so, anyway.
Then, exactly a week after he accepted the Richard Dawkins Award, Bill Maher couldn't help it but let his freak flag fly! In fact, he started out an interview with Bill Frist by asking:
"…
oracknows | October 11, 2009I may have been a bit hard on Richard Dawkins lately, but, if he believed in saints, Dawkins would deserve sainthood for keeping his cool in the face of so much concentrated idiocy coming from Bill O'Reilly:
A couple of lovely O'Reilly quotes:
"I'm throwing in with Jesus because you guys can't tell us how it all got here?"
"When you guys figure it out, then come back to me."
Then, of course, O'Reilly couldn't resist pulling out the "fascism" gambit.
Geez, I don't think I could have restrained myself as well as Richard Dawkins did with Bill O'Reilly. In the face of such blustery nonsense,…
oracknows | October 11, 2009You know, whenever I'm at a meeting or on vacation, I still sometimes feel the tug of the blog. Yet, I tell myself, I need a break. Usually, I handle the problem by setting up several old posts from at least a couple of years a go to repeat, you know, to see how well or badly they've aged. Sometimes, however, material is given to me. For example, this e-mail from someone named John who happens to have a .au (Australia) e-mail address:
WHY ARE YOU SO AFRAID...
To put your real name to this Blog---
its probably because you are not a Real person and don't actually exist--
I have seen Direct…
oracknows | October 10, 2009...Mark Crislip versus Doug Bremner.
Dr. Crislip calmly explains the evidence regarding flu vaccination and why it's safe and effective. Perhaps the most important point there is this:
So it's a suboptimal vaccine. And that's a problem. One, because it will make it more difficult to prove efficacy in clinical studies and two, there is a sub group of anti vaccine goofs who seem to require that vaccines either be perfect, with 100% efficacy and 100% safe, or they are not worth taking.
The influenza vaccine is not 100% efficacious in preventing disease, but it is as close to 100% safe, and much…
oracknows | October 9, 2009Now here's some tasty blogging for you to peruse and read while I'm on my way to Chicago. Hot off the presses, it's the 121st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle over at The Mad Skeptic.
Go. Read. Learn. Enjoy.
Orac will be back soon enough to annoy woo-meisters everywhere, and the occasional skeptic or two.
Then come back in two weeks, when The Young Australian Skeptics will be hosting. Nothing like a little skepticism from Down Under to enjoy!
oracknows | October 9, 2009Surgeons, especially general surgeons, know that the middle of October is an important time of year. One thing that hospitals notice is that the surgery schedule in the O.R. often slows down considerably for several days. If you're the junior surgeon or otherwise the low man on the totem pole, you suddenly find that it's easy to get O.R. time, that you can book cases at times you normally couldn't before, and that you might even get the better rooms. The reason? Simple. The middle of October is the time when the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress takes place, and that's where I'm…
oracknows | October 8, 2009Orac's anti-stupidity circuits just took a serious beating. It's kind of like Star Trek, when the Enterprise is being battered by multiple Klingon warships. After multiple phaser and photon torpedo hits, its shields are down to 10% and in danger of failing.
Orac is feeling sort of like that right now, except that it was a single massive photon torpedo of stupid that hit his logic circuits, courtesy of someone named Jeffrey, who commented:
Orac forgot to mention, in his attempt to character assassinate Dawn, to compensate for body weight compensation for, lets say a 6 lb baby.
A baby gets the…
oracknows | October 8, 2009Quackademic medicine has struck again. Worse, it's struck at one of my old stomping grounds. OK, not exactly, but rather close to a past home.
Let me back up a minute.
I know someone who attended nursing school at UMDNJ. It's actually a very good nursing school, but, alas, it has a serious woo streak in it. Yesterday, because of that connection, I was shown a pamphlet that had arrived in the mail. It was a the Continuing Education Catalog for the UMDNJ School of Nursing. At first glance, it looked pretty unremarkable. There were the usual courses in subjects like trauma nursing, clinical…
oracknows | October 7, 2009
Watch CBS News Videos Online
A number of you sent me this link. It's to a video (above) of Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News' resident anti-vaccine propagandist, putting on a nauseating display of sucking up to Andrew Wakefield over his recent monkey study, the one that I deconstructed yesterday to show it for the lousy science that it is. Attkisson is a true believer. She's done this sort of thing before, occasionally to unintentionally hilarious effect; she's especially enamored of writing hit pieces on Paul Offit. Even worse, Attkisson is in bed with Generation Rescue and Age of Autism,…