oracknows | July 27, 2009Last week, I expressed my surprise and dismay that the Atheist Alliance International chose Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award. I was dismayed because Maher has championed pseudoscience, including dangerous antivaccine nonsense, germ theory denialism complete with repeating myths about Louis Pasteur supposedly recanting on his deathbed, a href="http://oracknows.blogspot.com/2005/12/bill-maher-anti-vax-wingnut.html">hostility towards "Western medicine" and an affinity for "alternative medicine," a history of sympathy to HIV/AIDS denialists, and the activities of PETA through his…
oracknows | July 26, 2009As hard as it is to believe, it's been a week and a half since the last time the skeptics of the Skeptics' Circle met. The next meeting will soon be upon it, but it can't happen unless you make it happen. This time it will be hosted at Beyond the Short Coat, and instructions for submission are here. Guidelines for what the Circle is looking for can be found here.
oracknows | July 26, 2009While I'm holed up in my Sanctum Sanctorum grinding out prose that I hope will keep my lab funded for another three years, I'm going to fall back on a lazy blogging trick to keep the posts flowing for one more day, namely the obnoxious reader e-mail. (Don't worry, there'll be new insolence tomorrow.) This time, I'm feeling the love from a reader named Shawn, who, unlike yesterday's correspondent, was not polite. It's not as wingnutty as some of what P.Z gets (come on, guys, you can do better!), but it's entertaining nonetheless:
You and Stephen Barrett should be butt buddies. Mr quackwatch…
oracknows | July 25, 2009Last night, I received an e-mail from a fairly well-known atheist (no, it wasn't Richard Dawkins, although that would have been totally cool) criticizing me for my post about Bill Maher's complete unsuitability for the Richard Dawkins Award. I'm not going to reprint my response to that part, because, well, his criticisms were pretty much a boilerplate of other blowback I've received from the post. What caught my attention more was that he noticed a couple of posts of mine about Jenny McCarthy.
I'll paraphrase, because I don't have this person's permission to post his e-mail. Not that that…
oracknows | July 24, 2009It's been a pretty good week on the ol' blog here, with lots of good material to draw from, finishing up yesterday with my expression of disdain for the choice of Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award. I expected some blowback for my criticism, and I got some. However, I was surprised at how mild it was, at least from the one person I expected to defend the decision, P.Z. Myers. Quite frankly, his defense of the decision to select Bill Maher struck me as enormously half-hearted, in essence saying, "Sure he's a wingnut, but he's our wingnut, and, oh, by the way, all that quackery he…
oracknows | July 23, 2009The only thing he's left out is a takedown of Nazi analogies. After all, Nazis wanted universal health care, too, except that they wanted to guarantee the health of the volk more than any individual:
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oracknows | July 23, 2009Although I often don't agree with him and have cooled on him lately, I still rather like--even admire--Richard Dawkins. While it's true I've taken him to task for having a tin ear for bioethics, lamented his walking blindly right into charges of anti-Semitism (no, I don't think he's an anti-Semite), and half-defended/half-criticized him for seeming to endorsing eugenics. What's really irritated me about him in the past, though, is his use of the "Neville Chamber atheist" gambit that I so detest, so much so that I once featured Dawkins in a Hitler Zombie episode (albeit not as the victim). On…
oracknows | July 22, 2009This may be the burningest stupid I've ever seen about vaccines. Maybe. It's so hard to tell given how much idiocy I've seen about vaccines.
I know, it's really, really hard to believe me when I say that what follows deserves to leap right up to the top ranks of brain-melting moronicity. After all, over the last four years, I've delved into the deepest, darkest chasms of pure anti-vaccine stupid. I've subjected myself to the incredible idiocy that is Jenny McCarthy and Kent Heckenlively. I've delved into the most vile cesspits of anti-vaccine propaganda, cesspits so full of misinformation and…
oracknows | July 21, 2009Ever since Jenny McCarthy hitched her fading star to the anti-vaccine movement and managed to get Oprah Winfrey to go along for the ride, she has become the public face of the anti-vaccine movement. Unfortunately, there hasn't been nearly as much blowback as there should be in the mainstream press, although bloggers have been all over McCarthy's promotion of the worst lies of the anti-vaccine movement and advocacy of autism quackery. Then I came across this the other day:
I'm of two minds on this. While it's a good thing to see cartoonists ridiculing Jenny McCarthy and Oprah for their…
oracknows | July 21, 2009If there's one characteristic of the anti-vaccine movement that helps define them as true cranks, it's a streak of conspiracy theory mania. It's not too much of an exaggeration when I wonder if they think that the Lizard Men have taken over the government, the CDC, and the American Academy of Pediatrics in order to use vaccines in a New World Order plot to make all of our children autistic. Or something. I'm never quite sure. Knowing this particular aspect of the anti-vaccine movement, the only thing that surprises me is that they haven't joined the forces arrayed against President Obama's…
oracknows | July 20, 2009I've had a lot of fun over the last couple of years deconstructing the black holes of woo that a certain advocate of "natural" remedies likes to lay down on a regular basis. Yes, I'm referring to a guy named Mike Adams, who runs a website called NaturalNews.com. Indeed, Adams has made NaturalNews.com a bastion of quackery and outright wingnuttery.
Apparently that isn't enough.
I don't know how long it's been around, but apparently Mike Adams is branching out. Now he's decided that he wants to do a wiki about "natural" living. He's calling it, appropriately enough, Naturalpedia:
Welcome to…
oracknows | July 20, 2009...as the last Virgin Mary sighting in a bird turd smear on a pickup truck.
At least this time around, we're back to more conventional "Virgin Mary in a tree"-type sightings:
(Click on image for video.)
Of course, this time around, I have to wonder if the guy who cut the tree down is having a little fun with the faithful.
oracknows | July 20, 2009Screening for disease, especially cancer, is a real bitch.
I was reminded of this by the publication of a study in BMJ the very day of the Science-Based Medicine Conference a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, between The Amaz!ng Meeting and other activities, I was too busy to give this study the attention it deserved last Monday. Given the media coverage of the study, which in essence tried to paint mammography screening for breast cancer as being either useless or doing more harm than good, I thought it was imperative for me still to write about it. Better late than never, and I was…
oracknows | July 19, 2009While we're on the subject of pareidolia, it turns out that Mitchell and Webb have taken this topic on as well...
Awesome.
oracknows | July 18, 2009Everyone knows that I'm a bit of a connoisseur of pareidolia. Pareidolia, for those not familiar with the term, is a phenomenon where humans see patterns in various things, you know, like seeing Elvis in a flame or the Virgin Mary on a stain under a freeway overpass in Chicago or in a window blotch in Perth Amboy, or seeing Jesus on a shell, on the wall of a shower, on a sand dune, a potato chip, or (my personal favorite) a pierogi. Heck, there have even been Jesus sightings on a cat, a stain on a ceiling tile, and even on a rather odd location on a dog.
However, I really, really have to…
oracknows | July 17, 2009It may be a day late, but it was worth it. The latest installment of the Skeptics' Circle, that long-running blog carnival of skepticism and critical thinking (hey, four and a half years is a really long time in the blogosphere).
This time around, let TechSkeptic take you on A Skeptical Journey Through the Universe, complete with pretty pictures!
Next up will be Beyond the Short Coat, a skeptical medical student who wants to take a shot at this blog carnival on Thursday, July 30. Be sure to send your best skeptical blog posts!
Finally, I notice that the waiting list for hosts is getting a bit…
oracknows | July 17, 2009I realize that this week in practically every new post I've been mentioning TAM7. It hasn't exactly been intentional, believe it or not, at least aside from my recap a on Tuesday and my request for photos from those of you who attended. Oddly enough, although I mentioned how proud I was to be part of the Anti-Anti-Vax Panel discussion, where I joined Joe Albietz, Steve Novella, Mike Goudeau (skeptic, juggler, entertainer, producer, and writer who has an autistic child), Harriet Hall, and Derek Bartholomaus, I didn't really discuss some of the thoughts that the panel's discussion inspired in…
oracknows | July 16, 2009If there was one thing about going to TAM7 last week, it was the opportunity to contemplate among a thousand fellow skeptics just what critical thinking and reason mean. If there's one thing about woo, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories in all their forms, it's not just a lack of critical thinking and a plethora of logical fallacies. More importantly, it's the question, "How do we know what we know?" Certainly science is the primary means by which we explore the natural world and make conclusions about how it works, however imperfect they may be, but not everyone uses science, reason, and…
oracknows | July 15, 2009He's baaaack. Lovely.
I'm referring to everybody's favorite anti-Semite, Hitler apologist, and Holocaust-denying "historian," David Irving, who has reinfected our fair nation. Indeed, and unfortunately, he is busily slithering his way across the western U.S., hitting the mighty white power ranger circuit in the back of cheap hotels and greasy spoon restaurants in order to meet with his fellow Holocaust deniers and, of course, pathetically try to hawk some of his books. Worse, he promises that in the fall he will hit the eastern U.S. In the meantime, he's been to Kansas City, Oklahoma City,…
oracknows | July 15, 2009I tell ya, I'm gone for a few days, and the woo-meisters take over the store!
Seriously, I was really, really tempted to blog this over the weekend, even though I was at The Amazing Meeting and even though I had promised myself that I would not blog during the meeting. It was that tempting. Now it's a few days after I first learned about it, and I wondered it it was still worth blogging.
It is.
The story begins with, seemingly innocently enough, a press release by the Lymphoma Association:
We are delighted to announce the appointment of our new Chief Executive, Sally Penrose.
Sally joined us…