oracknows | August 30, 2008Jack Chick is old. After many years of turning out the most hilariously over-the-top Christian fundamentalist cartoons, you may think he's lost his edge, but if anything he seems to be getting even loonier. For example, check out his latest tract First Bite:
Click panel for the tract in all its crazy glory!
Yes, it actually has vampires in it! But, wait. Didn't Chick in the past do multiple tracts about how Halloween was the tool of Satan? On the other hand, this hilariously unhinged tract from 1991 features Satan as a serial killer, complete with chainsaw. On second thought, Satan as a…
oracknows | August 30, 2008Having grown up in an American league town east of the Mississippi, as a baseball fan it is my sacred duty to hate the Yankees. This is even more so given how badly my hometown team (the Detroit Tigers) and my second favorite team (the Cleveland Indians) are doing this year. Thanks to the Yankee organization itself and the NYPD, I now have yet another reason to hate the Yankees (as if I needed one), thanks to Stupid Evil Bastard. The Yankees actually ejected a man from Yankee Stadium for wanting to go to the bathroom during the seventh innning stretch (which, I always thought, was the purpose…
oracknows | August 29, 2008I hesitated about whether to post this, knowing how many antivaccine activists read this blog, which is why I didn't post it yesterday. Still, I think this might be of sufficient interest to my readers that I thought I'd announce it, just with relatively short notice.
It turns out that today's Science Friday with Ira Flatow features a discussion of childhood vaccines, complete with an appearance by a man whom antivaccinationists consider the Dark Lord of Vaccination himself, Dr. Paul Offit. It's on at 2 PM, and I'm told that Dr. Offit will be in the 2:20 to 2:40 PM segment, but I generally…
oracknows | August 29, 2008The single most necessary task for a physician practicing science- and evidence-based medicine is the evaluation of the biomedical literature to extract from it just what science and the evidence support as the best medical therapy for a given situation. It is rare for the literature to be so clear on a topic that different physicians won't come to at least somewhat different conclusions. Far more common is the situation where the studies are conflicting, although usually with a preponderance of studies tending to support one or two interventions more than others, or where there are few or…
oracknows | August 28, 2008A reader of this blog was outed by a moron posting as "Mark" on the Age of Autism blog. I will not link to the outing, nor will I link to Age of Autism. I have, however, kept a nice screen shot of the page, just in case someone over there has an attack of conscience, and I will also comment on the observation that "outing" its enemies is a favorite technique of cranks in general. However, it seems to be a particular favorite of antivaccine cranks. So is hypocrisy, it would appear. After all, "Mark" did not post under his full name but only under his first name, while he thinks nothing of…
oracknows | August 28, 2008I lamented how much I needed it, given the persistence of a couple of particularly annoying and obtuse antivaccinationist trolls over the last couple of weeks. Finally, it's here! We're talking the 94th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle over at Reduce to Common Sense. It's just what I (and hopefully you) need: A dose of science, rationalism, and skepticism to combat the rampant credulity of the blogosphere. It's even based on an OIympic theme, complete with gold medals!
Next up two weeks hence, on September 11, is Skeptimedia. Uh-oh, I don't like the date it coincides with, but on the other…
oracknows | August 28, 2008Believe it or not, there was one area of so-called "alternative" medicine that I used to be a lot less skeptical about than I am now. Homeopathy, I always realized to be a load of pseudoscientific magical thinking. Ditto reiki, therapeutic touch, and other forms of "energy healing." It didn't take an extensive review of the literature to figure that out, although I did ultimately end up doing fairly extensive literature reviews anyway. Then, the more I looked into the hodge-podge of "healing" modalities whose basis is not science but rather prescientific and often mystical thought, the less…
oracknows | August 27, 2008...and contribute to the next edition of SurgeXperience, the blog carnival that's all about surgery. The next host, Dr. Cris Cuthbertson is interested in surgical research and, in addition to good posts about surgery, is looking especially for good posts about surgical research. Instructions for submitting can be found here. Please help her out if you can.
oracknows | August 27, 2008I've been sarcastically "thanking" Jenny McCarthy for bringing the U.S. the gift of measles through her tireless efforts on behalf of Generation Rescue and other antivaccine groups and will continue to do so whenever I deem it appropriate. But Jenny isn't the only one who deserves our "thanks" (no, I'm not going to thank Andrew Wakefield again). Let's not forget all those religions who, either because they think vaccines are messing with God's will or because of some interpretation of a holy book written in prescientific times, religions like this one in Canada:
With the number of confirmed…
oracknows | August 27, 2008In its quest to rule the science blogosphere, the Borg--I mean ScienceBlogs--Collective has assimilated yet another blog, it would appear. It's a good one too, and adding its uniqueness to us will only strengthen us.
So please welcome blogger (not to mention frequent commenter on this very blog) Blake Stacy and Science After Sunclipse to the Collective. Go on over and say hi. Tell him Orac sent you.
oracknows | August 27, 2008Last night was a late night at work, and I didn't have time to apply my usual annoyingly long-winded analysis to a study that I found interesting and had intended to look at today. It'll keep. In the meantime, there are always the brief "link-and-comment" (or in my case "link-and-snark") posts. Also, there was an article a couple of days ago that I have been meaning to bring up since I saw it but somehow allowed myself to get distracted. With the impending resurgence of measles and other previously controlled or even vanquished infectious diseases, courtesy of Jenny McCarthy, Generation…
oracknows | August 26, 2008If there is one thing I hate with a burning, red-hot passion in a website/blog/whatever, it's content that autoplays when I access a site. To have a John Philips Souza march start blaring unexpectedly or some video start suddenly and noisily is a jarring experience, and I consider such content to be an abomination, a blight on the web that must be eliminated. I particularly hate such content when it's an advertisement.
That is why I must reluctantly but nonetheless angrily note that our usually benevolent Seed Overlords have seen fit to place just such an abomination on ScienceBlogs,…
oracknows | August 26, 2008Yesterday, I was annoyed by a particularly vile article by quackery promoter supreme Mike Adams claiming that Christina Applegate didn't need a bilateral mastectomy and could have "cured" herself of cancer with "natural" methods. Indeed, my contempt for Mike Adams knows no bounds, given that he is the purveyor of a seemingly never-ending stream of antiscience and quackery, much of it directed at cancer patients, who if they follow Adams' "advice" could very well miss their best chance at treating their cancer and thereby wind up dead. Indeed, so great is the amount of quackery emanating from…
Suzanne Somers versus Christina Applegate in a bilateral prophylactic mastectomy fantasy cage match!
oracknows | August 25, 2008Earlier today, I did a rather extensive post about a particularly ghoulish attempt to exploit the story of a woman with cancer, in this case Christina Applegate. It turns out that Mike Adams isn't the only woo-meister looking to capitalize on Ms. Applegate's misfortune, You just knew it had to happen, but Thighmaster, Bioidentical Stem Cell Huckster Suzanne Somers has gotten in on the act. Apparently she's penned an open letter to Applegate that was published in People:
Dear Christina,
Cancer is scary, and lonely. You can't ask anyone to make decisions for you because it's just too heavy.…
oracknows | August 25, 2008This is getting to be nauseatingly frequent.
As my blog bud Mark Hoofnagle pointed out, the hard-core "alternative medicine" mavens, in particular that despicable promoter of quackery and distrust of scientific medicine who runs one of the two or three largest repositories of antiscience and quackery in existence, Mike Adams, seem to have decided that a lovely new tactic would be to descend upon every celebrity death or battle with serious disease, ghoul-like, and blame their deaths or suffering on conventional medicine rather than disease. Both PalMD and I noted this particularly vile tactic…
oracknows | August 24, 2008You may recall that on Friday afternoon, I posted a bit of a rant about how a certain liberal blogger named Matt Stoller had disparagingly and contemptuously referred to Presidential Candidate John McCain as a "crazy, cancer-ridden dishonest madman." It turns out that Mr. Stoller was displeased by my much-justified rebuke. His response is an example of the most studiously, intentionally obtuse avoidance of answering what my real criticism was, including an elaborately constructed straw man, some quote mining, and one really dumb additional statement that reveals Mr. Stoller to be far more…
oracknows | August 24, 2008Those who are Battlestar Galactica fans, as I am, know that the disparaging slang humans in the Colonial fleet use for their dreaded enemies the Cylons is to call them "toasters."
The question then naturally follows: Sure, Cylons are toasters, but can they actually make toast?
It turns out that they can.
oracknows | August 24, 2008This has been an annoying week on the old blog. In fact, I can't remember the last time we had an infestation of antivaccinationists this persistent and prolonged in a while. Heck, even one of the "big kahunas" of that blogospheric repository of all things antivaccine, Age of Autism (Dan Olmsted) showed up in the comments to spew non sequiturs about the Hewitson "vaccinated versus unvaccinated" monkey study (I'm devastated he apparently read my discussion of that very study) and misleading claims about measles. I guess that's what mentioning Dr. Offit with anything other than a sneer does; it…
oracknows | August 23, 2008While, thanks to the recent CDC report documenting the resurgence of measles in the U.S., thanks to worrisome pockets of decreasing vaccine uptake that could portend a much wider resurgence if the antivaccine brigade, now led by Jenny McCarthy, has its way, I'm back on the topic of vaccines after having amazingly managed to stay away for an uncharacteristically long time, I thought that one last post for a while (I hope) is in order.
Yes, in September, there is reason for some optimism in the P.R. war, which the antivaccination forces have clearly winning in recent months. That's because a…
oracknows | August 22, 2008I was disappointed to find an approving link from a fellow ScienceBlogger to this sort of rant by Matt Stoller:
We all know that winning this election is not enough. It's just not. It's not even close. This is the most unpopular President we've ever had and our opponent is a crazy cancer-ridden dishonest madman. Our nominee should crush this guy.
"Crazy cancer-ridden dishonest madman"? Nice. I wonder if Matt spit out the term "cancer-ridden" with the same amount of contempt and venom while typing as he did when he spit out the terms "crazy," "dishonest," and "madman." I wonder if he…