oracknows | March 3, 2008In case you had any doubt that it's about vaccines and the concept of vaccination itself, here's video of the protest held outside of the American Academy of Pediatrics a couple of weeks ago:
I'm not sure it was such a great idea to release video of this protest, given how tiny the demonstration looks and how obviously antivaccine their signs and rhetoric are. Either way, Dr. Eisenstein (whose "research" skills are legendary) makes me wonder how he earned his M.D. if he doesn't understand that the whole "toxins in vaccines" is a canard, and Dr. Ayoub is a conspiracy-monger. However, it's…
oracknows | March 3, 2008I'm not sure why, but it's been a while since I've delved into the cesspit of pseudoscience that is the Discovery Institute's propaganda organ, Evolution News & Views. Perhaps it was because I simply got tired of diving into the depths of stupid. Of course, that then begs the question of why I've been spending so much time diving into the Age of Autism website or the sophisticated-sounding yet ultimately vacuously pseudoscientific blather that is David Kirby. Trying to decide which is stupider, AoA or ENV, is rather like deciding whether it would be better to die of cancer or Lou Gehrig's…
oracknows | March 2, 2008As I mentioned in January, everybody's favorite blog mascot has seemingly undertaken a new career in show biz. In fact, he's become a big movie star, even popping up in some fairly avant garde movies.
This month, however, he's popping up in a most unexpected place: In one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time:
Even better, though, there's something that my readers would most definitely appreciate. You--yes, you!--can, if you so desire, peruse the various movies that EneMan is slated to appear in through the course of 2008 and vote for your favorite at EneMan Goes to Hollywood…
oracknows | March 1, 2008A couple of days ago, I wrote about a particularly deceptive and idiotic article by David Kirby about the settling of a case of vaccine injury by the U.S. government. Fellow skeptical physician Steve Novella couldn't resist taking a shot at Kirby as well and in doing so came up with one of the best lines about Kirby that I've ever heard in reference to Kirby's attempt to bring AZT into the discussion:
Among stiff competition, this is perhaps the most absurd and scientifically ignorant thing Kirby has every written.
Damn. I wish I had thought of that line. However, I would say to Steve that he…
oracknows | March 1, 2008I've always been a bit skeptical of most recommendations by religious figures, but for once I've come across one that I can whole-heartedly support:
Florida pastor Paul Wirth wants his parishioners to make love -- a whole lot of love.
The pastor for Relevant Church in Ybor City is challenging the couples in his congregation to get busy in bed every night for a month.
Wirth said the supposed 50 percent divorce rate is the reason behind the 30-Day Sex Challenge.
He said too many couples let the stress of jobs and daily life get in the way of intimacy.
So far, so good. But wait! There's a catch…
oracknows | February 29, 2008Well, now I'm really in a pickle as far as the 2008 Presidential election goes. I really don't like Hillary Clinton and consider Barack Obama not ready for prime time; i.e., he's too inexperienced and too liberal for my liking. On the other hand, I used to like John McCain--at least until he started pandering to the religious right and became a cheerleader for the Iraq war. Now I have another reason not to vote for John McCain, which leaves me with not a single Presidential candidate that I can see myself voting for right now.
John McCain has credulously fallen for the blandishments of…
oracknows | February 29, 2008Earlier today I was perusing incoming links. (Yes, most bloggers do that because we like to know who's linking to us; any blogger who doesn't do this from time to time is atypical or lying about it.) What to my wondering (and I do mean wondering) eyes should appear, but Respectful Insolence appearing on a most unusual list, so much so that I didn't know whether to be proud or embarrassed.
That's right, this blog is listed as one of the Top 50 Alternative Medicine Blogs on Live Smarter. Now, I'm as vain as the next blogger, possibly even more so, but even my vanity did not protect me from the…
oracknows | February 29, 2008It's very bad when I have a week off. Very, very bad.
The reason is that when I have a week off I have this rather unfortunate tendency to stay up late at night, and when I stay up late at night I have an even more unfortunate tendency to check out late night infomercials that show up between the hours of 2 AM and 4 AM. Such was the case the other night when I found myself sitting in bed bathing in the glow of the LCD screen, staring in utter awe at the woo I found until my wife's annoyed retort told me that I was yelling at the TV screen. Even so, I still wondered whether I should use it for…
oracknows | February 28, 2008This year's a Leap Year, as it so happens, and it turns out that Leap Day is tomorrow. Unfortunately for "alternative medicine" mavens, conspiracy theorists, and lovers of woo everywhere, that means that the Skeptical Conspiracy to Suppress All Dissent--I mean, the Skeptics' Circle--is meeting over at--where else?--The Conspiracy Factory, where, just as woo-meisters have always suspected, skeptical bloggers everywhere are taking their instructions from their nefarious leader, who bears an uncanny resemblance to...well, you'll have to go over to the 81st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle to find…
oracknows | February 28, 2008In the two days since I first mentioned an attempted home invasion of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) by bandana-masked animal rights terrorists, there have been new developments worth posting an update here.
First, last night the Santa Cruz Sentinel posted a story indicating that the FBI are now involved in the investigation:
SANTA CRUZ - The FBI is investigating a possible connection between a militant animal rights group and the weekend attack on the home of a UC Santa Cruz researcher, a spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday.
"The reason we said we'd look into it…
oracknows | February 28, 2008I didn't want to blog about this. I really didn't.
No, the reason why I didn't want to blog about this latest screed by mercury militia enabler David Kirby is not because it is about any sort of slam-dunk proof that vaccines do after all cause autism, a mistaken impression that you might get if you just looked at the crowing throughout the antivaccination blogosphere. Rather, it's because I've been forced once again to wade through Kirby's smug, self-congratulatory, and intentionally obfuscatory prose to try to figure out just what the hell he was talking about and then try to make sense of…
oracknows | February 27, 2008In case you haven't heard it enough on this blog and elsewhere: Antivaccination lunacy has consquences. In the UK, measles cases have jumped to a record high:
The number of measles cases in England and Wales jumped more than 30% last year to the highest level since records began in 1995.
The Health Protection Agency (HPA) recorded 971 cases during the year - up from 740 in 2006.
The agency issued a warning last summer urging parents to get their children immunised with the MMR jab.
Experts have repeatedly stressed that public concerns about the safety of the jab have no foundation.
As I've…
oracknows | February 27, 2008...two words: Killer robots!
Clearly, we're all doomed. Skynet, here we come!
oracknows | February 27, 2008A few days ago, I came across an article on Engadget that mentioned almost in passing some studies that seemed to indicate health problems or no health problems, depending on the specific study, due to the ubiquitous and maligned cellular telephone. Not having dealt with this issue much on my blog, I decided to take a look, mostly out of curiosity. The claims that cell phones somehow cause cancer have been circulating for many years, and the studies marshaled to show such a link have in general been not that impressive. However, even though radiofrequency radiation of the sort used in cell…
oracknows | February 26, 2008
...and this time it's a home invasion.
Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sig pointed me to this incident, which has all the markings of still more animal rights terrorism. This time, the attack occurred at the University of California Santa Cruz and involved a home invasion by masked intruders:
SANTA CRUZ - A UC Santa Cruz faculty member whose biomedical research using animals sheds light on the causes of breast cancer and neurological diseases was the target of an attack Sunday afternoon, reportedly by animal rights activists.
UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal confirmed late Monday that an off-…
oracknows | February 26, 2008In a way, I have to hand it to Mike Adams.
As you may recall, Mike Adams is the man behind what is arguably one of the top two or three woo-filled sites on the Internet, NaturalNews.com (formerly known as NewsTarget.com). I'm hard-pressed to come up with an example of someone who can deliver delusional paranoid conspiracy-mongering against the FDA, CDC, and big pharma, antivaccination lunacy, overblown claims about cancer, and (in my considered medical opinion, of course), dangerous cancer quackery, all in one tidy, ranting package. Sometimes the stuff Adams writes is so over-the-top that I…
oracknows | February 25, 2008One way that pseudoscience tries to maintain a patina of respectability to the outside world, a patina that sometimes even manages to take in researchers unacquainted with its methods, is through the "research conference" that has all the trappings of a research meeting but whose topics reveal the pseudoscience at the heart of it all. Such a conference is coming up this spring in Chicago from May 21-25.
Yes, I'm talking about the AutismOne conference, which, year after year, has managed to attract luminaries of the mercury militia and antivaccination movement, along with dubious practioners…
oracknows | February 25, 2008Back in late December, I came across an op-ed piece in the New York Times written by Dr. Atul Gawande, general and endocrine surgeon and author of Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science and Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, that struck me as a travesty of what our system for protecting human subjects should be, as it did fellow ScienceBlogger Revere.
In brief, the article described an action by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Human Research Protection that, on its surface, appeared to be a case of bureaucracy hewing to the letter of the…
oracknows | February 24, 2008You can read parts I and II first, if you like.
Yet another reason Bill Maher is an idiot can be found in the video below, taken from Real Time With Bill Maher from the February 8 episode. I happened to catch it in reruns and was looking for a transcript or YouTube version. It's truly appalling. This guy claims to be a rationalist and mocks religion for its irrationality, and here he is spouting off the more of his usual ignorant, idiotic, stupid ideas about medicine and, yes, downright woo, to the point where even his guests start to wonder what the heck is going on. They seem to back away…
oracknows | February 24, 2008One of XTC's best songs:
I actually heard this on the radio the other night, hence my looking for it on YouTube. I hadn't heard the song in several years, and I don't recall ever hearing it on the radio. In any case, it caught my mood this morning.