Quoth global warming "skeptic" (translation: "crank") Senator Inhofe: Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) got the crowd cheering early in the day. "I have been called -- my kids are all aware of this -- dumb, crazy man, science abuser, Holocaust denier, villain of the month, hate-filled, warmonger, Neanderthal, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun," he announced. "And I can just tell you that I wear some of those titles proudly." Inhofe repeated his view that man-made global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," and he quarreled with a Bush administration proposal to list…

Now why can't all New Age-y pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo be like this New Age-y pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo? Yes, it's back. Starting right around now, it's Global Orgasm time again: WHO? All Men and Women, you and everyone you know. WHERE? Everywhere in the world, but especially in countries with weapons of mass destruction and places where violence is used in place of mediation. WHEN? Solstice Day - December 22, at 06:08 Universal Time (GMT) WHY? To effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible instantaneous surge of human biological,…

People never cease to amaze me. Sometimes it's in a good way, when a person whom I would least expect to be capable of it does something really kind or brilliant. Sometimes it's in a bad way. One of the bad ways people never cease to amaze me is how someone can continue down a path that has obviously caused them harm. I was reminded by this by a news story that's been making the rounds of the media. I first saw it a couple of days ago on the local ABC affiliate, and it seems to be making the rounds of many affiliates nationwide. It's the story of Paul Karason. Paul Karason is blue, and an…

It occurred to me. For someone looking for last minute Christmas gifts for the credulous, perhaps the Chi Machine, which I mentioned this morning, won't fit the bill. One thing about it is that it's too limited in what it can do, and if I'm going to give the gift of woo for Christmas, I really want to give the gift of woo. That's why I'm really grateful to a regular reader who, for reasons that will become obvious, will probably want to remain nameless, who turned me on to another great gift for the holidays. Even better, it comes from a most unexpected source. Yes, with the help of Duke…

As hard as it is to believe, yet another Christmas is fast approaching. I can feel it in the blogosphere. Heck, I can feel it here on the ol' blog. Once garrulous commenters here have gone strangely silent for the most part (at least in comparison to their usual prodigious output), and traffic has already begun to plummet in anticipation of the even bigger plunge that it usually takes during that dead week between Christmas and New Years. It's almost enough to make me wonder whether I should just put the blog on hiatus until after the 1st. Almost. I might slow down a bit and throw a few…

Maybe it's unfair to proclaim this a "well, duh!" study, but its conclusions do seem rather obvious. On the other hand, it's information that we need in a cold, hard scientific form, and I'm glad that the investigators did it: (AP) -- Uninsured cancer patients are nearly twice as likely to die within five years as those with private coverage, according to the first national study of its kind and one that sheds light on troubling health care obstacles. People without health insurance are less likely to get recommended cancer screening tests, the study also found, confirming earlier research.…

As regular readers of the Skeptics' Circle know, hosts are usually given pretty wide latitude about how they handle the presentation of the posts. This time around, host Martin Rundkvist, who's hosted an excellent edition before (albeit with a puzzling theme), decides that a large dish brush is just the thing for the 76th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. Why? Who knows? It must be a Swedish thing. Fortunately, the carnival is chock full of bloggy goodness (albeit with one exception that somehow found its way in there) in a fine, no-nonsense (other than the brush) presentation and thus well…

Evidence-based medicine is not perfect. There, I've said it. Like anything else humans do in science or any other endeavor, evidence-based medicine (EBM) has its strengths and its weaknesses. On the whole, I consider it to be potentially vastly superior to the way that medicine was practiced in the past, bringing a systematic, scientific rigor to how we practice to replace parts of medicine that tended to be based as much (or more) on tradition or dogma as on evidence. Naturally, a common source of attacks on EBM is advocates of "alternative medicine," who often appeal to "different ways of…

You can probably manage to tell a Picasso from a Monet. But can you do the same for Churchill and Hitler? Inquiring minds want to know. The website's Swiss, and it's written in German, but you should be able to figure it out. Just click on one of the four painting to get started and indicate Churchill or Hitler for each one. If your answer is correct, it will say either "Das war richtig," "Richtig," or "Genau." If your answer is wrong, it will say either "Nein" (even I could figure that one out), "Das war falsch," or simply "Falsch." At the end, you'll get a score. I managed to get 8 out of…

I used to be of the opinion that there might just be something to acupuncture. No, I never thought there was anything to the notion that acupuncture "works" by somehow rerouting the flow of a magical life force (qi) that no scientific instrument can detect and that no practitioner of acupuncture (or other practioners "healing arts" that invoke qi or something like it as the reason that they can heal) can detect either, even as they claim to "release blockages" of or somehow improve its flow. Rather, I wondered whether the simple act of sticking needles into the skin might release some hormone…

If you listen to what advocates of homeopathy, acupuncture, or whatever form of so-called "alternative" medicine you can think of (in reality, non-evidence-based medicine for the most part), you'd think that physicians are in the pockets of Big Pharma, hopeless slaves to its propaganda, addicted to its tchotchkes and swag. Sadly for Big Pharma, they may not be having quite the effect it had hoped, if this roundtable discussion of primary care doctors about a study on NSAIDS and pain is any indication: Should we believe this study? Bob: When I decide to read an article, I first look at the…

Several months ago, i wrote quite a few posts about a new anticancer drug that had not yet passed through clinical trials but had demonstrated efficacy against tumors in rat models of cancer. The drug, called dichloroacetate (DCA), is a small molecule that targeted a phenomenon common in cancer cells known as the Warburg effect. Because DCA is a small molecule that is relatively easy to synthesize, the misguided news stories proclaiming it the "cure" for cancer that big pharma wouldn't fund because it was not patentable spawned a cottage industry of charlatans who used the Internet to sell…

Would it have looked something like this? And how would Thomas Jefferson have countered? (Hat tip to Spinning Clio.)

Regular readers of this blog know that I have been becoming increasingly disturbed by what I see as the infiltration of non-evidenced-based "alternative" medicine into academic medical centers. Indeed, about a month ago, I went so far as to count the number of medical schools that offer some form of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) in their curricula. (What a fantastic marketing term for what are in the vast majority of cases therapies without a plausible scientific basis or compelling clinical evidence for efficacy above that of a placebo!) The end result was the Academic Woo…

...well, not really: OK, I don't really hate them. But it used to be that science journalists stood between scientists and the public. The scientists did research, then we asked questions and translated their dry jargon and complicated ideas into scintillating prose. Sure, there were a few scientists, like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who wrote engagingly about the mysteries of the natural world, but they were relatively few. Now look what's happened. Go to the Science Blogs website and you'll find dozens of actual scientists, commenting in real time on every aspect…

...when another blogger refers to your linking to him by adding "-lanche" to your 'nym? I can't say I've ever had that happen to me before.

It's been a while since I mentioned the Autism Omnibus hearings. The Omnibus proceeding is the culmination of all the legal cases brought to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program by nearly 5,000 families who "feel" that their children's autism was caused by vaccines. Many, but not all, of the plaintiffs blame the mercury in the thimerosal in childhood vaccines, despite there being no good evidence to support such a link. The way that the hearings are being run is that several "test cases" are being chosen by Special Masters, who hear evidence presented by the plaintiffs and the defense…

It's almost here. No, not Christmas, although that's almost here too. what I'm talking about is the fast-approaching 76th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which is due to land at Aardvarchaelogy on Thursday, December 20, right in time for the holidays. (And what better time to indulge in a serious dose of skepticism than in the midst of all this pre-Christmas cheer?) Ebenezer Scrooge would be proud. Well, the pre-visitation Scrooge, anyway. The post-visitation Scrooge clearly believed in ghosts and other paranormal happenings, like visitations promised to happen in over three nights…

I have to confess, the ol' Folder of Woo was looking a little thin this week. No, it's not that I'm running out of topics (a.k.a. targets) for my usual Friday jaunt into the wacky world of woo. Far from it. It's just that, in the run-up to writing this, perusing the odd stuff therein just wasn't getting me fired up to do the feature the way that it usually does. There just wasn't anything there that was grabbing my attention and refusing to let it go, as has happened so often in weeks past. I began to worry whether Your Friday Dose of Woo has been going on too long (it's approaching a year…

There's been a bit of bad news on the vaccination front: ATLANTA - More than a million doses of a common vaccine given to babies as young as 2 months were being recalled Wednesday because of contamination risks, but the top U.S. health official said it was not a health threat. The recall is for 1.2 million doses of the vaccine for Hib, which protects against meningitis, pneumonia and other serious infections, and a combination vaccine for Hib and hepatitis B. The vaccine is recommended for all children under 5 and is usually given in a three-shot series, starting at 2 months old. Drug maker…