Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on July 25, 2005 . Although the Undead Führer himself has made only one appearance, but the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster became. Enjoy! As for all the Hitler Zombie reruns, don't worry. I decided to do that over the weekend, and now I'll change to reposts of different topics for a while. In the most recent issue…

Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on July 6, 2005 and is the very first time ever that the Hitler Zombie appeared in a horror story form. As such, it was a landmark day in the annals of Respectful Insolence. Appropriately enough, it's over what had become a frequent blogging topic even back in those early days. Enjoy! Deep within a dark crypt, far beneath the ground, it slept. The…

Now that I've been in London for a couple of days and have started to acclimate to my surroundings, I've started to notice some things. As I said in my vacation announcement, I don't plan on doing a lot of blogging, but a short take here and there to break up the reruns definitely seems advisable when I happen to have some down time to do it, particularly since I somehow loaded the weekend with so many Hitler Zombie reruns. (Don't worry, there are only a couple more before a more varied set of topics start.) Soooo.... [Enter Jerry Seinfeld voice] What is the deal with mushy peas? [Exit Jerry…

Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 26, 2005 and is the fifth ever Hitler Zombie post. Although the Undead Führer himself has not yet made an appearance, the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster ultimately became. Enjoy! The Hitler zombie's been a busy undead Führer the last three weeks (1, 2, 3, 4), and it's time (I hope) for him to go back into…

Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 23, 2005 and is the fourth ever Hitler Zombie post. Although the Undead Fuhrer himself has not yet made an appearance, the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster became. Enjoy! It would be no fun at all to write this blog if everyone always agreed with me. (Of course, it would be even less fun if everyone violently…

Vacation time! While Orac off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 22, 2005 and is the third ever Hitler Zombie post. Although the Undead Führer himself has not yet made an appearance, the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster evolved into. Enjoy! (Note: I did not check all of the links; if some of them are now dead, I'm sorry.) I've been wanting to write about Senator Dick…

Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 10, 2005 and is the second ever Hitler Zombie post. Although the Undead Fuhrer himself has not yet made an appearance, the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster became. Enjoy! Last week, inspired by this post, I discussed how quick politicians and pundits are these days to make fallacious comparisons to…

Don't forget, everybody, that the 68th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is due to land at Aardvarchaeology on Thursday, August 30 (sadly, my last full day in London). Martin will host again. He did a fine (albeit slightly confusing) job last time, and I expect even better this time around. If you don't know what blog carnivals or The Skeptics' Circle is about, here's an introduction. If you're a blogger with a skeptical (not a pseudoskeptical) bent, please submit some of your work and show it off to like-minded readers. So get your entries submitted to Martin by August 29, and join us next…

Around the time you read this, barring any flight delay agonies, I will have touched down at Heathrow Airport to spend a week in London. It's the first real vacation that my wife and I have taken, possibly since our honeymoon. Certainly it's been the first time I've been out of the country since my honeymoon and the first time I've been to London since Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and I was too young to appreciate it properly. After the last couple of months, I desperately need some R&R, and this will hopefully fill the bill. This trip means a couple of things. First, the blog…

The latest edition of Change of Shift, the blog carnival for nursing, has been posted over at Nurse Ratched's Place. Enjoy!

This story's been floating around the blogosphere for a few days now, and I've been wanting to weigh in. Basically, Medicare is saying that it will no longer pay for conditions and treatments that result from hospital errors. Sounds reasonable on the surface, right? After all, if a surgeon leaves a sponge in a patient, why should the patient or the patient's insurance company have to pay for the extra operation that it takes to remove the object and the additional hospital time? Most surgeons, at least, don't charge a fee for the reoperation to remove a retained surgical instrument or object…

You know, even though I know he's been a Republican talker for a long time, that he worked for the Nixon administration as a speechwriter and lawyer, I've always kind of liked Ben Stein. My wife and I used to like to watch Win Ben Stein's Money, and he was quite amusing as the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He's always come across as a pleasant doofus, even though I know that image appears to be carefully calculated one. Now I learn that he's the narrator and a driving force behind a pro-"intelligent design" movie called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which is due to be released…

Good news! Dr. Roy Kerry, the quack whose careless use of intravenous chelation therapy for autism resulted in the death of a five year old autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama, will be charged with involuntary manslaughter: PITTSBURGH - A doctor was charged with involuntary manslaughter Wednesday for administering a chemical treatment that state police say killed a 5-year-old autistic boy. The child, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, went into cardiac arrest at Dr. Roy E. Kerry's office immediately after undergoing chelation therapy on Aug. 23, 2005. Chelation removes heavy metals from the body…

It's been brought to my attention that Perry DeAngelis, regular contributor to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast, member of the New England Skeptical Society has passed away unexpectedly at far too young an age. I don't know any of the details, although as a regular listener to the Skeptics' Guide podcast I knew that he had been in the hospital for a while, although I had begun to wonder if it was more serious than it first seemed as his time in the hospital kept getting longer. I also know that it's almost as though I knew Perry, having listened to him almost every week for over a…

Fellow SB'er Tara Smith, and academic neurologist Steve Novella have written an essential primer on the dangerous pseudoscience and quackery that is HIV/AIDS denialism. It's published in PLoS and is entitled HIV Denial in the Internet Era. It makes a number of excellent points about the deadly quackery that is HIV/AIDS denialism, including how its advocates portray science as "faith," shift the goalposts when asking for evidence for the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, and in general engage in all the same sorts of logical and scientific fallacies beloved by pseudoscientists and cranks like creationists…

Thanks to Blake, I now have The Enemies of Reason, Part 2: My review of this episode is below the fold. I managed to BitTorrent the episode and watch it on my laptop on my flight back from Chicago last night. If you don't want to be influenced by my opinion before watching, watch the episode first and then see if you agree with my assessment. Part 2 of Richard Dawkins' The Enemies of Reason, The Irrational Health Service, is, as you might imagine, right up my alley. Moreover, it's the stronger of the two parts of this documentary in many ways, although I think it continues the theme of…

This has nothing to do with science, but this has to be the best headline ever: British dwarf's penis gets stuck to hoover Original story here. Even better, the dwarf in question goes by the stage name Captain Dan the Demon Dwarf. I don't think there's anything to add here.

I've been meaning to mention this post by Sid Schwab of Surgeonsblog for a while now. It's a wonderful example of how nothing heals like surgical steel in even the most humble-seeming conditions. In this case, he's talking about anal fissures, a condition that makes defecation very painful. It turns out that, for cases that won't heal with conservative measures, there's a very simple and underutilized operation that can be done in the office known as the lateral sphincterotomy, which can relieve the pain and in essence "cure" the condition instantly. Few operations provide such instant…

My regular readers here know to what lengths I go to combat Holocaust denial on the Internet. It's a fairly regular topic on this blog, as is rebutting the lies Holocaust deniers routinely spout. Not surprisingly, Holocaust deniers like to try to portray me as either Jewish or somehow in the thrall of the ADL, much as alternative medicine aficionados like to try to paint me as being a shill for big pharma. (Hey, big pharma and all you Jews out there controlling the New World Order, where are my checks? You guys owe me several years of back payments for my online efforts to undermine the…

1-899-SCAMDOC? Want an double decker MRSAwich--with extra MRSA? Or how about prolotherapy? (But don't forget the pixie dust!) (Via Kevin, MD.)