oracknows | April 12, 2011They call them Necromancers.
Necromancers have an uncanny ability to resurrect an old thread by commenting on it months, even years, after the last comment. Unfortunately, as hard as it is to believe, the version of Movable Type used by Seed to power our blogs does not have a preference panel that allows us to turn off our comments on posts after a set amount of time, for instance three months. Consequently, every so often I"m plagued with Necromancers bringing long deceased comment threads back from the dead to the annoyance of all. Of course, the most annoying Necromancers are the one who…
oracknows | April 11, 2011Calling all Boston area skeptics! Calling all Boston area skeptics! The Bat Signal is up!
Your fair city is being invaded by the man who, arguably more than anyone else, sparked the latest incarnation of the anti-vaccine movement, is about to metastasize to your fair city (well, to its suburb of Waltham) and speak at one of your universities, specifically Brandeis University. That's right, Andrew Wakefield is invading your town, apparently invited by that one trick pony of a blogger for the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism, namely Jake Crosby:
Struck off the UK's medical register after…
oracknows | April 11, 2011As many of you probably know, I'm proud to call Dr. Harriet Hall (a.k.a. the SkepDoc) my friend, and, I daresay, so is my wife. We've both hung out with her at the last two TAMs, and we've hit it off pretty well. I also admire her history of standing up for science, reason, and science-based medicine, something she's been doing longer than I have. I can only hope that one day I will reach her level of respect within the skeptical movement. Unfortunately, that will probably never happen until I cease being a Plexiglass box of multicolored blinking lights, but such is the price of pseudonymity…
oracknows | April 10, 2011I tell ya. I take a weekend off from this blog, and what do I find on Sunday night when I sit back down to take a look and see if there's anything I want to blog about?
Damn if those anti-vaccine loons aren't pulling a fast one while I'm not looking. It turns out that über-quack Joe Mercola is teaming up once again with Barbara Loe Fisher's the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) in a desperate attempt for the NVIC to try to demonstrate that it's still relevant in the anti-vaccine movement after having been supplanted by Generation rescue. This time around, they're doing SafeMinds one…
oracknows | April 8, 2011The animated short movie version of Tim Minchin's fantastic nine minute beat poem Storm is finally available. Watch. Learn. Enjoy.
oracknows | April 8, 2011Yesterday, I wrote about SB 31, a proposed law in North Carolina against which uber-quack Mike Adams had mobilized his "health freedom" minions and a crank organization Citizens for Health Freedom and apparently managed to bring some pressure to bear on legislators to water down the bill. The whole incident reminded me how fragile and easily dismantled even the most rudimentary laws and regulations designed to enforce a science-based standard of care and prevent the proliferation of quacks are. Dr. Rashid Buttar, for instance, can team up with a bunch of "integrative medicine" practitioners…
oracknows | April 7, 2011After having been away for four days, it always takes me a little time to get back into the swing of things when it comes to blogging. Actually, it takes some time to get back into the swing of things at work, too. Sometimes it takes starting on something not too difficult and then working my way back up to the more difficult tasks. In terms of blogging, starting out with something not too difficult often means taking on a reliable source of utter nonsense. And what better source of utter nonsense exists in the world of pseudoscientific medicine? Certainly, it's hard to find a loonier,…
oracknows | April 6, 2011As I wing my way back home from Orlando, fresh from having imbibed deeply of the latest and greatest in cancer research, I didn't really have the opportunity to generate a typical Orac-ian post. Fortunately for me (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), a commenter named Erwin Alber popped up in the comments of a year and a half old post to demonstrate once again the self-delusion at the heart of the claim of many in the anti-vaccine movement. Take it away, Erwin:
There is no scientific evidence to show that vaccines have ever prevented anything, apart from health, sanity and…
oracknows | April 5, 2011I'm not infrequently asked why the myth that vaccines cause autism and other anti-vaccine myths are so stubbornly resistant to the science that time and time again fails to support them. Certainly useful celebrity idiots like Jenny McCarthy are one reason. So, too, are anti-vaccine propaganda websites and blogs such as Age of Autism and anti-vaccine organizations like Generation Rescue, the National Vaccine Information Center, and SafeMinds and the organizations that publish them. However, these are clearly not the only reason. Alone, these people and organizations are in general quite…
oracknows | April 4, 2011It figures.
I don't know if it's confirmation bias or not, but it seems that every time I go away on a trip, some juicy bit of blog fodder pops up. So, right here, right now, while I'm at the AACR meeting soaking up the latest and greatest in cancer science, inevitably someone posts something that normally would provoke--nay, demand--an Orac-ian deconstruction full of the usual Insolence. So what is it this time?
Dana Ullman.
Yes, everybody's favorite homeopath for whom no science is too settled to twist and homeopathy and homeopathic "thinking" are in fact responsible for much of medical…
oracknows | April 3, 2011Fetid, filthy, pus-filled cup? Your goblet of death? Green Hitler? Children of death?
Mixed metaphors, anyone?
Yes, there's a reason why the occasional Alex Jones rant amuses me. It shouldn't, but it does. On the other hand, the fact that he has quite a fan base for his short wave radio show, his websites, his Internet videos, and his podcasts is rather disturbing to me. Still, there is entertainment value to be had:
I particularly like the exceedingly pregnant dramatic pauses he uses.
You know, come to think of it, I just noticed something. Take Glenn Beck, take away his charts and turn…
oracknows | April 1, 2011
Ah, April Fools' Day!
I had thought of trying to do a typical April Fools' Day post, you know, something like trying to write something but the last time I tried to do that it fell really flat, so flat that I'm not even going to link to it. It's better not to remind my readers of my jokes that fell completely flat. Better to move on to a more appropriate April Fools' Day topic, a topic like the James Randi Educational Foundation's annual Pigasus Awards. The basic idea is to give recognition where recognition is due for the five worst promoters of nonsense from the previous year.
For 2011…
oracknows | March 31, 2011I realize this is two weeks old, but I had this hanging around, making it still worthwhile to discuss, because it's been bothering me, and last week Coulter wrote a blisteringly stupid followup to her blisteringly ignorant column from two weeks ago entitled A Glowing Report on Radiation. She wrote this article in the wake of the fears arising in Japan and around the world of nuclear catastrophe due to the damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant caused by the earthquake and tsunami that hit northern Japan on March 11. Coulter was subsequently interviewed by Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly on…
oracknows | March 31, 2011Sometimes I complain on this blog about grammar Nazis. I had no idea at the time that grammar Nazis might actually be a real phenomenon.
Of course, I'd be dead because my unedited material all too frequently contains multiple run-on sentences. True, I almost always find them later when I reread my posts and then fix them, but in the few hours after such posts "go live" they often sit there, uncorrected. Oh, well, it is blogging, and I don't have an editor other than myself.
Now watch: Based on this video, everybody's favorite anti-vaccine apologist who keeps reminding us he is not "anti-…
oracknows | March 30, 2011Yesterday, I learned of how animal rights terrorists are targeting college students as the "soft underbelly of the vivisection movement." As an example of their new strategy, these thugs gloated over the "recantation" by a Florida Atlantic University student named Alena Rodriguez, who, because of her e-mail to a Negotiation Is Over editor named Ghazal Tajalli rejecting her request to become involved in an animal rights event, was targeted for a campaign of intimidation, smears, and harassment. As a result, Rodriguez was sufficiently terrified that she basically gave the thugs what they wanted…
oracknows | March 29, 2011I've made no secret of my disdain for self-proclaimed "animal rights" activists, the ones who are more than willing to terrorize scientists doing research to understand disease better and thereby develop better treatments and even cures. None of this means that I am some sort of "animal abuser" (to steal the animal rights jargon) or that I'm cruel and advocate "torturing" animals. There is a difference between animal rights and animal welfare; animal rights activists in essence equate a mouse with a rat with a dog with a pig with a human being. In any case, I've reported how animal rights…
oracknows | March 29, 2011Well, it's over.
The grant is in, but it was painful, and I was exhausted, both in brain and body, last night. That's why there's no Insolence right now. Last night, I chilled, cracked open a cold one, watched some utterly mindless TV, and crashed early in order to be ready for a day in the OR. So that means it's time for my favorite blog space-killing gambit when things get too busy for me to lay down my daily dose of Insolence: Open thread!
Have fun. Well-rested, I'm off to the OR. I'll be back later.
oracknows | March 28, 2011Grant time again! Since today--yes, today!--is the deadline for a rather big grant I'm writing (not quite R01 level, but a respectable three year project if I can get it), I was up until the wee hours of the morning trying to put this sucker to bed. Being the ever-benevolent blogger, though, far be it from me to deny you some Insolence. It'll just have to be recycled Insolence. Not just recycled Insolence, either. Old recycled Insolence, four years old, to be precise! Unbelievable! In fact, it's so old that the links don't even work anymore; so you'll have to take my word for it that I quoted…
oracknows | March 27, 2011Grant time again! Since today--yes, today!--is the deadline for a rather big grant I'm writing (not quite R01 level, but a respectable three year project if I can get it), I was up until the wee hours of the morning trying to put this sucker to bed. Being the ever-benevolent blogger, though, far be it from me to deny you some Insolence. It's just recycled Insolence. Of course, given that this is nearly four years old, if you've been reading less than four years, it's new to you! I'll be back tomorrow; that is, assuming I've recovered. As I look at this post, it occurs to me that I haven't…
oracknows | March 27, 2011These are two videos that appeared to have disappeared from YouTube for a while, thanks to takedown notices from the distributors of the film. Fortunately, they appear to be back, which is pure awesomeness. Unfortunately, because I'm busy putting the final touches on a grant today, the first one resonates in a rather eerie way. Unfortunately, neither of them appear to allow embedding:
Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945
Hitler NIH rejection
Back to work, now...