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Reiki is a "sin"?

Many are the times when I've pointed out that many "complementary and alternative medicine" CAM or "integrative medicine" (IM) modalities are very much more based on religion or mystical ideas akin to religion than on anything resembling science. I realize that my saying this is nothing new, but every so often I see something that reminds me of this concept to the point that, self-important logorrheic blogger that I am, I can't resist commenting, particularly when I'm amused by the story. This particular story is amusing, to me at least. You see, it's about what happens when one religion…

Dr. Oz's journey to the Dark Side continues apace: Bring on the bait and switch!

As I sat down to write this, I was torn. What topic to deconstruct? There appear to be so many! Certainly, the latest Huffington Post excretion by the ever-clueless (but amusing in his cluelessness, which results in posts of pure hilarity) Dana Ullman, entitled Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize Winner, Takes Homeopathy Seriously sure looked tempting. Ullman always makes an amusing target. However, I realized that I had already discussed Montagnier, not just once but twice in the last couple of months, first for promoting autism quackery and then, more recently, for having fallen hard for homeopathy…

It's more than just Senator Tom Harkin and woo: Christian Science and faith healing in health care reform

Every so often, as the health care reform initiative spearheaded by the Obama Administration wends its way through Congress (or, more precisely, wend their ways through Congress, given that there are multiple bills coming from multiple committees in both Houses), I've warned about various chicanery from woo-friendly legislators trying to legitimize by legislation where they've failed by science various "alternative" medicine practices. This began much earlier this year, when I pointed out how Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) invited the Four Horsemen of the Woo-pocalypse to the Senate to testify.…

Skepticism and the scientific consensus

It figures. Some of the most interesting questions and posts showed up right before Christmas, just the time when I didn't have time to discuss and (hopefully) expand upon them. Neither, I'm guessing, did anyone else, which is unfortunate because this post was about an issue worth further discussion in the skeptical blogosphere. I'm talking about a post in which fellow ScienceBlogger Martin Rundkvist made this rather provocative observation about skepticism: A discussion in the comments section of the recent Skeptics' Circle reminded me of something I learned only after years in the skeptical…

Dr. Lorraine Day: Purveyor of woo, homophobia, and Holocaust denial

Those of you who've been around this blog for a long time probably remember Dr. Lorraine Day. In fact, I mentioned her in one of the very first substantive posts that I ever did regarding why breast cancer testimonials for alternative medicines are inherently misleading, presenting her as an example of a once respected academic orthopedic surgeon who had fallen deeply into woo. I had also been aware of her association with infamous Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, but I had mainly thought that this was more because of Zündel's love of woo (he claimed that he had cancer and had called Dr. Day…

A field guide to biomedical meeting creatures, part 1: Any questions?

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on March 7, 2005 after I arrived home from a meeting. I'm back at home. The meeting went fairly well and my talk was well-received. Surgical meetings are odd beasts.…

Shortsighted, not curious, and proud of it!

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…

Reply to a 14 year old creationist

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…

The Science of Prometheus - a review, containing a lot of spoilers

So I unexpectedly got a ticket to see the screening of Ridley Scott's Prometheus on Wednesday.  I think it's because I was nice to Fox and ran that competition for Tim Burton's 9 that one time where people won sweet ass picture encyclopaedias. That was fun.  Anyway.  Here's my review of Prometheus with a look at the science behind it.  There will be spoilers. So if you want to go into the movie knowing nothing, and yet insist on reading this blogpost first, you're going to have a bad time. Anyway, the science.  The basic premise of Prometheus is that humans discover a star map coded into the…

Fido Might Not Know What You Do and Do Not See

You've probably had a conversation that goes something like this: Person A: "My dog is sooooo amazing!" You: "I mean, dogs are awesome and all, but what's so amazing about this particular dog?" Person A: "He just understands me. It's like he knows what I'm thinking and what I need." You: "Do you think he's just maybe responding contingently do your overt displays of emotion?" Person A: "Listen, man, I'm telling you: my dog can read my mind!" No matter on which side of this sort of argument you tend to fall, the question of whether or not domestic dogs can read human minds is an interesting…

How not to do "personalized medicine" to treat Alzheimer's disease

With the aging of the population, one of the most feared potential manners by which more and more of us will leave this earth is through Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. And it is a scary thing, too. Having valued my intelligence all my life and in particular enjoying the intellectual stimulation that I derive from my job, not to mention from blogging and contemplating science outside my realm of expertise, like many people I fear Alzheimer's disease at least as much as cancer or heart disease, possibly more. Imagining the slow decline in my faculties to the point where I can…

Joe Mercola and raw milk faddism invade HuffPo

Since its very inception five years ago, The Huffington Post has been, to steal a phrase from Star Wars, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, at least when it comes to anything resembling medicine. Of course, that's the problem. Very little, if anything, published in HuffPo resembles actual science-based medicine. The vast majority of medicine published there consists either of anti-vaccine screeds that are beyond stupid, quantum woo courtesy of Deepak Chopra, or pure, dangerous quackery, such as advocating homeopathy for H1N1 and acid-base woo for cancer. It's so bad that on more than one…

Evolution of vascular systems

Once upon a time, in Paris in 1830, Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire debated Georges Léopole Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier on the subject of the unity of organismal form. Geoffroy favored the idea of a deep homology, that all animals shared a common archetype: invertebrates with their ventral nerve cord and dorsal hearts were inverted vertebrates, which have a dorsal nerve cord and ventral hearts, and that both were built around or within an idealized vertebra. While a thought-provoking idea, Geoffroy lacked the substantial evidence to make a persuasive case—he had to rely on fairly…

Antivaccinationists versus Jonas Salk's centennial

One thing that happened this week that I didn’t get around to writing about is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jonas Salk, which was October 28. In the annals of medicine, few people have had as immediate a positive effect as Jonas Salk did when he developed the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). At the time the IPV became available in 1955, annual epidemics of polio were a regular feature of American life, causing panics and closing public swimming pools with a distressing frequency, causing thousands of cases of paralysis per year and many deaths. Indeed, in 1952 one particularly bad…

High dose vitamin C can cure Ebola virus disease? Not so fast...

Before I got sidetracked with a certain topic that’s consumed the blog, another topic that had popped up (albeit nowhere near as frequently) was the latest Ebola virus disease outbreak in Africa, the largest in history thus far. Indeed, as horrific as this outbreak is and as terrible a disease as Ebola is, with close to a 60% mortality even with the best treatment, it did produce one amusing bit of clownishness, and that’s that it revealed that there really is something too quacky even for Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com to tolerate. I’m referring to an incident four weeks ago where a truly…

Try standing at the edge of knowledge for a while. You'll like it.

Alternate titles for this post: "It turns out, it is a little like a priesthood." "Join us. Join us. Join us. Braaainzzzzz" "Imma gonna let you finish, but first I think you need to get your Wellies wet." ... In a library, there is a spatial relationship between knowledge and books or journals, and there is a sense of completeness about it. I'm thinking in particular of the Tozzer library, one I spent a fair amount of time in. I would go to the basement of the library and the entire ancient world (this is an anthropology library) was arrayed in a set of shelves to the left. There were…

The Mystery of The Returned Outboard Motor

If you have not yet read Goldilocks, a Very Cold Winter Night, And a Strange Sense of Empty-ness then please do so now. Only then will you have the background necessary to understand and appreciate The Mystery of the Returned Outboard Motor. As told to us by Jimmy James Watson Bettencourt ... ... I came as quickly as I could on Laden's request. He was at the cabin, and the note dropped off at my practice by one of his boys was terse. "Come Watson!" and that is all I generally need to be compelled to arrive at my friend's side. When I entered the cabin he did not acknowledge my presence…

A fungus among us in oncology?

I don't much like Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com (formerly NewsTarget.com). Indeed, I haven't yet been able to find a more blatant purveyor of the worst kind of quackery and paranoid anti-physician and anti-medicine conspiracy theories anywhere on the Internet, with the possible exception of Whale.to. However, Whale.to is so utterly, outrageously, incoherently full of not just quackery but paranoid New World Order conspiracy theories and other paranormal silliness that any but the most deluded can easily see it for what it is with just a cursory reading of a few of its many, many pages. It's…

Epi Wonk versus Mark and David Geier: Guess who wins?

There's a new blog in town that I've been meaning to pimp. It's a blog by a retired epidemiologist who got things started looking at the role of diagnostic substitution in autism diagnoses and argued that the autism "epidemic" is an artifact of changing diagnostic criteria. The blog is Epi Wonk, and it's a good one so far. This week, I'm really glad Epi Wonk exists. The reason is that somehow, another Geier père et fils crapfest of dumpster-diving has somehow slimed its way into the medical literature, just in time to be used in the Autism Omnibus hearings no doubt. The "study" (if you can…

Relying on prayer instead of medicine

This happened last week when I was feeling under the weather, and somehow I never got around to it. Fortunately, however, I've learned that there may indeed by justice in the case of Madeline Neuman, the 11-year-old child whose parents let her die of diabetic ketoacidosis. This story was widely reported thusly: "We just believe in the Bible, that's all. This is our faith," said Leilani Neumann, the mother of 11-year-old Madeline Neumann, who died from a treatable form of diabetes after her parents chose to pray for their daughter in place of seeking medical attention. Madeline Neumann had…

Stem cell tourism: Stem cells as the new snake oil

There's no doubt about it: Stem cells are hot. Yes indeed, they're not only hot, but they're hip, they're happenin', they're right now, baby. Scientists are falling all over themselves with excitement at the potential applications that could potentially come from stem cell technology. True, no validated therapies for embryonic stem cells have yet made it into clinical practice, and the challenges that need to be overcome before that can happen are arguably greater than what was believed in the heady days a few years ago, before President Bush declared his ill-advised restriction on embryonic…

The fantasy of cryonics in an unexpected place

We all seek immortality in some way. Death has been a terror of nearly all since humans first started realizing that everybody dies. After all, no one wants to face the end of everything that one has been, is, and will be, so much so that a key feature of many religions is a belief that death is not the end, that there is an afterlife where we will all live forever and where evil is punished and good rewarded. Even if, as seems most likely, death is simply the end, and the time after death is just like the time before we were born (or, more properly, before our first memories), something that…

An herbal medicine clinic at the Cleveland Clinic: Quackademia triumphant

I don't recall if I've ever mentioned my connection with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF). I probably have, but just don't remember it. Longtime readers might recall that I did my general surgery training at Case Western Reserve University at University Hospitals of Cleveland. Indeed, I did my PhD there as well in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. Up the road less than a mile from UH is the Cleveland Clinic. As it turns out, during my stint in Physiology and Biophysics at CWRU, I happened to do a research rotation in a lab at the CCF, which lasted a few months. OK, so it's not…

The court intervenes to save a child with cancer, and Mike Adams loses his mind over it

One type of story that I've fairly frequently commented upon since the very beginning of this blog is the story of children or teens with cancer whose parents decide to pursue quackery instead of effective therapy or children with other serious diseases whose parents reject effective therapy for them. Think way, way back to Katie Wernecke and Abraham Cherrix back in 2006. (Cherrix is still battling his lymphoma seven years later, having blown his best chance at cure back in 2006; I do not know how much longer he can continue.) More recently, there was Chad Jessop and Daniel Hauser. Just in…

Quoth the Institute of Medicine: The current vaccine schedule is safe and effective. Quoth antivaccinationists: Gahhhh!

I sense another disturbance in the antivaccine Force. Yes, I realize that it was just a couple of days ago that I sensed a previous disturbance rippling through the antivaccine Force. That's when antivaccinationists brought David Kirby out of mothballs from whatever journalistic slime pit he's currently residing in to use every trick at his disposal to convince you that somehow the government has compensated two families of children for vaccine-induced autism when in fact he's playing the same game he's always played: Claiming that if any child who's ever been compensated by the National…

Naturopaths and quack stem cell clinics revisited

A week ago, I wrote about a naturopath in Utah named Harry Adelson, who was advertising his use stem cells to treat lumbar and cervical disk problems, including degenerated and dehydrated disks. That alone was bad enough, but what elevated "Not-a-Dr." (my preferred translation of the "ND" that naturopaths like to use after their names to confuse patients because it's so close to "MD") Adelson above and beyond the usual naturopathic quackery is his cosplay of an interventional radiologist, in which he purchased a C-arm to use fluoroscopy to inject his "stem cells" right into the intervertebral…

While Orac's away, the Breatharians will play...

Well, I'm back. Hard as it is to believe, during my vacation I went a whole two weeks without writing a truly new post. That's something that hasn't happened in probably 12 years. Yes, as a result of the lack of original material for two weeks, my traffic appears to have taken a noticeable hit and is now lower than it's been in several years, but you know what? For the first time I actually don't really care that much. It was good to unplug. It's also good to be back, though. Although we arrived home Saturday afternoon, I remain jet lagged, and it's also Father's Day, which means I need to…

Will Tipper Gore be appearing at a fundraiser hosted by antivaxers?

I hesitated over discussing this story because it only comes from one source and that source is not one that I normally trust, The Washington Free Beacon. It might be fake news. On the other hand, it is a story that is not implausible and appears to be reasonably well reported, complete with a reproduction of an invitation to the event being reported on. Moreover, even though this particular source is unabashedly conservative and partisan, it has done some reporting that even Nick Baumann at Mother Jones admitted to be pretty good. So it is with a little bit of trepidation that I note this…

A boatload of fail: Were two horrendously bad zombie "vaxed/antivaxed" studies retracted—again?

[Editorial update: I woke up this morning to find out that the answer to my question in the title is almost certainly yes. The post has been quickly altered to reflect that. See below.] Believe it or not, I overlooked something in yesterday's post about a putrefying, rotting mess of a "vaccinated versus unvaccinated" study carried out by an Andrew Wakefield fanboi named Anthony Mawson that purported to have found that vaccinated children have a much higher prevalence of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) and and diseases not preventable by vaccines than unvaccinated children. I'll refer you…

"Dr. Seuss monsters": The quackery that is "battlefield acupuncture" continues to metastasize

After yesterday's post on a local news station's credulous promotion of quack acupuncture (but I repeat myself) for pets, I thought I'd stay on the topic of acupuncture for one more day. The reason is that a reader sent me a link to an article in Stars and Stripes that really irritated me, Acupuncture becomes popular as battlefield pain treatment. Longtime readers might remember that I've been writing about the utter ridiculousness and lack of science behind "battlefield acupuncture" and how it makes no sense to be sticking recently wounded soldiers with needles under battlefield conditions.…

Bogus "challenges" to prove the scientific consensus: The M.O. of a crank

Way back in the early days of my blogging career, I remember coming across a "challenge" by a man named Jock Doubleday. I didn't know it at the time, but Doubleday had achieved some notoriety before his "vaccine challenge" as the director or Natural Woman, Natural Man, Inc. and the author of such amazing works as The Burning Time (Stories of the Modern-day Persecution of Midwives) and Lolita Shrugged (THE MYTH OF AGE-SPECIFIC MATURITY). His "challenge" was in the same vein as his previous work, only more so and full-on antivaccine. The reason I'm bringing up Doubleday again after all these…

Schadenfreude: At the FDA, it looks as though Donald Trump is about to sorely disappoint his antivaccine supporters

I’ve seen it noted that our new President-Elect seems to be selecting his cabinet officers and directors of federal bureaucracies based on how much they oppose the mission of the department they are supposed to head. For instance, to head the Department of Health and Human Services, he picked an orthopedic surgeon who belongs to an organization utterly opposed to any role of the federal government in health care and who himself looks poised to dismantle as much of the Affordable Care Act as he can. For the Department of Energy, he picked Rick Perry, a man so dumb that when he was asked during…

Kris Kristofferson: The latest celebrity quackery victim

If you grew up, as I did, a child of the 1970s in the US (I graduated from high school in 1980), you probably couldn’t escape the influence of Kris Kristofferson. He was big, and he was at his biggest during the 1970s, pumping out country music and mainstream hits, appearing in movies, and generally rocking an awesome beard. Anyway, the 1980s came, and Kris Kristofferson’s career went. Well, it didn’t exactly disappear. Kristofferson continued to work and appear in movies, and his records still sold fairly well. However, he was never again as big as he was in the 1970s. It turns out that…

The MEND™ protocol for Alzheimer’s disease: Functional medicine on steroids? (revisited)

A week ago, I wrote about an example of one of the most common topics on this blog, the infiltration of pseudoscientific medicine and outright fantasy into academic medicine, a trend I like to refer to as quackademic medicine. The institution was George Washington University, and the dubious intervention was something called the MEND™ Protocol, which is sold as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease by Muses Labs. As I described, it’s a protocol that appears to rely on a proprietary computer algorithm of some kind that, according to Muses Labs, produces a “personalized” treatment plan for…

Diversity in Science Carnival: Women Achievers in STEM - Past and Present

It's here! The second edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival! But it wouldn't be here today without the help of Dr. Free-ride and Dr. Isis. With all the time I have had to devote to my mother and her issues the past two weeks, there is no way I could have gotten the carnival up today without their help. Indeed they really get full credit. I haven't even managed to finish a special post I wanted to do for the carnival - so check back later. I'll update when I have it done and add it in here. But enough of my travails! Let's get on to the really good stuff submitted to this…

Correcting the record

I know I said that "all you need to know about [Martin] Cothran" is that he managed to misidentify both my employer and my profession and then repeat those easily corrected errors many times. But it turns out there's more to Cothran. Sure, he's bigoted, has an odd fascination with the word "faggot," and writes for both the Disco. Inst. and the Kentucky affiliate of Focus on the Family. But he also teaches logic at a private school in Kentucky. To really get to know him, then, we need to see how he employs logic in his arguments against marriage equality. In one of several febrile posts…

What does not kill the group, makes it stronger!

I recently finished reading The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, a new book by Nicholas Wade, a science writer for The New York Times. Before giving it the "full treatment" I thought it behooved me to revisit some of the scientific literature which Wade relies upon to give form to his argument. One of the pillars of The Faith Instinct is group selection, and one of the scholars who Wade specifically cites is the economist Samuel Bowles. Bowles was an author on a paper I reviewed earlier this week, on the empirical assessment of the extent of heritability of wealth…

The 21st Century Cures Act: Old vinegary wine in a new bottle

The approval of new drugs and medical devices is a process fraught with scientific, political, and ethical landmines. Inherent in any such process is an unavoidable conflict between rigorous science and safety on the one side, which tend to slow the process down by requiring large randomized clinical trials that can take years, versus forces that demand faster approval. For example, patients suffering from deadly diseases demand faster approval of drugs that might give them the hope of surviving their disease, or at least of surviving considerably longer. This is a powerful force for reform,…

Revisiting the issue of ethics in human experimentation

Progress in science-based medicine depends upon human experimentation. Scientists can do the most fantastic translational research in the world, starting with elegant hypotheses, tested through in vitro and biochemical experiments, after which they are tested in animals. They can understand disease mechanisms to the individual amino acid level in a protein or nucleotide in a DNA molecule. However, without human testing, they will never know if the end result of all that elegant science will actually do what it is intended to do and to make real human patients better. They will never know if…

The martyrdom of St. Andy

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue. Well, not really. Maybe it looks more like I picked the wrong NIH grant cycle to be submitting an R01. After all, the deadline for my getting my grant to my university's grant's office coincided very closely with the announcement of the General Medical Council's ruling in the Andrew Wakefield case on Thursday. As I pointed out in a brief post yesterday, the complete 143-page ruling can be found here (if you want to avoid AoA or Generation Rescue) or here (if you want to annoy J.B. Handley by showing traffic coming from this blog…

The death of Jade Erick from intravenous curcumin: Mystery solved

Kim Kelly, ND (Not A Doctor). He prescribed the dose of intravenous turmeric that killed Jade Erick. Finally, a mystery has been solved. Nearly five months ago, a 30 year old woman named Jade Erick suffered a cardiac arrest, most likely due to anaphylactic shock, during the infusion of intravenous curcumin ordered by a California naturopath named Kim Kelly, ND (for Not-a-Doctor). Because Erick's death was so sudden and dramatic, the story briefly made national news. I viewed the tragic incident as yet another example of why "licensed" naturopaths, such as those in California or other…

Answering "scientific" arguments of animal rights extremists

I spent a lot of time writing about animal rights extremists who have threatened to harass the children of an investigator whom they view as a "vivisector" and how they fetishize the very violence they decry. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see that a fellow ScienceBlogger, namely Eric Michael Johnson of The Primate Diaries, appears to share some of the scientific misconceptions that the animal rights extremists when he prefaces an Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front with: Vivisection, or what in polite society is merely called animal experimentation, is a barbaric practice that…

As others see us

I found this comment, left on the blog of the negligible Bryan Appleyard, to be immensely entertaining. It's the combination of hyperbole, unintentional irony, and oblivious incompetence, all spiced with a germ of truth, that makes it amusing. Myers, like Dawkins when he's tired and especially the gruesome Dennett, survives entirely on scorn and venom. His response to any challenge is simply to increase the number and volume of schoolyard taunts. These guys are intellectual alchemists who have perfected the art of using invective to turn philistinism into apparent sagacity. The formula goes…

Good Schools and 'Bad' Students

When I was a post-doc, I once advised a student who definitely needed some remedial language skills help (since then, said student has gone on to be a very successful doctor--I take no credit for the student's success, but I just want to note that this student was very bright). What I learned is that, while additional resources are necessary for remedial education, they are not sufficient. That funding needs to be placed in the hands of competent teachers. Which leads me to this excellent point about remedial education by Bob Somerby (italics mine; bold original): Throughout this report, […

Obama Has Lost My Vote

One of the most successful anti-poverty programs ever created in the U.S. is the Social Security program. Despite that, conservatives and Republicans, primarily for ideological reasons, have attempted to dismantle the program--if not in one fell swoop, then incrementally. One of the tactics that conservatives have used is to try to convince people that Social Security "won't be there" when they retire. To do this, they gin up the notion that Social Security is in crisis, even though that is simply not true. The reason for this is that, as mandated by law, the Social Security Trustees are…

A "Literature Guy's" Response to the Anti-Cullen Fervor

A few days ago, I posted about the conservative dogpile over at the Weather Channel because one of their bloggers had some very scathing comments about global warming denialists. I found this post by a self-described "literature guy" which makes two very good points. First, he makes a very good point about expertise and trust (italics mine): Read posts by people who are angry that Dr. Cullen has made the monumentally unremarkable statement that anti global-warming dogma is junk science and that meteorologists--who have as much right to offer authoritative opinions on climate change as Imams…

AMA Seeks Ban on Ads For New Drugs

The American Medical Association has called for a temporary ban on all direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs. Sounds 'elitist'? Well, so are professional sports. But only an idiot would trust Madison Avenue over his or her doctor. (an aside: I'm not an MD. I just have the occassional good sense to listen to people who know what they are talking about). From ScripNews (subscription only): The American Medical Association is calling for a temporary ban on direct-to-consumer advertising for newly approved prescription drugs, with the length of the ban to be determined on a…

More on 'Progressives'

I've written before about internet progressives. I've never liked the term progressive because I have always associated them with the Progressives of the late nineteenth century: good-government types who are not very concerned with economic justice. I'm all for good government, following the law, and not engaging in hatemongering. But for me, those are not qualifications for membership in a political movement but for membership in the human race. I've written before about internet progressives. I've never liked the term progressive because I have always associated them with the…

The Failed Iraq Vote and A Nation of 'Friedmans'

I go away for a meeting, and Congress goes and holds a vote about the Iraq War. Like some, I'm disgusted by the outcome, but I think many are blaming the wrong people. To paraphrase Pogo, the enemy is us. Or least part of us. I'm not referring to the Mouth Breathing wing of the Republican Party (which is currently ascendant). One does not negotiate or convince authoritarians: empathy and abstraction are not their strong suit. The mindless Uruk-Hai will always oppose any thing deemed as 'surrender'--until their leaders point their lizard brains at something else. No, the group I'm…

Why Arthur C. Clarke mattered

Everyone on ScienceBlogsTM is talking about Arthur C. Clarke. I put up a short post where I noted his passing. I wasn't a super fan of Clarke's fiction, though I found it interesting and thought provoking. My personal favorite was the The City and the Stars, which tells the story of a future human civilization of immortal citizens who have turned away from the cosmos. Clarke, being a science fiction writer, does not depict this inward looking conservatism positively, though to some extent one might posit that it is a sort of Benthamite utopia. And that is the significance of men like…