autismone
oracknows | May 26, 2014Regular readers might be wondering why my output was—shall we say?—less extensive last week than it usually is. I even skipped a weekday and then followed it up with a recycled post from my not-so-super-secret other blog, altered to be a bit more, yes, Insolent. The answer is a single word: Grants. I had a grant deadline. That's basically past now. However, today is a holiday, and, besides taking some time to pay tribute to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, I also plan on taking a day off from full-scale blogging as well. Fortunately, there are a couple of links to…
oracknows | May 21, 2014Well, it snuck up on me again, the way it has a tendency to do every year. Maybe it's because Memorial Day is so early this year. Maybe it's because there's just so much work to do this week given the multiple grant deadlines. Whatever the case, it just dawned on my last night that today is the first day of the yearly autism quackfest known as AutismOne (AO), which is being held at the Intercontinental O'Hare Hotel near Chicago. Of course, things are different this year. Given the schism between team Crosby and pretty much everyone else in the antivaccine movement, it's unclear what the deal…
oracknows | April 30, 2013Well, April is over, which means that Autism Awareness Month is almost over. While antivaccinationists are saying goodbye to April and whining about the very concept of "autism awareness," I can't help but realize that the autism quackfest known as AutismOne is less than a month away. Yes, every year around Memorial Day weekend, the glitterati of the autism quackery and antivaccine world descend upon an airport near Chicago's O'Hare airport (what a drag, given that it can take an hour to get to downtown from there at rush hour) in order to spin conspiracy theories about big pharma and the…
oracknows | May 13, 2010One of the biggest examples of either self-delusion or lying that emanates from the anti-vaccine movement is the oh-so-pious and indignant denials that inevitably follow from its members and leaders whenever someone like me has the temerity to point out that they are, in fact, anti-vaccine. The disingenuously angry denials usually take a form something like this, "I'm not anti-vaccine; I'm pro-safe vaccine." (This is Jenny McCarthy's favorite variant of this gambit). Another variant is for anti-vaccine activists to claim that they aren't anti-vaccine at all; they're just "concerned" that…