Entertainment/culture
oracknows | May 4, 2009Ugh.
Double ugh.
Sitting in my e-mail in box this morning were lots of your e-mails warning me about a bit of news that shows definitively that Oprah Winfrey is beyond redemption, at least when it comes to any sort of medicine or science (not nice, given that I hadn't even had my morning coffee yet).
The reason? Jenny McCarthy has inked a deal with Winfrey's Harpo Studios to develop a syndicated talk show and other media projects, including a blog, which has already started dishing out the stupid, albeit (thus far) not about vaccines and autism. Apparently sensing that her advocacy of the…
oracknows | April 28, 2009I know I've been ragging on The Huffington Post a lot lately. Trust me, I take no great pleasure in doing so. Indeed, more than anything else, it's been a major frustration for me. It's bad enough that HuffPo has been a hotbed of anti-vaccine propaganda and pseudoscience ever since its very inception, continuing through to today. Ditto Deepak Chopra, who has had a home there for at least three years now. But 2009 has been especially bad, adding proponents of distant healing, detox quackery, and, worst of all, the stylings of Kim Evans, a detox maven who thinks that antibiotics cause cancer.…
oracknows | April 27, 2009I've complained quite a bit about the news media in my hometown. Indeed, about a year ago, I was stunned at how utterly credulous one TV reporter was about--of all things--orbs. I mean, orbs! Even dedicated ghosthunters don't push orbs much anymore, realizing that they are nothing more than reflections or specks of dust reflecting lights in photographs. Then there's Steve Wilson and his forays into anti-vaccine nonsense, in which he recycles some of the oldest, most tired, most highly debunked canards. Lately, it's been some additional crappy reporting about Gardasil and a recent "autism"…
oracknows | April 25, 2009I just learned yesterday from a link a friend sent me and from Professor Deborah Lipstadt's blog that the team of producers who made The Soloist have optioned the movie rights to Professor Lipstadt's book History on Trial: My Day in Court With a Holocaust Denier, which is the story of the libel suit brought against her by Holocaust denier David Irving in the U.K., a lawsuit that Irving ultimately lost big time.
This is excellent news. Having read her book, as well as Richard Evans' account of the trial, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, I had always thought…
oracknows | April 22, 2009
After writing about a new low of pseudoscience published in that repository of all things antivaccine and quackery, The Huffington Post (do you even have to ask?), on Tuesday, I had hoped--really hoped--that I could ignore HuffPo for a while. After all, there's only so much stupid that even Orac can tolerate before his logic circuits start shorting out and he has to shut down a while so that his self-repair circuits can undo the damage. Besides, I sometimes think that the twit who created HuffPo, Arianna Huffington, likes the attention that pseudoscience turds dropped onto her blog by…
oracknows | April 16, 2009For skeptics, TV news in my hometown sucks.
Actually, it sucks for just about anyone with two brain cells to rub together, but it's especially painful for skeptics and scientists to watch. On one station last year, there was the most credulous report I've ever seen about--of all things--orbs! It was presented as though these "orbs" in photos were actually ghosts or spirit presences, rather than the reflections from bits of dust in the air or on the camera lens that we know them to be. As I pointed out at the time, not even die-hard ghostbusters take orbs seriously anymore. They're so...1970s…
oracknows | April 13, 2009You be the judge!
And patriotic, too!
Huh, huh, huh. He said "stimulus package."
oracknows | April 8, 2009I really need to rein myself in sometimes.
Yesterday, all pleased as punch with myself for my mad Google skillz and for thinking I figured out just what "alternative" therapy it was that Farrah Fawcett had undergone that had resulted in what sounded for all the world like a rectus sheath hematoma, I wrote about how I thought that Fawcett had been undergoing galvanotherapy in Bad Weissee in southern Germany. Either my mad Google skillz failed me, or I was just too lazy to scroll through a sufficient number of screens to find additional information that would have brought the most likely answer…
oracknows | April 7, 2009Note the followup post to this one, in which Orac admits error. You just have to read it, given how rarely Orac messes up when speculating...
Our cancer center has a large, open area interspersed with patient waiting areas, one of which is the clinic where I see patients, that I frequently must traverse to get to the elevators that will take me to my lab. In each patient area is a large-screen television to help patients pass the time during the inevitable wait to be seen by their doctors. As I happened to be wandering through that area on the way to my lab and office, I noticed on one of…
oracknows | April 6, 2009
Embedded video from CNN Video
Over the weekend, a lot of readers sent me links to Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's appearance on Larry King Live. (If you can't stand watching the embedded video of the segment, the transcript is here.) Fortunately for me (and, I hope, you), a "friend" of mine has written a comprehensive takedown of not just the nonsense spewed by Jenny and Jim, but of a new "study" released by Generation Rescue purporting to show that nations with low numbers of mandatory vaccines have low levels of autism. Of course, it shows nothing of the sort.
Find out why at Science-…
oracknows | April 5, 2009Sorry, all. I'm all tied up putting the finishing touches on a grant application. However, via Behind the Sofa, I did come across this trailer for the next Doctor Who special, to be aired on Easter:
I suspect I'll have to fire up BitTorrent.
oracknows | April 1, 2009...but sadly, it's not. Jenny McCarthy has struck again.
Yesterday, given the release of Jenny McCarthy's new book espousing antivaccinationism and autism quackery and the attendant media blitz the antivaccine movement has organized to promote it, I predicted that a wave of stupid is about to fall upon our great nation.
Well, the stupid has landed. And how. An interview with Jenny has just been published on the TIME Magazine website in which she "surpasses" herself. In fact, so dense is the stupid emanating from what passes for a "brain" in that empty head of hers that words fail me.…
oracknows | March 30, 2009Anyone who's read this blog for more than a month knows my dismal opinion of Indigo woo girl, ex-Playboy Playmate, and gross-out comedienne Jenny McCarthy, who since having a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder has transformed herself from D-list celebrity to A-list, where the "A" stands for "antivaccine." Her combination of obnoxiousness, the arrogance of ignorance, and a dogged determination to stoke the embers of the discredited idea that vaccines somehow cause autism have endangered public health in this country in the year and a half since she published her first autism book…
oracknows | March 27, 2009Since its very inception, the Huffington Post has been a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. Shortly after that, antivaccine woo-meisters like David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kimg Stagliano, and, apparently, one of the editors (Special Projects Editor Rachel Sklar) were joined by all-purpose woo-meisters like Deepak Chopra. True, for a brief period of time there appeared to be an occasional voice for vaccines on HuffPo, but they never lasted. After all, RFK, Jr.'s been there nearly four years now and David Kirby almost as long, while pro-vaccine commentary pops up briefly, gets shouted down by…
oracknows | March 26, 2009Because of my stands against dubious medical "therapies" and outright quackery and for science- and evidence-based medicine, I have been the frequent target of what I've come to call the "pharma shill gambit." It's a pretty stupid and common ad hominem attack in which the attacker, virtually always an advocate of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) tries to smear those of us who argue against pseudoscience and for science-based medicine as being hopelessly in the pocket of big pharma to the point where we make the statements we do because we're "shills" for the drug companies.…
oracknows | March 21, 2009This is about as geeky as it gets, but since a couple of the genes I study are homeobox genes, one of which is a HOX gene, one of which is not, I found this hilarious:
There you go: All you need to know about homeobox genes if you're not an expert in them.
Hat tip to Bioephemera.
oracknows | March 16, 2009By way of badscience.net:
Speak it, brother Ben!
Oh, and don't be too hard on your hairstyle and clothing in that one. I could totally picture you as an incarnation of The Doctor in that getup. That sweater vest does look a bit Peter Davison-ish, although the curly locks do rather echo Tom Baker.
oracknows | March 10, 2009Crank alert!
Age of Autism has announced that David Kirby and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will be on the David Bender Show at 1:15 PM today.
It would be nice if, to counter the antivaccine activists, reality-based listeners would call in, although I am very pessimistic that Bender would give them a fair shake, given that he has said this about Deepak Chopra:
I had the pleasure of interviewing a man whose work I've admired for many years, but had never met--Dr. Deepak Chopra.
Any man who admires Deepak Chopra's work has a serious problem with reality. I've never listened to Bender's show before,…
oracknows | March 8, 2009Sadly, the meeting's over, and I'm winging my way back home as this very post shows up on the blog for your edification. Because it's Sunday and, more importantly, because I'm too tired to produce anything substantive, I leave you with this bit of Asian weirdness sent to me by my sister. It left me scratching my head:
My sister informs me that this is actually a parody of this band:
Wow. This is just...incredible.
You know, I really have to get back to serious blogging about medicine and science. I can hear my traffic plummetting after this. Oh, well. Perhaps people more in the know than…
oracknows | March 7, 2009I realize I'm a bit late on this, but it's hard not to take the antivaccine movement's icon and apply her own misinformation about vaccines being "toxins" injected into the bloodstream against her. In fact, doing so is far more justified, given that last week she was quoted in an interview as singing paeans of praise to one of the most deadly poisons known to humankind: Botulinum toxin. See:
I think plastic surgery is fun if it makes you feel good. I'm all for looking better, so I plan on doing whatever I want when the time comes. I love Botox, I absolutely love it. I get it minimally, so I…