jenny mccarthy
oracknows | March 9, 2010Way back on May 25, 2005, I first noticed something about a certain political group blog. It was something unsavory, something vile, something pseudoscientific. It was the fetid stench of quackery, but not just any quackery. It was anti-vaccine quackery, and the blog was Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post, where a mere 16 days after its being unleashed upon an unsuspecting world I characterized the situation as Antivaccination rhetoric running rampant on The Huffington Post. It was the start of a long running series that rapidly resulted in parts 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the course of a mere…
oracknows | February 22, 2010I'm beginning to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn when it comes to the public zeitgeist regarding the anti-vaccine movement. Not only have there been a lot of stories lately that eschew the false "balance" that used to be so common in news stories about vaccines, but even comedy magazines are dumping on the anti-vaccine movement. For instance, Cracked.com has an article entitled 5 Things The Media Loves Pretending Are News. What's #5?
Let's ask the idiots about science:
When it comes to matters of opinion or personal beliefs, it is absolutely the duty of the news…
oracknows | February 19, 2010On Wednesday, Steve Novella did a nice analysis of the recent study showing that signs of autism can be detected as early as six months of age. However, it was flawed by one clear misstatement, which was brought to his attention in the comments and which he then promptly corrected. Not that that stopped our old "friend" J.B. Handley, chief anti-vaccine propagandist for Generation Rescue from leaping into the fray with a goalpost-shifting, disingenuous, and insulting misrepresentation of the overall point of Steve's post. Par for the course for Mr. Handley.
Today, Steve has responded with a…
oracknows | February 11, 2010
"Would you like to touch my monkey? Touch him! Love him!"
J. B. Handley wants to touch see Andrew Wakefield's monkeys.
How do I know this? Well, there's just the little matter of his entitling his most recent excretion of flaming stupidity Show me the monkeys! and repeating "Show me the monkeys!" eleven times in the course of his post. My guess is that J.B. was trying to get a vibe going, perhaps like a preacher giving a sermon with cadences leading up to repeating the same phrase over and over again, with the intended effect of getting the audence to repeat the phrase when he says it, with…
oracknows | February 8, 2010It looks as though Generation Rescue's bubble-brained spokescelebrities Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey have finally found their niche. Can you guess where it is? Come on, take two guesses! That's right. They've made it into NaturalNews.com, crossposted from a post they had their handlers make to Age of Autism, entitled A Statement from Jenny McCarthy & Jim Carrey: Andrew Wakefield, Scientific Censorship, and Fourteen Monkeys. Truly, it is one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen on AoA or NaturalNews.com. You'll see why in a moment. Suffice it to say that Jenny and Jim have the most…
sciencepunk | May 14, 2009
Despite what everyone will say about the boggle-eyed madness contained in the video below the fold, you have to admit science is never more fun than with a ex-Playboy model explaining how Iran and Iraq will turn your chef cells into Rambo. I'm begging for some remixes of this - get to work, people!
Hat Tip Skeptobot.
terrasig | May 5, 2009I wanted to contribute to today's discussion of anti-vaccinationist, pseudoscience-pawning Jenny McCarthy being given not only an appearance on Oprah but, as reported by Orac, a deal with Oprah's production company for her own show.
The public attention that Jenny McCarthy's rants have gotten were bad enough. But, now, to have the soapbox of one of the most influential names in society?
I had to go outside the science blogging community with this. So, I wrote to the Philadelphia attorney who writes the award-winning blog, Field Negro.
Good evening, Counselor,
I know that your view of Oprah…
amillikan | May 5, 2009
The billionaire media icon Oprah Winfrey sealed a contractual deal with notorious anti-vaccination supporter Jenny McCarthy Monday that will enable McCarthy to spread her belief that vaccines cause autism across several platforms. This viewpoint is vehemently opposed in the scientific community, as it remains virtually unsupported after years of rigorous scientific investigation and, if heeded as true, has lethal consequences in the form of diseases like measles, mumps and rubella. With support from Oprah, McCarthy is slated to host a syndicated talk show and maintain a blog. According to…
palmd | April 23, 2009It's no secret that I think the Huffington Post is an teeming den execrable pseudoscientific snakes. Still, when it comes to fanning the vaccination manufatroversy, they are really off the deep end. Take the latest piece of dreck on Jenny McCarthy, GoD (Google Doctorate). It's written by the infamous "Dr." Patricia Fitzgerald, and this is where I get cranky. Worse than all the drivel spouted by Jenny is HuffPo giving their imprimatur of authority to Fitzgerald. Let me 'splain.
Look, there's a lot of ways to legitimately gain the title of "doctor". The most common are to go to a…
palmd | April 23, 2009Orac isn't known for his sound bites. He tends to write pieces which, in the blogosphere, might be considered rather long, and for good reason---he has a lot to say, and he says it well. But sometimes there is a gem of insolence that is so apt, it must be reshared:
But what really makes this analogy so brain dead is that it was the very epidemiological methods that have so consistently failed to find any correlation between vaccines and autism that led scientists to realize that smoking is strongly correlated with cancer. Jim [Carrey], while accepting the epidemiology linking tobacco smoke…
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 20, 2009About a week and a half ago, something happened that makes me realize that the Jenny and Jim antivaccine propaganda tour that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago was clearly only phase I of Generation Rescue's April public relations offensive. About ten days ago, courtesy of J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, who in order to have a couple of famous faces fronting his organization has allowed himself to be displaced, so that Generation Rescue has now been "reborn" as Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's Autism Organization (the better to capitalize on her D-list celebrity yoked to Jim…
sciencepunk | April 11, 2009
Over at the Guardian's Lost In Showbiz, Marina Hyde continues her campaign to steal my heart, this time by lancing those celebrities who confuse their ability to secure a table at the Ivy with the authority to talk sensibly on matters of science. We're looking at you, Madonna:
Behold, the most serious challenge to the Royal Society in that august body's 350-year history - the medical musings of Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow and Stella McCartney. These women are not just singers, or actresses, or fashion designers. They are distinguished professors at the University of Celebrity, and are coating…
palmd | April 6, 2009I don't know what it's like to be autistic. I don't know what it's like to raise an autistic child. For this knowledge, I have to rely on others, and there are plenty of talented bloggers out there who write about these experiences all the time. What I do know is that there is a cadre of autism "activists" out there who do a great disservice to people who do know something about these experiences.
One such example is Dr. Jerry Kartzinel, who co-wrote Jenny McCarthy's latest monument to her own idiocy. "Dr. Jerry" is infamous among many parents of autistic children for this quote:
Autism,…
palmd | April 2, 2009"You know the moon landings were ginned up on a Hollywood sound stage, right?"
"Hey, how come it's so hard to get the Truth out there about the 9/11 attacks being staged by the CIA/Mossad?"
"I don't know why they think I'm crazy; the aliens really did probe my anus."
We hear crap like this all the time, but these wackos never get ink in major media outlets because, well, they are so clearly paranoid and deranged. So why do we see a similarly paranoid, deranged person like Jenny McCarthy on the pages of Time magazine? Is it because she's more photogenic than most alien abductees? Is it…
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 31, 2009
Get ready for some serious stupid, folks, stupid that threatens to engulf all reason, as a black hole engulfs all nearby matter that falls into its gravitational field.
Although I knew that Jenny McCarthy was soon to release another book promoting autism quackery, I had thought it wasn't coming out for a month or two. The book is entitled Healing and Preventing Autism: A Complete Guide, written by Jenny and her partner in autism quackery Dr. Jerry Kartzinel. Dr. Kartzinel, some may recall, wrote the foreword to Jenny McCarthy's very first paean to autism quackery back in 2007 and was…
oracknows | March 31, 2009I may have been deluding myself when I talked about 2009 shaping up to be a bad year for antivaccinationists. It turns out that the antivaccine movement is succeeding.
That's right, a cadre of upper middle class, scientifically illiterate parents, either full of the arrogance of ignorance or frightened by leaders of the antivaccine movement, such as J.B. Handley, Barbara Loe Fisher, Jenny McCarthy, or the rest of the crew at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, are succeeding in endangering your children. Although the U.K. got a head start in bringing back the measles and mumps,…
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 9, 2009
Regular readers of this blog know pretty much what I think of Jenny McCarthy. In brief, she's an opportunistic, scientifically ignorant but media-savvy twit whose hubris leads her to believe that her Google University education, coupled with her personal anecdotal experience, render her proclamations that vaccines cause autism and that "biomedical" quackery can cure it more convincing than all that boring science, epidemiology, and clinical trials. Indeed, her critical thinking skills are so poor that she was once a huge booster of the "Indigo Child" movement, but had to try to purge the…