Pseudoscience
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 4, 2010I realize I complain periodically about when I get into what seems to me to be a rut in which I'm writing pretty much only about anti-vaccine lunacy. This is just such a week, when the news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, first with Andrew Wakefield's being found to have behaved unethically and dishonestly by the British General Medical Council, only to be followed up a few days later with the news that the editors of The Lancet had retracted his 1998 paper, the paper that started the MMR scare in the U.K. and launched a thousand autism quacks. Meanwhile, the cranks…
oracknows | January 24, 2010Mike Adams is confused.
I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn't have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there you go. Speaking of writing an NIH R01, that's exactly what I'm doing now, hence the decreased blogorrhea over the last few days, but sometimes trying to cram a five year project into the 13 pages (one page for specific aims and twelve to describe the project) makes my head hurt so much that reading and…
oracknows | January 4, 2010Over the holidays, I stayed at home for a combination of some relaxation and some grant writing. (I know, weird.) As I was perusing some of the links I saved during that time, it occurs to me that I totally forgot about one particularly amazing bit of hilarity, courtesy of our old "friend" Deepak Chopra. Given that it was over a week ago, it's probably not worth going into the full Orac mode on it any more, old news and all, but I couldn't let it go completely unremarked upon because it's just so amazingly, hysterically funny. Appearing two days after Christmas, Chopra's post was entitled Woo…
oracknows | December 18, 2009Since I happen to have fallen into the topic of anthropogenic global warming, before I move back to medical topics I might as well have a little fun. Certainly, I could use some, given that I just wrote two posts in which I felt forced to criticize someone whom I admire greatly. Besides, it's been over a week since I last blogged about vaccines on this blog. that has to be some sort of record. Why wreck it now? It feels good to take a break from the topic, and there's always next week. I have no doubt that the anti-vaccine movement will produce something begging for some not-so-Respectful…
oracknows | December 17, 2009Yesterday, I wrote one of my typical Orac-ian length posts that was unusual. What was unusual about it was not its length. Rather, what was unusual about it was the target of its criticism, perhaps one of the last people in the world I would ever have expected to have to have taken issue with, James Randi himself, who had posted a truly embarrassing post in which he cast doubt upon anthropogenic global warming (AGW). What provoked my dismay was not so much that Randi had questioned AGW; what dismayed me so was how he did it. His post, as I pointed out, was chock full of logical fallacies and…
oracknows | December 12, 2009I've decided to chill this weekend after five years of insanity. However, while you anxiously await yet another hemidecade of Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful, what better way to do so than checking out the awesome Tim Minchin and his most excellent nine minute beat poem "Storm":
Who says skepticism and art don't mix?
oracknows | December 11, 2009
Has it really been that long?
It was a dismally overcast Saturday five years ago when, on a whim after having read a TIME Magazine article about how 2004 was supposedly the Year of the Blogger, I sat down in front of my computer, found Blogspot, and the first incarnation of Respectful Insolence was born. If anyone is curious, this was my first test post, and this was my first substantive post (well, sort of). Every year (at least the ones where I remember my blogiversary, I find it particularly interesting to go back to the beginning and see how true to my original vision for this blog I've…
Deepak Chopra and his Choprawoo translated: "Skeptics, take my ill-informed speculations seriously!"
oracknows | December 1, 2009He's baaaack.
Deepak Chopra. Remember him? It's been a while since I've said much about him and him alone. True, I've gone after him this year when he joined up with three other major league woo-meisters Dean Ornish, Rustum Roy, and Andrew Weil to try to try to help Senator Tom Harkin hijack the health care overhaul bill currently before Congress. However, given that a couple of years ago, Chopra was the man for whose abuses of quantum theory, evolution, and "universal consciousness" ideas I coined the term "Choprawoo" and the only response ever needed to Choprawoo, it's been a while since I…
oracknows | December 1, 2009I debated whether or not to blog about this. The reason is that I suspect that gathering a lot of attention and controversy is exactly what Generation Rescue wanted when it posted what I'm about to blog about. On the other hand, no matter how low my opinion is of the principals who run Generation Rescue's anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, there were limits below which they wouldn't go. Oh, sure, AoA has launched at least three broadsides at me over the last year and a half, all penned by the ever-offensive blowhard J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue who's allowed himself…
oracknows | November 30, 2009A couple of years ago, fellow ScienceBlogger Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism Blog coined a most excellent term to describe all manners of pseuodscience, quackery, and crankery. The term, "crank magnetism," describes the tendency of cranks not to mind it when they see crankery in others. More specifically, it describes how cranks of one variety (for instance, HIV/AIDS denialists, will be attracted to another form of crankery (for instance, anti-vaccinationism or the 9/11 Truth movement) because, as Mark put it, cranks and pseudoscientists see themselves as iconoclasts, brave mavericks opposed…
oracknows | November 27, 2009I happen to be fortunate enough this year to have taken the Friday after Thanksgiving off, and it is a very good thing indeed. However, this morning, having indulged in the American tradition of stuffing myself full of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and various other most excellent and hearty foods, all accompanied by some hearty ale. What that means is that I'm still suffering some of the after effects of food coma. What that further means for the blog is that I don't feel up to tackling something that will require me to exercise my neurons too much. So, in my food-induced haze, I asked…
oracknows | October 7, 2009
Watch CBS News Videos Online
A number of you sent me this link. It's to a video (above) of Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News' resident anti-vaccine propagandist, putting on a nauseating display of sucking up to Andrew Wakefield over his recent monkey study, the one that I deconstructed yesterday to show it for the lousy science that it is. Attkisson is a true believer. She's done this sort of thing before, occasionally to unintentionally hilarious effect; she's especially enamored of writing hit pieces on Paul Offit. Even worse, Attkisson is in bed with Generation Rescue and Age of Autism,…
oracknows | September 7, 2009If there's been a theme running through this blog, it's been the importance of science and critical thinking. The main focus of this emphasis on skepticism, of course, has been medicine, which makes sense, given that I'm a doctor and a cancer researcher, but I don't limit myself to just medicine. However, as part of my emphasis on science-based medicine (SBM) as being the best methodology to provide the best patient care that we can, besides the random quackery deconstructions,
I've tended to harp on two topics over the years. First, there's the subject of what Dr. R. W. has called "…
oracknows | September 1, 2009Seventy years ago today, the massed armies of the Third Reich poured across the Polish border, marking the official start of World War II. It would require nearly six years, millions of deaths, and the combined might of the Soviet Union, United States, Great Britain, and numerous other nations to bring the war to an end, with Hitler utterly defeated. I mark this occasion because of my interest in World War II history, the Holocaust, Holocaust denial, and because my heritage is Polish through my father's side. Another thing that needs to be understood about September 1, 1939 is that it marked…
oracknows | August 26, 2009I realize that I'm possibly stepping into proverbial lion's den with this one, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As you may also recall, the arguments and assertions that Chris and Sheril made in their book ruffled more than a few feathers around ScienceBlogs, chief among them the big macher of atheism around here, P.Z. Myers, who really, really didn't like…
oracknows | August 9, 2009Too bad it's missing one big one. There's nothing about the birther movement there:
See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.
I think that about sums it all up: moon hoax, 9/11, the Illuminati, the Masons. What more could there be?
oracknows | July 28, 2009In discussions of that bastion of what Harriet Hall (a.k.a. The SkepDoc) likes to call "tooth fairy science," where sometimes rigorous science, sometimes not, is applied to the study of hypotheses that are utterly implausible and incredible from a basic science standpoint (such as homeopathy or reiki), the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I've often taken Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) to task. That's because Senator Harkin is undeniably the father of that misbegotten beast that has sucked down over $2.5 billion of taxpayer money with nothing to show for it. It's…
oracknows | July 27, 2009Last week, I expressed my surprise and dismay that the Atheist Alliance International chose Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award. I was dismayed because Maher has championed pseudoscience, including dangerous antivaccine nonsense, germ theory denialism complete with repeating myths about Louis Pasteur supposedly recanting on his deathbed, a href="http://oracknows.blogspot.com/2005/12/bill-maher-anti-vax-wingnut.html">hostility towards "Western medicine" and an affinity for "alternative medicine," a history of sympathy to HIV/AIDS denialists, and the activities of PETA through his…
oracknows | July 23, 2009Although I often don't agree with him and have cooled on him lately, I still rather like--even admire--Richard Dawkins. While it's true I've taken him to task for having a tin ear for bioethics, lamented his walking blindly right into charges of anti-Semitism (no, I don't think he's an anti-Semite), and half-defended/half-criticized him for seeming to endorsing eugenics. What's really irritated me about him in the past, though, is his use of the "Neville Chamber atheist" gambit that I so detest, so much so that I once featured Dawkins in a Hitler Zombie episode (albeit not as the victim). On…