Skeptical Raptor
Nearly eleven years ago, back in April 2005, I opened my work e-mail (I was working at a different university back then) and saw an e-mail from someone whose name I had seen before, one Mr. William P. O'Neill. Opening the e-mail, I was shocked to find an e-mail to Orac; worse, the e-mail was cc'ed to my cancer center director, my division chief, and my chairman. In it, O'Neill outed me as Orac and was threatening to sue me over a post I did. Naturally, it was interspersed with accusations of my being a "pharma shill" and having lied about him. Now here's the odd thing. This is the post that…
I've used my current pseudonym since at least the late 1990s, first on Usenet and then on the first incarnation of this blog. Not surprisingly in retrospect (although it surprised me at the time), people who didn't like me began trying back in the 1990s to "unmask" me. It began with Holocaust deniers. No, I'm not trying to Godwin this post; it really did begin with Holocaust deniers because, as longtime readers know, my "gateway drug" to skepticism was refuting the lies and misinformation of Holocaust deniers. So, round about the turn of the millennium, a group of Holocaust deniers managed to…