Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | October 14, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon, and may not be able to post anything new before Thursday afternoon or Friday. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
It seems like only yesterday that I was…
oracknows | October 13, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
Alright, I'll come right out and admit it up front. There was no part one to this piece. Well, there was, but it wasn't on…
oracknows | October 11, 2009I may have been a bit hard on Richard Dawkins lately, but, if he believed in saints, Dawkins would deserve sainthood for keeping his cool in the face of so much concentrated idiocy coming from Bill O'Reilly:
A couple of lovely O'Reilly quotes:
"I'm throwing in with Jesus because you guys can't tell us how it all got here?"
"When you guys figure it out, then come back to me."
Then, of course, O'Reilly couldn't resist pulling out the "fascism" gambit.
Geez, I don't think I could have restrained myself as well as Richard Dawkins did with Bill O'Reilly. In the face of such blustery nonsense,…
oracknows | October 9, 2009Now here's some tasty blogging for you to peruse and read while I'm on my way to Chicago. Hot off the presses, it's the 121st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle over at The Mad Skeptic.
Go. Read. Learn. Enjoy.
Orac will be back soon enough to annoy woo-meisters everywhere, and the occasional skeptic or two.
Then come back in two weeks, when The Young Australian Skeptics will be hosting. Nothing like a little skepticism from Down Under to enjoy!
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 | October 5, 2009...and, no, I don't mean Orac, his last few posts notwithstanding.
No, don't worry, this post is most definitely not about Bill Maher. Rather, it's how, while doing searches for that craziness, I found even more disturbing craziness. Even though I was disappointed in him on this one issue and even though I often don't agree with him on religion, never let it be said that I don't still have considerable admiration for Richard Dawkins. That's why, when I came across some truly over-the-top attacks on Dawkins, I thought it would be worthwhile to mention them, as a little wafer to cleanse the…
oracknows | September 30, 2009I love this guy's explanations of skepticism and critical thinking.
In this installment, it is quite clearly and cleverly why it's impossible to "prove" the existence of God or any god and thus why such gods are always a matter of faith and belief without evidence:
oracknows | September 20, 2009Three Imperial stormtroopers discuss the destruction of the Death Star on the first anniversary of its exploding:
Of course Palpatine must have known! The logic is inescapable. Why else would Darth Vader have been in his Tie fighter and not in the Death Star when Luke Skywalker blew it to kingdom come? Personally, I always thought it was because he was needed as the villain for the next couple of movies and so he had to escape, but that's just me.
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 6, 2009Here in the U.S., it's smack dab in the middle of a three day holiday weekend. Given that, I'm chilling for a while. There's some new material tomorrow, but today I have to head out for a celebration of my father-in-law's 70th birthday and, between that , to work on a talk I have to give on Friday. That makes today the perfect time to post a reminder that the 119th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching and will arrive on Thursday, September 10 at Cubik's Rube.
Instructions for submitting your skeptical blog posts are here. General guidelines for submission can be found here.
oracknows | September 5, 2009Praying to the porcelain god was never a more appropriate term:
Cue toilet and bathroom jokes...with Jesus!
oracknows | September 4, 2009Now here's one thing we skeptics could use more of:
Imagine you're moving to a new city, and you want to see what skeptic-themed events or groups are available. Wouldn't it be awesome if there was one central place you could go, plug in the destination, and get a list of skeptical stuff to do?
Or, say you're going to be traveling on business, and you want to find some evening entertainment that's a little more fulfilling than getting drunk at the airport bar watching TV in your hotel room. Wouldn't it be great if you could pull up a website and see what skeptical events were going on in that…
oracknows | September 1, 2009For a change of pace, I want to step back from medicine for this post, although, as you will see (I hope), the study I'm going to discuss has a great deal of relevance to the topics covered regularly on this blog. One of the most frustrating aspects of being a skeptic and championing critical thinking, science, and science-based medicine is just how unyielding belief in pseudscience is. Whatever realm of science in which there is pseudoscience Orac happens to wander into, he find beliefs that simply will not yield to science or reason. Whether it be creationism, quackery such as homeopathy,…
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 30, 2009It was just a high school marching band, like so many other high school bands in this country, a band that no one outside of the area of Sedalia, Missouri would be likely to have heard of, were it not for a breathtakingly stupid action by its school superintendent. You see, the band had an idea for a clever and amusing way to illustrate their theme for the year of the "Brass Evolutions." It was this T-shirt, to be worn by band members and reported by the Sedalia Democrat:
When I saw it by way of ERV, I thought it was kind of cute and a rather clever way of illustrating the theme. As the…
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 21, 2009I realize that this is a little late, but for those of you in southeast Michigan who might be able to make it, there's going to be an attempt at an inaugural Skeptics in the Pub. Thanks to fellow ScienceBlogger and skeptical rogue PalMD and even more so thanks a couple of his similarly skeptical (but blog-free thus far) buddies, this event will come to fruition tonight. If it works out, maybe next time we'll gussy it up a bit and perhaps even have a speaker. For now, though, it's just a chance to meet and greet in informal surroundings.
PalMD and Orac will be there. If you're in southeast…
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 | August 6, 2009Further tweaking of the crank conspiracy theory that is the "birther" movement:
Obama Debunks Birther Conspiracy - watch more funny videos
If President Obama is a Cylon, maybe he was born in Kenya and Hawaii.
oracknows | August 4, 2009Wow. After I wrote a post last week about the "birthers," cranks who believe that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, and therefore is not a natural born U.S. citizen, and therefore is not eligible to be President of the United States. Like all good conspiracy theorist cranks, they trot out all sorts of reasons why all the evidence showing that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii 48 years ago today is invalid or how there is a huge coverup. (Isn't there always in any good conspiracy theory?) Meanwhile, they constantly demand that they be "shown the birth certificate." As if that would shut them…