Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | May 9, 2008Last week's woo was pretty darned hard to top, don't you think? It had it all, after all: Boner potentiation, penis enlargement, magnets, near infrared, and more. The only thing it lacked that would have made it absolutely perfect woo were references to pseudoscientific "vibration" or, even better, quantum theory. That's the reason I could only give it a 9.5/10 rather than a perfect score of 10/10. All I can say is: Better luck next time.
In looking for something that could at least live up to last week, if not surpass it, I was surprised that there actually was such a link in my ever-…
oracknows | May 8, 2008Sometimes being a skeptic can be a real bitch. And no one knows that better than the host of the latest installment of a blog carnival that has, believe it or not, been running over three years now, the ever-popular Skepbitch. She's served up a heaping helping of the best skeptical bitching from the last two weeks. Head on over and enjoy!
Next up to host is Action Skeptics on May 22. If you're a blogger, start getting your best skeptical posts ready to submit for the next Skeptics' Circle.
Finally, as always, if you're interested in hosting, check out the schedule and guidelines, as well as…
sa smith | May 8, 2008I was really mad this morning. I glanced at my new issue of Discover, and noticed yet another article glorifying HIV Deniers. Its not online yet, but its a seven page spread on Peter Duesberg.
So I brought it to work with me so everyone had to vomit as much as I did. They changed my perspective a bit.
First, Im still mad, but Im not as mad. I dont think they are glorifying him-- I think theyre playing to the 'fair and balanced all sides' game that 'journalists' think is so clever these days, which is still pathetic.
On the one hand, Jeanne Lenzer plays off of EXPELLEDs theme. You could…
sa smith | May 8, 2008This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that!
I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;)
I like to make fun of how crappy traditional media has become as much as the next person, but I also hate it when people complain about how bad something is, without offering positive, constructive criticism. Examples of what is right, so the offending parties can improve…
sa smith | May 6, 2008You all need to email bomb CNN.
My HIV Denier boyfriend, Leonard 'CALL ME DOCTOR OR IM HANGING UP' Horowitz was scheduled to be on CNN earlier this week (he got bumped, but still).
How did he receive such an honor with his flat, man-like, boobless chest??
Turns out Obamas choice of crazy sky-god-medium, Rev Wright, is a HUGE fan of Horowitzs, and has had no problem spitting in the face of every HIV researcher on the planet.
MODERATOR: In your sermon, you said the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. So I ask you: Do you honestly believe…
sa smith | May 6, 2008This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that!
I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;)
The beast... he has reemerged...
Heres the link to the debate (Thank you Reggie!!)
Yay! I finally feel better! Turns out I had a freak combination of a cold and allergies. So a few puffs of Flonase and a Claritin perked me right back up! Finally! So heres my pov from the '…
sa smith | May 5, 2008Another fluff post. Again, I apologize, but I think I whupted todays test, so I dont feel bad :P
During tests weeks like this, I love to take study breaks by playing video games.
Not 'WoW' games that end up distracting you more than relaxing you-- Im one of those 'alternative' gamers that has benefited from the third revolution in gaming. I luv brain games. Ive always loved the 'Zelda' series, but now there is a whole new group of 'brain games'-- 'Brain Age', 'Big Brain Academy', and the like. Theyre nice because they are a 'break', but Im not shutting my brain off entirely or…
oracknows | May 3, 2008Time's flying by once again.
You know, the longer I serve as the organizer of this great endeavor that I did not start, namely The Skeptics' Circle, the more it amazes me just how good it routinely is. It also amazes me just how fast time flies between editions. This time around is no exception. Already, the next edition is due in a mere four days, on May 8, 2008. This time around, the host will be The Skepbitch. Besides having an utterly awesome name for her blog, the Skepbitch is--well--a skeptic. In fact, so dedicated is she that she was willing to subject herself to a lecture by Sylvia…
oracknows | May 3, 2008Does anyone remember a few months ago, when I wrote about Ben Stein? No? Here, then, I'll jog your memory. Ben Stein and his involvment in that piece of cinematic excrement Expelled! "inspired" me to--if you'll excuse the term--resurrect a certain recurring character from the very early days of this blog. Yes, I'm talking about the ever-dreaded Hitler Zombie, who returned after more than a year's absence to take a huge chomp out of Ben Stein's brain.
Now we're seeing the results of that chomp, and I'm not just talking about the ridiculous claims in Expelled! that "Darwinism" leads inevitably…
oracknows | May 2, 2008Over the last few years, depressingly, we've witnessed a rise in antivaccinationist activism. Beginning with the highly unethical activities of Andrew Wakefield and his bogus study in 1998 that set off a scare over the MMR vaccine supposedly causing autism that led to declining vaccination rates and skyrocketing measles and mumps rates in the U.K., it metastasized to the U.S. with hyped up concerns that the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal used in most vaccines until 2001 was a cause of autism. Over the last year or so, it's been helped along by useful celebrity idiots like Jenny…
oracknows | May 2, 2008
As I approach the second anniversary of Your Friday Dose of Woo (now only a mere two months away), it occurs to me: What sort(s) of woo, if any, have I neglected? Is there a kind of woo that is commonplace but has somehow slipped under Orac's radar? Hard as it may be to believe, there have now been over 100 installments of my weekly bit of vanity. Looking back over it, I see all manner of woo. Quantum homeopathy? Check? Sound healing? Of course! DNA Activation? That was definitely a fun one! Detoxification footpads? Not once, but twice! 9/11 Truther conspiracy theories? Yes, I've even…
oracknows | May 1, 2008It's late, and I'm working on tomorrow's installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo; so I don't have the time to give this particularly dumb guest editorial Think twice before you vaccinate your child in the Winona Daily News, which is packed full of antivaccinationist lies and pseudoscience, a proper dose of the not-so-Respectful Insolence that it deserves. Suffice it to say that, while denying that they are antivaccination (as all antivaccinationists do), writers Jim and Laurie Jenkinson then go on to prove exactly the opposite by spewing an amazing collection of idiocy, including citing Robert…
oracknows | May 1, 2008Yet another dubious study has been making the rounds of mercury militia websites and discussion forums. The study is being played up and touted by certain very excitable and scientifically not-too-bright militia members and woo-meisters like Mike Adams as some sort of vindication of the scientifically discredited hypothesis that mercury in vaccines somehow causes autism.
It doesn't.
It is, however, somewhat interesting in that their embrace of this bit of questionable research shows how desperate the mercury militia is to grasp to any bit of peer-reviewed published research that they can spin…
oracknows | April 30, 2008
I may have joked a bit about certain surgeons whom, because they say such dumb, pseudoscientific things with alarming regularity, I consider embarrassments to the noble profession that is surgery. Usually, it's been surgeons who reveal an astonishing ignorance of the science of evolution as they parrot long discredited and debunked canards about evolution while spouting creationist nonsense. You know about whom I speak: surgeons like neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor and general surgeon Dr. Henry Jordan. But, as mind-numbingly dumb as some of the things that, for example, Dr. Egnor has said…
oracknows | April 26, 2008Yesterday, I wrote about what I thought to be a fairly amusing story. It was the story of one hapless candidate for the Republican nomination for Congress in a district in northwest Indiana whose excuses for giving a talk to the American National Socialist Workers Party's Chicago celebration of Adolf Hitler's 119th birthday last weekend can only be characterized as what in LOL Cat lingo one would call "EPIC FAIL" (he claimed he didn't think people there were of a "Nazi mindset"). I've also written more than I now wish I had about the inherent dishonesty of Ben Stein's claim in the movie…
oracknows | April 25, 2008
There's a new woo in town. Unfortunately, it's the same as the old woo.
I first noticed it around Christmas. Inexplicably, I started getting a greatly increased amount of traffic to an old Your Friday Dose of Woo post of mine. The post to which I'm referring is one that I did a year and a half ago about some fabulously silly woo that claimed to remove toxins through the soles of your feet through a special foot pad, which inspired me to entitle the post These boots were made for detoxifyin'. This product in question was called "Miracle Patches" and, it was claimed, can remove all manner of…
oracknows | April 24, 2008Heh.
Before I abandon the disgusting piece of fecal matter that is Ben Stein's Expelled! for (hopefully) a long, long time, if not forever, I can't resist pointing out that it's good to see that at least someone totally gets it and sees through the lies. It's even better to see it coming from a hometown publication Real Detroit Weekly (you'll need to scroll almost all the way to the bottom of the web page to get past all the other movie reviews). A couple of gems:
In addition to the standard creationist claptrap, Ben Stein argues that there is a link between acceptance of evolution and…
oracknows | April 24, 2008Yesterday, I did a rather long post that used as its introduction an assertion by bioethicist Arthur Caplan in a review of the anti-evolution propaganda movie Expelled! that the claim that Darwinism led more or less directly to the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust denial. In my post, I concluded that I don't agree with that assertion and that likening Ben Stein's claims in the movie actually weakened his otherwise excellent article that appropriately pointed out the inherent immorality and dishonesty in the way the movie links Darwinism to the Holocaust. To my surprise, Dr. Caplan actually…
oracknows | April 21, 2008A couple of weeks ago, I commented about a frivolous, SLAPP-style subpoena directed at one of the most thorough, rational bloggers about autism out there, Kathleen Seidel by Clifford Shoemaker, the attorney for Rev. Lisa Sykes and her husband Seth Sikes, both of whom who are suing Bayer for alleged "vaccine damage" as a cause of their child's autism. The subpoena in question, issued mere hours after Seidel published a well-researched but particularly unflattering post about Clifford Shoemaker's activities suing vaccine manufacturers, was so obviously a fishing expedition designed to…
oracknows | April 19, 2008I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I am somewhat. As loony as the President of Iran Ahmoud Ahmadinejad is, as much of an Energizer Bunny of Holocaust denial and host of a conference for Holocaust denial as he is, even I didn't think he would go this far. But, thanks to Mark Hoofnagle and Screw Loose Change, I learn that he has. I should have seen it coming:
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States said Wednesday it was "speechless" after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad voiced doubts about the accepted version of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
"I am not sure…