Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | December 22, 2007Quoth global warming "skeptic" (translation: "crank") Senator Inhofe:
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) got the crowd cheering early in the day. "I have been called -- my kids are all aware of this -- dumb, crazy man, science abuser, Holocaust denier, villain of the month, hate-filled, warmonger, Neanderthal, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun," he announced. "And I can just tell you that I wear some of those titles proudly."
Inhofe repeated his view that man-made global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," and he quarreled with a Bush administration proposal to list…
oracknows | December 21, 2007
People never cease to amaze me.
Sometimes it's in a good way, when a person whom I would least expect to be capable of it does something really kind or brilliant. Sometimes it's in a bad way. One of the bad ways people never cease to amaze me is how someone can continue down a path that has obviously caused them harm. I was reminded by this by a news story that's been making the rounds of the media. I first saw it a couple of days ago on the local ABC affiliate, and it seems to be making the rounds of many affiliates nationwide. It's the story of Paul Karason.
Paul Karason is blue, and an…
oracknows | December 21, 2007It occurred to me. For someone looking for last minute Christmas gifts for the credulous, perhaps the Chi Machine, which I mentioned this morning, won't fit the bill. One thing about it is that it's too limited in what it can do, and if I'm going to give the gift of woo for Christmas, I really want to give the gift of woo.
That's why I'm really grateful to a regular reader who, for reasons that will become obvious, will probably want to remain nameless, who turned me on to another great gift for the holidays. Even better, it comes from a most unexpected source. Yes, with the help of Duke…
oracknows | December 21, 2007
As hard as it is to believe, yet another Christmas is fast approaching. I can feel it in the blogosphere. Heck, I can feel it here on the ol' blog. Once garrulous commenters here have gone strangely silent for the most part (at least in comparison to their usual prodigious output), and traffic has already begun to plummet in anticipation of the even bigger plunge that it usually takes during that dead week between Christmas and New Years. It's almost enough to make me wonder whether I should just put the blog on hiatus until after the 1st.
Almost.
I might slow down a bit and throw a few…
oracknows | December 20, 2007As regular readers of the Skeptics' Circle know, hosts are usually given pretty wide latitude about how they handle the presentation of the posts. This time around, host Martin Rundkvist, who's hosted an excellent edition before (albeit with a puzzling theme), decides that a large dish brush is just the thing for the 76th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. Why? Who knows? It must be a Swedish thing. Fortunately, the carnival is chock full of bloggy goodness (albeit with one exception that somehow found its way in there) in a fine, no-nonsense (other than the brush) presentation and thus well…
oracknows | December 14, 2007
It's almost here.
No, not Christmas, although that's almost here too. what I'm talking about is the fast-approaching 76th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which is due to land at Aardvarchaelogy on Thursday, December 20, right in time for the holidays. (And what better time to indulge in a serious dose of skepticism than in the midst of all this pre-Christmas cheer?) Ebenezer Scrooge would be proud. Well, the pre-visitation Scrooge, anyway. The post-visitation Scrooge clearly believed in ghosts and other paranormal happenings, like visitations promised to happen in over three nights…
oracknows | December 14, 2007
I have to confess, the ol' Folder of Woo was looking a little thin this week.
No, it's not that I'm running out of topics (a.k.a. targets) for my usual Friday jaunt into the wacky world of woo. Far from it. It's just that, in the run-up to writing this, perusing the odd stuff therein just wasn't getting me fired up to do the feature the way that it usually does. There just wasn't anything there that was grabbing my attention and refusing to let it go, as has happened so often in weeks past. I began to worry whether Your Friday Dose of Woo has been going on too long (it's approaching a year…
oracknows | December 13, 2007Oh, no, not again.
Respectful Insolence⢠has been invaded over the last few days by a particularly idiotic and clueless homeopath named Sunil Sharma, who's infested the comments of a post about how U.K. homeopaths are complaining about all of us mean skeptics who have the temerity to point out the mind-numbingly obvious about homeopathy, namely that it is based on magical thinking, goes against huge swaths of well-understood science and thus would require some very compelling evidence indeed to be worth being taken seriously by scientists (evidence that homeopaths have been thus far unable…
oracknows | December 12, 2007Readers may have noticed (or maybe they haven't) that I haven't commented at all on the Guillermo Gonzalez case. As you may recall, Gonzalez is an astronomer at Iowa State University, as well as advocate of "intelligent design" creationism. In May 2007, ISU denied tenure to Gonzalez. Not surprisingly, the ID movement in general and its propagnda arm (Discovery Institute) in particular have done their best to try to portray Gonzalez as a martyr who was "persecuted" for his beliefs and denied his "academic freedom." Despite the attempts of the DI to milk it for all its PR value, as usual, the…
oracknows | December 11, 2007It's been a while since I've visited the cesspool that is Uncommon Descent, a.k.a. Bill Dembski's home for wandering sycophants, toadies, and lackeys. There's a good reason for this; I just get tired of the sheer stupidity that routinely assaults my brain every time I make the mistake of taking a look at UD's latest attempt to try to refute evolution. Worse, there's lots of other pseudoscience there these days, from the promotion of the use of cancer therapies that haven't been subjected to clinical trials yet to anthropomorphic global warming "skepticism." Yes, every time I peruse the posts…
oracknows | December 10, 2007If you've hung out in forums where Holocaust deniers, 9/11 Truthers, and other conspiracy theorists hang out, as I have done, one thing you'll notice is that these particular purveyors of dubious conspiracy-mongering seem to have a particular love of demonizing Jews (or, as the smarter ones tend to call them in order to try to skirt obvious charges of anti-Semitism, "Zionists"). If you believe such nuts, Jews are responsible for exaggerating the Holocaust, for destroying the World Trade Center, or even for for the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia or even Hurricane Katrina. Indeed,…
oracknows | December 7, 2007After last week's Your Friday Dose of Woo, which featured an amazingly extravagant bit of woo that took up 10,000 webpages of some of most densely-packed woo language that I've ever seen, I feel the need for a change of pace. It's time to simplify this week. After all, if I were to do nothing but woo on the order of sympathetic vibratory physics, the Wand of Horus, quantum homeopathy, or DNA activation every week, your brain might well fry. And, if your brain didn't fry, my brain would for subjecting myself to such material week after week. Every so often, I need just a little wafer to…
oracknows | December 6, 2007This video would argue that the answer to the question in the title is no:
"I don't think anything predated Christians"?
What about Judaism? You know, the Old Testament, the book in which, Christians say, many prophecies of Jesus' coming were made?
I'd try to reassure myself that she's just more ignorant than average about history, but I'm not sure that she is.
(Via Pure Pedantry and Crooked Timber.)
Of course, this is the same woman who doesn't accept evolution and wouldn't commit to an opinion about whether the world is flat, as seen in this video:
Any bets on how long before we hear…
oracknows | December 6, 2007It's hard to believe that two weeks have flown by once again. It's even harder to believe that the Skeptics' Circle has been around long enough to reach its 75th edition, which this time around comes straight out of Denmark, courtesy of longtime Respectful Insolence commenter and now blogger Kristjan Wager at Pro-Science. Kristjan's a just-the-facts kind of guy and he delivers a just-the-facts kind of Circle, chock full of skeptical bloggy goodness.
Next up to host on December 20, just in time for Christmas (and what better Christmas gift than the gift of skepticism?) is fellow ScienceBlogger…
oracknows | December 3, 2007Depressing. One of the fakest faith-healers of all, Peter Popoff, who was so memorably exposed for a fraud by James Randi back in the 1980s when Randi caught him using a small radio receiver to be fed information on people he was "healing" from his wife, who was reading them off of prayer cards, is back:
And here's Randi's original takedown of Popoff from the 1980s:
Scum always rises again, I guess.
oracknows | December 2, 2007There are certain bloggers who can reliably be counted on to deliver the stupid. We've met several of them over the time this blog's been in existence. One such blogger, the born again Christian named LaShawn Barber, has been particularly good at it, although we've only met her a couple of times before, likening the NAACP to the white nationalist teen duo Prussian Blue as a means of trolling and saying rather odd things about Ted Haggard. Those were bad enough, but now she's even more out of her depth than usual as she decides to pontificate about something about which it is brain-fryingly…
oracknows | November 30, 2007
I don't know what it is about woo-meisters and vibration.
I know I've said this before, but it seems to come up so often that I can't help but repeat it. Everything is vibration. Everything. And if it' not vibration, it's waves, be they energy waves, sound waves, or, as I like to describe them waves of pure woo. Add quantum mechanics to the mix, and you have the ingredients a veritable orgy of woo. (And if you want a real orgy, they might even have your back covered there, too.) I had thought that this fascination with vibration among purveyors of woo was a relatively recent phenomenon.
I…
oracknows | November 29, 2007Heard on the radio this morning, a commenter responding to a radio talk show host's pointing out to him that Mike Huckabee doesn't accept evolution as valid. This is as close as I can remember what he said, but the gist is correct:
We disagree on that. But not believing in evolution is something I can overlook. It's not that important. It's not as though he'll have stormtroopers knocking down my door because of it.
Maybe not, but if elected Huckabee would have a huge say over federal educational and biological research policy and funding. Being a creationist, as Mike Huckabee is, to me is an…
oracknows | November 29, 2007We've had one example this week of people with minds so open that their brains fell out at the Oxford Union, which invited Holocaust denier and British National Party leader Nick Griffin to "discuss free speech." Now, sadly, I see another, this time it's the United States government, which has invited die-hard antivaccinationists to be on a major federal panel about autism:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Advocates who believe vaccines may cause autism will join mental health professionals and neurologists on a new federal panel to coordinate autism research and education, the U.S. Health and Human…