October 20, 2012
I've been lurking at the Skeptical OB for a while and enjoying Amy Tuteur's very effective criticism of some of the extremes of the homebirth movement. I had noticed that among some advocates of homebirth that were proposing risky behavior for pregnant mom's that conflict with the literature that…
October 19, 2012
This has been a year of some wonderfully crazy new conspiracies. Birtherism is actually looking pretty banal next to the "Obama is gay-married to a Pakistani" conspiracy, the "Obama is a Jihadist sleeper agent conspiracy, the Aurora conspiracies, job numbers conspiracies, polling conspiracy…
October 19, 2012
Scientific American evaluates the candidates on their answers to Sciencedebate 2012 and evaluates ideology-based denialism as a whole:
Today's denial of inconvenient science comes from partisans on both ends of the political spectrum. Science denialism among Democrats tends to be motivated by…
October 18, 2012
Every once in a while Everything is Terrible has a fun denialism-overlap as they show some ad for a terrible piece of quackery, or in this case a great cut of Ken Ham speaking nonsense to a group of very unfortunate children. This is child abuse. Not the creationism bit, but the embarrassingly-…
October 12, 2012
It seems every day brings a new, glaring falsehood about medical care from Romney, who has bizarrely decided to run against his own healthcare plan in order to appease right wing voters. Now he's claiming Americans don't die from lack of healthcare coverage. His reasoning? The unfunded mandate…
October 6, 2012
I don't understand how they could write the headline,"On Health Care, Two Visions With Their Own Set of Facts" in regards to the debate between Obama and Romney last week. The appropriate headline should have been "On Health Care, Two Visions With Romney Telling Falsehoods".
It's another example…
October 2, 2012
Via Ed I see that Christopher Monckton is expanding his crankery from denying global warming, claiming to be and MP despite cease and desist letters from parliament asking him to stop, curing HIV, the flu, MS and the common cold to now engaging in Birtherism. It's pathetic when you've been pre-…
October 1, 2012
Slate has an interesting article about Romney campaign mailings that appear to contain buzzwords for chronic Lyme disease advocates in Virginia. Romney's plan for Lyme disease includes these two points:
IMPROVE SYNERGY
Ensure that government agencies have an open line of communication and work…
October 1, 2012
This article from the Sunday Times by AEI fellow J.D. Kleinke is exceptional for two reasons. For one, it's an excellent explanation for why conservatives should agree with Obamacare. Second, despite coming from the American Enterprise Institute, an organization that regularly contributes global…
September 24, 2012
The anti-GMO study released late last week has raised so many bad science red flags that I'm losing count. Orac and Steve Novella have both discussed fatal flaws in the research, the New Scientist discussed the researchers' historical behavior of inflating insignificant results to hysterical…
August 24, 2012
Timothy Egan nails it, the Republican caucus is composed of crackpots and cranks.
Take a look around key committees of the House and you’ll find a governing body stocked with crackpots whose views on major issues are as removed from reality as Missouri’s Representative Todd Akin’s take on the…
August 22, 2012
Everyone has heard about Akin's comments about "legitimate rape" and the push now coming from the GOP to get him out of the race. But is this really fair or ideal? The problem with removing Akin from the race over this is that his gaffe was not just one exposing his scientific ignorance, but…
June 29, 2012
Atul Gawande, thoughtful as always, writes about the "wicked problem" of healthcare reform and the historical similarity between this battle and previous battles to expand fairness to all of our citizens. Opening with the kind of experiences all physicians have had with tragically-uninsured…
June 28, 2012
It's good news that the Supreme Court split 5-4 with Roberts (and not Kennedy?!?) as the deciding vote, to uphold the affordable care act. It's interesting that this was controversial, and certainly Roberts led the court to a very safe middle ground making the issue about taxation and saying the…
June 7, 2012
Chris and I have met with our new National Geographic overlords here in DC, and we had a productive and interesting meeting. It was a great chance to put names to some faces and hear about where Nat Geo wants to take Scienceblogs. If any of the other sciblings can wrangle it I can highly recommend…
May 25, 2012
Today I read about two individuals who decided on political defections over perceived anti-science amongst their former political allies- one due to climate change, the other for anti-GMO. From the right, we have Michael Fumento, who in Salon describes his break with the right, spurred by Heartland…
May 24, 2012
Right Wing Watch is a great site to follow to track the latest conspiratorial craziness coming from the right. It seems every single day there is some new bizarre claim about homosexuals trying to enslave America and institute sharia law (that makes sense right?), or how Obama is a muslim, yada…
May 23, 2012
I can't take any credit for it. Nat Geo has transitioned us to wordpress. Please let me know in the comments if there are any problems with the new format or with commenting and I'll see what I can do to get things up to snuff.
May 17, 2012
Many of the climate change denialist sites have been up in arms by comparisons of climate change denial to holocaust denial. In particular Marc Morano at climate depot has had multiple articles attacking and expressing hysterical outrage at these comparisons.
We know they don't like the comparison…
May 7, 2012
The New York Times has the results from when they posed the question, "is it ethical to eat meat?" The finalists, with one or two exceptions, are quite interesting. Certainly, when it comes to opinions about food, everyone has one, and the judges emphasized the variety of the opinions, and…
May 5, 2012
In a brilliant parody of the HSUS shelter ads, humane watch has put sad looking lawyers in cages to emphasize that donations to HSUS do not fund shelters.
HSUS is like PETA but with deodorant and suits. Hah! I love it. HSUS is PETA.
It's upsetting that this fake charity has co-opted the…
April 13, 2012
But you'd never know that reading AEI's highly dubious contribution to the literature in this week's Health Affairs (lay Reuters article here). Consistent with their free-market solves everything and can do no wrong (cover ears and yell "nananananananana") attitude towards the broken US healthcare…
April 12, 2012
In it's increasingly bizarre need to inflict it's animal rights morality on everybody, PETA's Ingrid Newkirk has criticized Jennifer Lawrence for scenes in Winter's Bone and the Hunger Games, which show her hunting and eating animals.
The actress was dubbed "the coolest chick in Hollywood" by…
April 6, 2012
Maybe my email worked? I got a one sentence reply from Max last night saying he agreed, and today Tucker Max says hellz no to PETA and instead wants to give to a local shelter:
I do not agree AT ALL with the mission of PETA.
...
If we're talking about what an awful organization PETA is, that's…
April 6, 2012
You may have heard about Planned Parenthood turning down Tucker Max's 500k charitable donation on the grounds his misogynistic past marred the gift.
Now PETA is asking for the donation.
Let's beg him not to do this. Instead of giving money to the dog-killing animal rightsists, how about a…
April 5, 2012
A great article from the awl asks writers and book critics which books they liked when they were younger, but now make them cringe.
The results are interesting, the two authors those surveyed reported most cringe-worthy were Kerouac and, you probably guessed it, Ayn Rand. Ha!
March 27, 2012
The NYTimes reporting suggests a 5-4 split against ACA is likely:
Justice Kennedy, along with Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. all asked questions suggesting that they had a problem with the constitutionality of the mandate requiring most…
March 26, 2012
He had to realize Nisbett's framing was worthless and write a whole book on defective Republican reasoning to realize it but it sounds like Chris Mooney has come around to the right way to confront denialism:
The only solution, then, is to make organized climate denial simply beyond the pale. It…
March 26, 2012
With the Supreme Court hearing arguments for the next three days on the Affordable Care Act, many commentators, including Dahlia Lithwick appear to have so much contempt for the Roberts court that they believe the issue will likely be settled on politics rather than law.
The first proposition is…
March 23, 2012
We've already extensively discussed why it costs twice as much for the US to provide healthcare for it's citizens all the while failing to cover health care for all. Most recently, we discussed the hidden tax of the uninsured and the perverse incentive structure of US healthcare which encourage…
