libel
oracknows | April 19, 2016Several of you have noticed that a certain friend of the blog has been under attack from one of the quackiest of Internet quacks out there. Here is his response. The paranoia and stupidity are black hole level density. (Yes, instead of posting the whole thing, I've simply posted a link to our friend's discussion and rebuttal of Adams' charges.)
oracknows | November 11, 2015I'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…
oracknows | May 18, 2014I hadn't really planned on writing again about everyone's favorite conspiracy theorist and promoter of quackery, Mike Adams, at least not so soon after the last time I did it, which was only last week after Adams appeared on Dr. Oz's daytime television show to push his "laboratory." Adams, as you might recall, goes by the Internet moniker the "Health Ranger" (which would really more appropriately be "Health Danger") and is the man responsible for one of the quackiest sites on the Internet, NaturalNews.com, a repository for nearly every form of medical pseudoscience known to humans, mixed in…
oracknows | September 7, 2012On the antivaccine front, this year began with antivaccine hero Andrew Wakefield filing suit against investigative reporter Brian Deer, the BMJ, and Fiona Godlee (the editor of BMJ) for libel based on a series that Deer published in the BMJ outlining the evidence for Wakefield's scientific fraud in his (in)famous 1998 Lancet case series. This resulted in a massive rallying of the antivaccine troops around Wakefield, as well as temporarily making him appear relevant again after so many much-deserved humiliations and defeats, in the wake of his having had his license to practice medicine in the…
oracknows | August 4, 2012I tell ya, sometimes I think you guys think I'm a journalist or a 24 hour news source. I'm not, of course. I'm just a humble blogger, and I do what I can within the constraints of my every day "real life." What? I have a real life? You mean I'm not really a supercomputer who can link with any other computer in the galaxy to mine all known data, all contained within a Plexiglass box of multicolored blinking lights? I'm not saying, but I am saying that I do need some down time.
Unfortunately, sometimes big things happen during those down times, stuff I really like to blog about. In the past, I…
stoat | February 25, 2011 The story so far: "Energy and Environment" threatens to sue RealClimate, and RC tells them they are a bunch of bozos.
But now the Grauniad picks up the story. Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen attempts to fight back by asserting that Every paper that is submitted to the journal is vetted by a number of experts but noticeably does *not* use the magic phrase "peer review". So it looks like E+E are going to concede by default, which leaves their reputation in tatters: as Gavin says:
You would need a new editor, new board of advisors, and a scrupulous adherence to real peer review, perhaps ... using…
oracknows | April 15, 2010Today is a great day.
Today, British science writer Simon Singh accomplished something I would never have believed possible, given British libel laws and a very bad ruling by Sir David Eady, the presiding judge, a ruling characterized as astonishingly illiberal. Despite the long odds, Singh appealed the ruling and actually won.
As a result, the British Chiropractic Association has thrown in the towel on its bogus libel action against Singh:
Having carefully considered its position in the light of the judgment of the Court of Appeal (1st April 2010), the British Chiropractic Association (BCA)…
oracknows | April 1, 2010I was wrong.
I know it doesn't happen that often, but I'm forced to admit it. I was wrong. I predicted that Simon Singh would likely lose his appeal against an astonishing illiberal ruling on his libel case by Sir David Eady. Singh, as you may recall, is the British science writer who wrote a now infamous article about chiropractic, in particular, Singh labeled claims that chiropractic could treat colic, sleeping and feeding problems, ear infections, asthma, and prolonged crying as "bogus." Specifically, he wrote that the British Chiropractic Association "happily promotes bogus therapies."…
oracknows | March 10, 2010Well, that didn't take long.
Remember when the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, decided that she would try to harass, intimidate, and silence Paul Offit through the filing of a frivolous libel suit against Dr. Offit, Amy Wallace (the journalist who interviewed Offit for an excellent article last year), and Condé Nast, the publisher of WIRED, which ran the article? Well, the judge has ruled, and that ruling is...dismissed!
The text of the ruling can be found here.
There are some awesomely awesome passages in this ruling, which is a slapdown that, while not as epic…