Popular Culture
oracknows | September 26, 2014
It’s been a bad week for celebrity quacks; that is, after starting out looking as though it would be a good week. For example, as I discussed a couple of days ago, contender for the title of world’s most brain dead antivaccine conspiracy theorist, washed up comedian Rob Schneider, having somehow managed to land a gig resurrecting his 20 year old “Richmeister” character (a.k.a. the “Makin’ Copies Guy”) in the service of an ad campaign for State Farm Insurance, found his ad dropped like the proverbial Ebola-laced bedding when State Farm was made aware of Schneider’s virulently antivaccine…
oracknows | September 3, 2014
This post, although it is about an interview with a CDC scientist named William W. Thompson that resulted from the whole “CDC whistleblower” manufactroversy that’s been flogged relentlessly for the last two weeks, since antivaccine “heros” Andrew Wakefield and Brian Hooker released a despicable race-bating video flogging Hooker’s utterly incompetent reanalysis of a ten year old study that had failed to find an association between autism diagnosis and age of first vaccination, is about a more general issue as well, an issue that can apply to discussions of just about any trumped up risk,…
oracknows | August 24, 2014
Occasionally, there are issues that come to my attention that need more than just one blog post to cover. One such issue popped up last week, and it’s one that’s kept you all very engaged, with the comment count on the original post rapidly approaching 200. I’m referring, of course, to the alleged CDC “whistleblower” who’s supposedly blown the lid on a “coverup” based on Brian Hooker’s incompetent “reanalysis” of a ten year old study (Destefano et al) that failed to find a link between age at MMR vaccination and the risk of developing autism. More specifically, given that Destefano et al…
oracknows | August 6, 2014Every so often I come across something in the world of woo that catches my attention because it’s so completely batshit loony that it demands my attention, either for the sheer delusion on display or for the extreme cleverness with which the pseudoscience and conspiracy theories are woven together. No, this time, I’m not talking about the Food Babe, either, because there’s no cleverness at all there, other than cleverness at self-promotion and quackmailing food and beverage manufacturers for fun and, most of all, profit. All that’s there besides that is an incredible ignorance of science and…
oracknows | July 8, 2014Over the years I’ve been studying science versus pseudoscience, medicine vs. quackery, reason versus crankery, I’ve noticed one thing. The cranks, pseudoscientists, and quacks of the world have a hard time dealing with legitimate criticism. Now, I know I sometimes get a bit—shall we say?—frisky with my criticisms. OK, obnoxious. I have, however, mellowed considerably since the dawn of this blog, as any reading of posts from the early days (or even not-so-early days) will confirm. Sure, I do occasionally still reach back into that reservoir of the “Insolence” that got me started, but I’d never…
oracknows | June 24, 2014If there's one thing that antivaccine activists share in common, it's the passionate (and as yet unproven) belief that "something" out there in the environment caused the "autism epidemic." Usually, that "something" thought to be vaccines, but with the utter failure of the vaccine-autism hypothesis to the point where it is considered soundly refuted, antivaccinationists have gotten a bit more—shall we say?—creative. Now it's something in the environment. Sometimes it's mercury, despite the utter lack of evidence that mercury in vaccines is even remotely linked to autism. Sometimes it's…
oracknows | June 23, 2014I’ll admit it: I’m a bit of a beer snob. I make no bones about it, I like my beer, but I also like it to be good beer, and, let’s face it, beer brewed by large industrial breweries seldom fits the bill. To me, most of the beer out being sold in the U.S., particularly beer made by Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors can easily be likened to cold piss from horses with kidney disease (you need protein to get beer foam, you know), only without the taste. I have to be mighty desperate and thirsty before I will partake of such swill. I will admit that there is one exception, namely Blue Moon, which is…
oracknows | June 5, 2014Quacks really hate Wikipedia.
It's understandable, really. Wikipedia has some fairly tight standards regulating its form and content. Quacks, thinking that because anybody can edit Wikipedia articles it must mean that they can edit the entries on their favorite bit of woo to their hearts' content in order to make it look more scientifically supported and to remove disconfirming information, are disappointed when they discover that it's not that easy. Now, I've been a critic of Wikipedia in the past, having found problems in entries on topics where I have deep knowledge and been concerned that…
oracknows | May 14, 2014Sometimes, when you're blogging, serendipity strikes. Sometimes this takes the form of having something appear related to something you just blogged about. Yesterday, I discussed one of the biggest supporters of quackery on the Internet, Mike Adams, a.k.a. the Health Ranger, proprietor of NaturalNews.com, one of the quackiest, if not the quackiest site, on the Internet, NaturalNews.com. This time around, I was simply using one of Adams' wonderfully incoherent defenses of alternative medicine thinking to demonstrate how much magical thinking exists at the core of alternative medicine and how…
oracknows | May 9, 2014
There's a certain category of posts that I like to call (to myself, anyway) "taking care of business" posts. Usually, it's a post about something that I missed the first time around but has, for some reason, reappeared on my radar screen or something that I wish I had written about when it first showed up but didn't to the point that I don't care that the material is over a week old, which, let's face it, might as well be a year old in blogging time. On the other hand, there's still no time like the present, so let's take care of some business. There is the added benefit that taking care…
oracknows | May 2, 2014I've often written of "black holes of stupid" that threaten to rupture the fabric of the space-time continuum, so dense and full of stupid are they. Such black holes tend to come from places like the wretched hive of scum and antivaccine quackery known as Age of Autism, the wretched hive of scum and conspiracy quackery known as NaturalNews.com, and various other sites loaded with pseudoscience throughout the web. I've often also joked about some post or other from such people "frying my irony meter." Usually such comments are deserved when particularly clueless quacks write something that is…
oracknows | May 1, 2014Yesterday, the CDC held a Twitter party for National Infant Immunization Week, which is, conveniently enough, this week. Our old "friend" Ginger Taylor tried to call in her squadron of flying antivaccine monkeys to fling poo at what should have been a celebration of the success of vaccines; so I sent up the Bat Signal, the better to attract some voices of reason to the sliming of the #CDCvax hashtag used for the Twitter party to counter the antivaccine quacks. P.Z. Myers picked up the call too, and the rest is history. I almost felt sorry for Ginger and her fellow antivaccine loons, as they…
oracknows | April 20, 2014This might look somewhat familiar to people, but I have a good excuse. Yesterday was Easter, and, although by no stretch of the imagination can I be accused of being particularly religious, we still did have family to visit. Add to that the fact that I have a two talks to give today that as of Friday night I hadn't even started working on (OK, two versions of the same talk, which makes it perhaps 1.5 talks), and a little—shall we say?—creative recycling is in order. Even so, if you don't follow the other locales where my written meanderings may be found, it'll still be new to you. It all…
oracknows | April 7, 2014Here I am, sitting on the balcony of my hotel room in sunny San Diego, as I get ready to head over to the 2014 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). The sun is rising over the mountains, and the only sound I hear is that of running water in the swimming pool below (well, that and traffic around the convention center, the odd siren, and the noise of air conditioner fans), and I need to produce something quick for the blog. Realizing that last week, I described myself as having fallen into a "rut," not because I thought my posts were substandard but rather because I…
oracknows | March 18, 2014As hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when I (sort of) gave "Dr. Bob" Sears the benefit of the doubt. You remember Dr. Bob, don't you? Son of the famous pediatrician Dr. William Sears, who was best known for his "Sears Parenting Library" and is a not infrequent guest on TV, where he goes by the name of "Dr. Bill." Like his father, Bob Sears, likes to do the "Dr. First Name" thing and calls himself "Dr. Bob." (What is it with pediatricians and this annoying affectation?)
Along with his wife Martha Sears, RN, Dr. Bill is known as a major proponent of "attachment parenting."…
oracknows | March 3, 2014
Last week, one of my favorite comedians and filmmakers of all time passed away unexpectedly. I'm referring, of course, to Harold Ramis, whose work ranged from movies like National Lampoon's Animal House (the first R-rated movie I ever saw, actually), to gems like Ghostbusters and and Groundhog Day. In fact, in retrospect, when I posted about Brian Hooker and the antivaccine movement trying to resurrect the hoary corpse of the conspiracy theory that the CDC is some how "covering up" data that would prove that the antivaccine cranks were right all along about mercury in vaccines as a cause…
oracknows | February 21, 2014Back in December, I was excited. The reason I was excited was because everybody's favorite über-Libertarian, New World Order conspiracy theorist quack, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger, had made an announcement. That announcement was that on January 6, 2014 Adams would announce astonishing "scientific findings" about food that would "revolutionize" nutrition and health. Given Adams' past history of doing hilariously off-base things with scientific instruments, such as putting Chicken McNuggets under a microscope and being amazed that things look a lot different when highly magnified,…
oracknows | February 13, 2014I must confess, I had a rather rough time yesterday. Actually, it's been a rough winter, at least as far as my car is concerned. Record amounts of snow and a January much colder than usual have wreaked havoc on the roads around where I live, producing craters that make our roads and freeways look more like the surface of the moon than anything you'd want to go speeding along on in an automobile. So it was that about a month ago on my way to work I couldn't avoid a particularly nasty crater, and immediately after I hit it I knew something was wrong. My tire pressure light went on, and the car…
oracknows | February 11, 2014I don't know if it's a sign that I've arrived as being a bit more influential than just a blogger or just dumb luck when reporters start sending me things, but I'll take it. It's like blog fodder being served to me on the proverbial silver platter. Unfortunately, as a result of receiving a press release, FDA Denies Treatment to Two Terminally Ill Young Women, from two different sources, after yesterday's hilarious (if I do say so myself) bit of fun with a certain woman who fancies herself a "Thinker" when everything she writes shows that she is anything but, I find myself tackling a much more…
oracknows | February 6, 2014Now we come to a post in which Orac unloads a bit about one of his pet peeves. It is a post that will likely piss a few people off on "his" side. If it does, so be it. He does this now because yesterday something happened that irritated the crap out of me because it put on display one of the less appealing characteristics of the skeptical movement, a tendency to obsessively focus on what it views as important at the expense of losing touch with the big picture. It is a story about knee jerk responses to which we all (myself included) fall prey.
Yesterday it was widely reported in the media,…