Categories
Anti-Semitism Entertainment/culture History Holocaust Holocaust denial Movies Politics World War II

Who should play David Irving?

I just learned yesterday from a link a friend sent me and from Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s blog that the team of producers who made The Soloist have optioned the movie rights to Professor Lipstadt’s book History on Trial: My Day in Court With a Holocaust Denier, which is the story of the libel suit brought […]

Categories
Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Humor Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: It’s not just a breast massage, it’s a Brassage!

I’m tired of blogging about anti-vaccine nonsense again. Don’t get me wrong, I had an enormous amount of fun writing my commentary on Fire Marshal Bill’s attempt to explain vaccine/autism pseudoscience. It was a hoot, if I do say so myself, but it depresses me that writing such posts is so necessary so often. Fortunately, […]

Categories
Biology Clinical trials Medicine Politics Science

The UCLA Pro-Test Rally: Researchers stand up to animal rights terrorism

Better late than never, given that DrugMonkey has already been all over this. Unfortunately, there was another serious outbreak of antivaccine idiocy over at HuffPo that I felt I had to deal with before this: Embedded video from CNN Video It was a great day indeed. For far too long, animal rights terrorists have intimidated […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Movies Popular culture Television

Fire Marshal Bill discusses vaccines and autism on The Huffington Post

After writing about a new low of pseudoscience published in that repository of all things antivaccine and quackery, The Huffington Post (do you even have to ask?), on Tuesday, I had hoped–really hoped–that I could ignore HuffPo for a while. After all, there’s only so much stupid that even Orac can tolerate before his logic […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A mathematical model for the persistence of quackery

I’m sure it’s obvious that I’m often puzzled (and, I daresay, many other skeptics and boosters of science- and evidence-based medicine are puzzled too) over why various forms of quackery and woo that have either about as close to zero prior probability as one can imagine and/or (more frequently “and”) have failed to show evidence […]