Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.
That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)
DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.
To contact Orac: [email protected]
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30 replies on “Merry Christmas…one last time”
MESSAGE BEGINS—————————-
Shills and Minions,
Felicitous Holiday Greetings from all of us here at PharmaCOM Orbital.
I’ve been reading up on your quaint midwinter holiday customs and have come to feel quite a kinship with this “Santa Claws” person. Though I’m not corpulent as he is described, and I’d never be caught dead in red, there are similarities. He sees you when you’re sleeping (me too), he knows when you’re awake (ditto), he knows if you’ve been bad or good (check). According to your scriptures this is the point where I am to say “so be good for goodness sake.” Well I’m hardly one to moralize, so I’ll not implore you to do that, more like “be vigilant and ever-so-slightly-evil so that you may stand, mouth agape at the endless stream of wealth and trinkets that sprays from the great teat of PharmaLucre@ that is Glaxxon PharmaCOM.” That’s more “me.”
In any case, enjoy your candy prostheses, parasitic plants, and orgy of overconsumption. Be back at work on January 1, and stay vigilant, the rebels are plotting our downfall even as they stuff themselves with tofurkey, açai juice and supplements.
Lord Draconis Zeneca ih71L
001010010011111010010
Foreward Mavoon of the Great Fleet, Pharmaca Magna of Terra, Knows if You’ve Been Sleeping
Glaxxon PharmaCOM Orbital
Sol System
——————-MESSAGE ENDS HO HO HO
Merry Christmas Orac,
It was a bit warm for drinking white wine in the sun here in Victoria, Australia. I had gone into the country. Storms in Melbourne gave some people a warm white Christmas: http://www.theage.com.au/photogallery/victoria/storms-hit-melbourne-on-christmas-day-20111225-1p9b2.html I especially like the 3rd and 22nd photos. The 3rd photo has a girl in a summer dress making a snow angel.
We had white wine in the rain
played cricket with the cousins until the dog stole (repossessed) the ball
and then had white wine in the pool
My “brown eyed” daughters all flew out last night…sigh
Great song with a great message
Thanks ORAC
Happy Holiday to you
Great song, Orac. Love it and get a bit nostalgic every time I hear it, though, again, being in the Northern latitudes, I’ve never actually had white wine in the sun. Shows that even us atheists can enjoy the holiday and what’s important about it: being with family.
Oh, and the pharma lucre, of course. Exalted, etc., Lord Draconis. Thank you so much for the gift. Unfortunately, I find that lacking a third arm makes it a bit difficult to use. The person that was helping me will, fortunately, only be in hospital for a week; much shorter than the EMTs suggested at first.
It’s a little late…but our Christmas present has arrived at AoA.
Boy wonder ace reporter Jake Crosby has written the definitive article about his latest stalking episode of Dr. Paul Offit.
Jake now claims that HE was “defamed” by Dr. Offit…because Dr. Offit called him out for his stalking activities. Poor Jake doesn’t realize that his own libelous articles about Dr. Offit, Orac and others at AoA, really do constitute defamation.
I’ve read the first seven comments…there will be more…praising Jake for his latest brave stalking caper.
3-2-1: I predict within a few days that Jake’s blogging Warrior Mommy, Ginger Taylor, will be writing to Dr. Offit and putting up the long haranguing letter on her own website. Ginger will then be demanding that Dr. Offit reply. She’s still waiting for replies from Seth Mnookin and Anderson Cooper.
Enjoy!
Shills and minions:
While you should concentrate on your year’s end duties I believe we all can benefit from a moment ( actually, moments) of levity.
Put down that drink ( on second thought, have another) and head over to AoA for Master Jake’s latest presentation concerning Dr O. Although I consider myself to be a rather creative person, I could never in my wildest dreams match the flights of fancy to which this young gentleman ascends ( and yes, there is a profound reason that explains that fact: fiction can be either an act of volition or a spontaneous emission) *without* opium.
Preparation for Saturday night’s festi… *annual meeting* are proceeding seamlessly. See you there.
Sincerely,
DW ( you know my titles so why bother?)
Jake made the claim that he isn’t anti-vaccine, so I submitted a comment to have him list the vaccines that he is in favor of (I’d bet he lists tetanus & perhaps rabies) – so we’ll see, one, if it gets posted & two, if he or anyone else bothers to respond.
In other news:
Mike Adams ( @ NaturalNews, yesterday and today) informs us about how Dow, Dupont, and Monsanto continue to wage unremittant chemical warfare against the People.
… while selling “survival” meals so you can avoid all of those nasty GMO food products…
I venture a guess that issues like these will replace Hg/ Al as the materia for toxin phobias. BigPharma will be joined by BigFarm in rants emanating from the usual suspects. Fear-mongering was never easier.
@ DW: I’ve poured myself that second drink (coffee) and I am enjoying the show…all the usual suspects have weighed in.
I still want to know if Jake wore that same grungy T-shirt that he wore when he has stalking Fiona Godlee. Such a class act our boy wonder/ace reporter is.
@ Lawrence: You passed “moderation”…for now
@ lilady:
Being inappropriate sartorially can signal other problems. Fashion is a type of communication where you send “messages” and anticipate others’ reactions to your choices.
While we do laugh at Jake and AoA writers ( Kim S is now also writing “chick lit” mysteries about the autism-vaccine “connection”), I think that a few of these people have real psychological issues that could be treated: however, if you have family and internet fans who applaud your perseveration you won’t be as likely to seek help. One of the advantages of illness, as they say: I think Freud would be shocked to number *fame* and *popularity* amongst them.
This is as awful as parents who, distracted by bio-med and supplements ads, don’t focus as much on SB treatments, or waste a lot of time, effort, and money on useless crap. Constant fuming about the crimes perpetuated upon their children by the powers-that-be can’t be healthy either.
@ Denice Walter: Jake is simply boorish. He has been spoon-fed a diet of praise for his outlandish behavior by his mother who is heavily into woo…and by the sycophants at AoA.
Whether or not he is awarded a MPH degree…he will never be an epidemiologist. He will continue his brilliant “career” in journalism at AoA or another crank website, where he can use his “science” education to expand on the vaccines-cause-autism theory.
Put down that drink ( on second thought, have another) and head over to AoA for Master Jake’s latest presentation concerning Dr O.
How many separate cover-ups does he allege? I gave up when he started rambling incoherently about Colbert.
@ Narad: Everyone is in on the cover-up.
@ Lawrence: “We apologize, some comments were deleted during moderation. Blame the holiday fatigue! Thanks. KIM
Posted by: Comment Glitch: Managing Editor | December 27, 2011 at 01:32 PM”
The little editor Stagmom has be busy….
Saw that. Just their true colors……
The world according to Jake…
Stalking – Tweeting about him, writing a blog post about his anti-science writing, and commenting here at RI after he did to correct his misinformation.
Not Stalking – Going to presentations on vaccines time after time (after time) and making wild accusations to the presenters while accusing them of being in league with Big Pharma.
But, you know, life goes on.
@lilady
Looks like John Stone, recapturing a lot of the deleted comments, put Lawrence’s comment back up. Best grab a screen shot of it before it disappears again. Lawrence, if you have a screen shot of your original comment, let me know. I’d be happy to start a new thread over at HS for you and anyone else that tries to post a comment to AoA.
The ones that she managed to semi-undelete have some pretty good nuggets:
Yep, Big pHARMa is ultimately the reason that the NSA and CIA aren’t dispatching intelligence briefings to the AoA readership. How could this not have occurred to me before?
I “think” a memo may have gone out to the AoA “journalists” (not guest journalist/fire science expert, Offal), directed them to not post at RI.
The last time I recall Jake posting here was a while back…when herr doktor bimler kept asking him for citations about his statement that Brian Deer plugged into Bettelheim’s bullshit contained in “The Empty Fortress”…mothers wishing that their autistic children were dead.
Lawrence…Poster “Jenny Allen” at AoA has responded to your post.
She, of course, is not anti-vaccine…but then goes into a long harangue about the MMR and H1N1 vaccines. Her “opinion” about the HPV is based on all the reported deaths of youngsters who received the vaccine!!!
As I’ve said many times, pseudo-science and conspiracy mongering go hand-in-glove because conspiracies explain why brilliant “revolutionary science” is not accepted and commonplace.
Amongst the idiots I survey, the conspiracies have become more baroque -nigh unto Rococo- and expanded beyond the earlier “Pharma did it!” to more recent addenda:”Goverment covered it up!” and “The media helped!”.( On an interesting note: AoA recently featured both Lender’s and Stagliano’s new *novels* about vax conspiracies: reality testing doesn’t reign supreme there.)
Thus, you need a score card to keep this stuff straight. In short: there is a ruling elite who wishes to control society through chemical and informational methods while simultaneously enriching themselves. They brain-wash the public – via education and the media- and intoxicate them with drugs, fast food, and bad television: diseases are created with the assistance of the medical establishment/ food producers that impoverish the People by addictively chaining them to pharmaceuticals/HFCS and separating them from the Natural World. A few Truth Tellers gallant enough to inform the public by crashing through this facade of lies are- of necessity- branded as cranks and quacks who endanger the public. The Righteous should avoid the mainstream media as well as the government and medical/ university dictates. Needless to say, a new Media is being created as we speak. And Jakey’s on his way to stardom: move over, Alex Jones!
@DW you’re right about that, but you can’t say the (US) government has never been involved in a conspiracy (with big XYZ and the media) to perhaps twist the truth about certain aspects of public health or medicine, in order to eliminate competition for big XYZ’s latest product.
Only because a proposition that vague is unfalsifiable. You also can’t prove that you have never murdered someone and covered up the murder, I would wager. Burden on proof is on those who allege such a gaudy scenario to back it up.
ROFL
Jake is such a hero in his own mind.
Jake your long self congratulatory
ranting rave smells strongly of narcissistic personality disorder. Never mind though, most rants based on delusions of grandeur always do.
#20 lilady
It’s gone…along with another 28 posts.
The post count there at present is 10 with4 of those by Anne Dachel. The post count is displaying 38.
Oh yeah…I just lurrrrve the “open and honest” nature of AoA.
Visiting AoA after not having been there for awhile was hilarious.
Now it’s 40 comments vs. 12 that are actually still there.
#14
Nope..that comment has been disappeared.
@ Maggie Evellyan:
Those who sell conspiracy, along with their overpriced supplements, manipulate people by catering to their prejudices: because there is mis-trust of the government, the media, large corporations, medicine, to sell you on their *own* brand of woo, they rachet up their audience’s mis-trust and hatred and then, present themselves as the alternative.
One of the idiots I survey, regularly presents tales of dastardly deeds by the government et al *prior* to presenting his own scenario. Usually, a sales pitch follows. Recently, political/ economic horror stories have taken up as much time/ space as health woo ( which is supposed to be the focus of these radio shows/ web articles) because in order for the woo to be accepted they have to direct their audiences’ attention away from information that shows its inadequacy/ fictional nature: this is what a good magician does- he/ she directs you away from information that would wreck the trick- you see only what the performer *wants* you to see.
To buy what a charlatan like AJW is selling, you have to suspect not only the journalist who found him out but editors, fact checkers, reviewers, newspapers, journals, the media, the medical establishment, corporations, the government, and then, cross the pond to point your finger at media, corporations, goverment. And this is what AoA does: cultivates scepticism about standard sources of information to prevent you from thinking about the most likely state of affairs: a doctor fixed data because so that it would benefit his business plans. Any corruption that exists in any institution wouldn’t change that.
In addition, they would have you dismiss folks who point this out, even me. I wonder why?
@ Sauceress: The AoA website is very cumbersome…you have to keep scrolling down the pages repeatedly at the bottom of each page to find the “faint” arrow…to finally get to the first post. The first post was 12/27/11 @ 6:49 AM by John Stone.
Jenny Allan’s reply to Lawrence is there, same day at 3:51 PM.
Lawrence posted again at Jake asking for specific vaccines that Jake finds “acceptable” or “not acceptable and Jake replied:
“No, I don’t “care to explain.” I don’t have to explain anything. The people who are anti-vaccine are the people who say they are anti-vaccine – not the people who say vaccines cause autism – although I am sure the latter understandably includes some of the former.
Posted by: Jake Crosby | December 28, 2011 at 12:19 AM”
There were several more replies to Lawrence, none of which provided “specific” vaccines.
The most recent reply is directly below Jake’s article.
@ Maggie Evellyan: Would you care to provide any specifics about XYZ medicine and “twisting” of the truth. I am really interested in XYZ medicine as it applies to public health. I want to know if my supervisors while I worked in public health duped me and used me.
I am tempted to post again, but it would be an exercise in futility, if it was even allowed out of moderation. It seems to me that it would be easy for them, since tetanus or rabies isn’t part of the vaccine schedule (though tetanus is recommended).
For them not even to be able to provide that, only shows how anti-vaccine they really are. I could also point to their support of the Idaho anti-vaccinationists (link to the article on the AoA site), who reject all vaccines again, as their support of the anti-vaccine position.
#27 lilady
Ahh..my mistake. The fact that I haven’t been there for quite a while, plus having observed the censorship of challenging posts more than once in the past, probably handicapped my ability to find the rest of the posts.
Perhaps the after effects of much liquid Holiday cheer as well. Not something I indulge in that much the rest of the year. (it’s those darn hangover things that put me off) However this Holiday Season called for much celebration. Of particular note, a six hour emergency surgical procedure saving the life of a much loved elderly relative.
I wonder what the outcome would have been employing a homeopathic remedy for a perforated bowel.