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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Poul Thorsen: The fine art of distraction from inconvenient facts

My first big splash in the blogosphere will have occurred five years ago in June, when I first discovered the utter wingnuttery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It was then that I wrote a little bit of that not-so-Respectful Insolence that you’ve come to know and love entitled Salon.com flushes its credibility down the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking Television

Complain to CBS: CBS resident anti-vaccine propagandist Sharyl Attkisson sucks up to anti-vaccine pseudoscientist Andrew Wakefield

Watch CBS News Videos Online A number of you sent me this link. It’s to a video (above) of Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News’ resident anti-vaccine propagandist, putting on a nauseating display of sucking up to Andrew Wakefield over his recent monkey study, the one that I deconstructed yesterday to show it for the lousy science […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Evolution History Holocaust denial Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The “vindication of all kooks” corollary to the principle of crank magnetism

A couple of years ago, fellow ScienceBlogger Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism Blog coined a most excellent term to describe all manners of pseuodscience, quackery, and crankery. The term, “crank magnetism,” describes the tendency of cranks not to mind it when they see crankery in others. More specifically, it describes how cranks of one variety […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Television

The resident anti-vaccine reporter at CBS News strikes again

I’m not infrequently asked why the myth that vaccines cause autism and other anti-vaccine myths are so stubbornly resistant to the science that time and time again fails to support them. Certainly useful celebrity idiots like Jenny McCarthy are one reason. So, too, are anti-vaccine propaganda websites and blogs such as Age of Autism and […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Television

Stop CBS from airing anti-vaccine ads on its Times Square JumboTron

I tell ya. I take a weekend off from this blog, and what do I find on Sunday night when I sit back down to take a look and see if there’s anything I want to blog about? Damn if those anti-vaccine loons aren’t pulling a fast one while I’m not looking. It turns out […]