Denialism Blog

Month: June 2007

  • Family Research Council endorses Homobigot Surgeon General

    Bible Belt Blogger brings us this excerpt from the Family Research Council’s “Dear Praying Friends” letter:

    Surgeon General Nominee under Fire – Dr. James Holsinger, President Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General, has been harshly condemned by pro-homosexual activists for a 1991 paper he wrote for the Methodist Church describing male gay sex as unnatural and unhealthy. Sen. Barak Obama (D-IL) attacked Holsinger and President Bush saying, “…The Surgeon General’s office is no place for bigotry…that would trump sound science.” But Holsinger’s work catalogued the obvious. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reports that of over 600,000 American men with AIDS, the largest category is men who practice homosexuality. Other diseases such as hepatitis, cancer, gonorrhea, and syphilis are increasingly prevalent in the homosexual community. Dr. Holsinger’s credentials are impeccable. He served as Kentucky’s health secretary, chancellor of the University of Kentucky’s medical center, has taught at several medical schools and spent over three decades in the Army Reserve, retiring in 1993 as a major general. Holsinger is being subjected to character assassination for doing precisely what a Surgeon General should do, bring health facts to light. (see Resume, Negative Effects, Fairness)

    Pray that Dr. Holsinger will receive an honest and fair hearing from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
    May the larger effort to make approval of the homosexual lifestyle a qualification for public office not succeed (Pr 6:16-18; 17:15; Ps 31:11-13; Zec 8:16-17; Eph 4:25; Rev 12:10).

    For those of you interested, here is what Holsinger wrote about homosexuals here – and see our previous discussion. It’s interesting, many religious groups have refused to endorse or challenged Holsinger. Notably, Fred Phelps and his band of merry Baptists is supportive of Holsinger’s nomination. You know it’s bad when you need support and the only people who show up are either the KKK, or the crazy preacher who holds up the “God Hates Fags” signs.

    This is also why I consider the Family Research Council a denialist organization. In support of Holsigner’s bad science they have claimed that such research is sound, citing such research as this. Such research is by no means the mainstream view of medical science, is actually quite the opposite of what most doctors and medical experts believe, and Box Turtle Bulletin shows why Holsinger’s report is the classic compilation of cherry-picked data, misrepresentation and lies about scientific findings.

    It would be one thing if the just said they don’t like gays or that they believe it’s immoral. So what? People are going to be bigots, there is very little one can do, and it at least would be an honest position. But it’s completely different when groups like these try to suggest that science is on their side when it clearly is not. It is completely absurd to assert that there are scientific reasons homosexuality should be immoral or is fundamentally unhealthy, and such misrepresentations and lies are a testament to the “values” these family organizations truly hold to. That’s why the fake family values organizations aren’t just bigots, they’re denialists too.

    Write you senator, oppose this nomination, the Surgeon General should not be a homobigot.

  • Well it only took one day

    And Cordova has used the conflict between molecular and fossil data to attack evolution.

    Sigh. To busy to write about everything wrong with this. Go ahead and use this as an open thread to mock Cordova for being a predictable, quote-mining, dishonest creep. Also note, in line with perfect crank behavior, they’re still harping about junk DNA, and the findings in marsupials that they still don’t understand.

  • Skeptic's Circle Number 63

    It’s up at Relatively Science.

    Swing by and show them some love.

  • Victory over a parasite – the global eradication of Guinea Worm

    Hooray for science! The New England Journal reports on the imminent eradication of the Guinea worm.

    For those who haven’t heard of this nasty little parasite, it is a really horrible infection to get. It starts with the ingestion of Dracunculus medinensis infected water. The larvae, when freed from their copepod carriers, migrate from the GI tract, copulate, work their way to the skin, and the adult worms then cause a painful, burning blister as they emerge. The human host, seeking relief, will often seek to immerse the blister in water – and when it bursts the cycle continues as the larvae are released.

    i-251231ffc9bb4369e422eb32f47bdbd5-Drac_life_cycle.gif

    Humanity can thank the Carter Center, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, the CDC, and World Health Organization for the following graph:
    (more…)

  • Update on the Bees from PloS

    Those who are interested in the Colony-Collapse Disorder phenomenon will probably enjoy this paper from PLoS entitled “What’s Killing American Honey Bees?” It lays out the history of mass bee die-offs – which have been recorded extensively by apiarists, and discusses whether or not major concern needs to be paid to the problem.

    I still suspect that rather than this being a new problem it’s likely part of a normal pattern of fluctuation that has been observed in the record. While this swing is extreme, it’s early to suggest that this is an impending or prolonged disaster based on the history of such die-offs.

    Some winter losses are normal, and because the proportion of colonies dying varies enormously from year to year, it is difficult to say when a crisis is occurring and when losses are part of the normal continuum. What is clear is that about one year in ten, apiarists suffer unusually heavy colony losses. This has been going on for a long time. In Ireland, there was a “great mortality of bees” in 950, and again in 992 and 1443 [3]. One of the most famous events was in the spring of 1906, when most beekeepers on the Isle of Wight (United Kingdom) lost all of their colonies [4]. American beekeepers also suffer heavy losses periodically. In 1903, in the Cache valley of Utah, 2000 colonies were lost to a mysterious “disappearing disease” following a “hard winter and cold spring” [5]. More recently, there was an incident in 1995 in which Pennsylvania beekeepers lost 53% of colonies [6].

    Often terms such as “disappearing disease” or “spring dwindling” are used to describe the syndrome in which large numbers of colonies die in spring due to a lack of adult bees [7,8,9]. However in 2007, some beekeepers experienced 80-100% losses. This is certainly the extreme end of a continuum, so perhaps there is indeed some new factor in play.

    It’s a very good summary and because it’s PLoS, it’s free for all.

  • Tangled bank #82

    Greg Laden writes a very nice tangled bank. It’s a model for what a good carnival post should look like I think. And he was kind enough to link our discussion of Uncommon Descent’s remarkable ability to predict the past.

    Definitely worth a click.

  • How long before Sal Cordova quote mines this one?

    Nature reports on this new paper that shows a major conflict resolving the fossil and molecular records of mammalian evolution. It’s entitled, “Cretaceous eutherians and Laurasian origin for placental mammals near the K/T boundary” and the major finding is that mammals seem to have evolved largely after this boundary based on their discovery of fossil evidence of a new mammal. This isn’t a new finding for the fossil record, but this study represents the largest fossil-based evolutionary tree to date.

    However, this conflicts with the molecular record (the editorial gets the lead author’s name incorrect – it’s Beninda-Emonds – nature news coverage here) which constructs a evolutionary tree of 99% of mammals suggesting more than 40 mammals survived the Cretaceous period – ended by the mass extinction of the dinosaurs at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary 65 million years ago . Their finding suggested that the end-cretaceous extinction event may not have provided the impetus for the expansion of mammalian species implied by the fossil record.

    It’s an interesting debate as the molecular and fossil records tend to conflict when it comes to the dates of branching along the evolutionary tree. And, because it’s a debate, it’s just a matter of time before it’s quote-mined by the evolution denialists at Uncommon Descent. In particular, I would be concerned with passages such as these from the nature editorial.

    (more…)

  • Only the best 5 second internet video ever

    It lives up to it’s title.

    H/T boingboing

  • Autism Crankery at Huffpo – Again

    RFK Jr. writes the standard crank screed in Huffpo, and it’s like a mirror reflection of the CBS news crankery that Orac takes on.

    Let’s see, it’s a crank screed so it at a very minimum has to have four elements. The wacky idea, a bunch of inflated non-evidence, conspiracy theories to deflect criticism, and finally, notions of persecution. Let’s see how RFK Jr. does.
    (more…)

  • Seed Schwag – and Banner design time

    I don’t know how many people knew about this – the sciencebloggers were informed a little bit late, but Seed had a competition on threadless to design a t-shirt in honor of our benevolent overlords, Seed publishing.

    Here’s the winner

    i-c1a14daac45fc10f1b65156c49d2973a-threadless.jpg

    Also, you guys may have noticed our rotating masthead. Well, I’m announcing our own little competition, to design more banners for the denialism blog!

    The banner submissions must be 756 width by 93 height. You can make a completely revolutionary new design or keep the basic format and add new fun symbols of cranks. Here’s our basic banner (pops) – click for the full size to save.

    Email me your entries or host them yourselves and link in the comments. I’ll put up a gallery – or in the likely event that only one person participates – the submission after about a week. We’ll decide a winner and their banner will run for a full week – and then we may rotate in some of our other favorites.

    So, go nuts! Make a banner that reflects what you think of when you think of cranks.