Denialism Blog

Month: March 2008

  • I'm of two minds about this one

    There’s a new facebook group set up to protest Expelled.

    I am ambivalent for the usual reasons—protest, and you give the reactionary religious cults more publicity, and an illusion of power. Fail to protest, and you appear to consent to their insanity.

    I figure there will be protests either way, so go and chose your way…protest loudly, or protest silently. But please, at least let someone know what you think, even if it’s just your friends or coworkers. I’m not one to keep my mouth shut, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be pissing someone off.

  • More flu woo from Mercola

    OK, I never really liked Joe Mercola, but when I read about this story on his website, I was encouraged. Boy, do I feel like a sucker.

    He started out so well, telling us about the tragic case of a child who died of influenza this year, and how health officials rapidly responded by increasing vaccine availability. Yea! He finally gets it!

    Or not.

    After the reasonably good piece of journalism, Mercola hops back on to the bat-shit insane wagon.

    Joe’s commentary starts thusly:

    This tragic story is, unfortunately, being used for all the wrong reasons; namely to promote the “universal influenza vaccination for all Americans.

    Um, he must have read a different story than I. Unvaccinated girl dies of flu—public health officials respond by trying to prevent a similar tragedy.

    But being unburdened by logic or truth, Mercola has an explanation:

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  • Cults make you stupid

    You don’t have to be stupid to join a cult (although it helps), but once you’re in…

    You see, PZ went to see Expelled    . With some friends. No one of note really, just THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS ATHEIST!!!111!

    And which one got tossed at the door? Take that, Dawkins! We grow good atheists right here in the Midwest!

    But really, it’s not just the funniest thing to happen in Minnesota since lutefisk. It shows how cults make you dumb. They discourage independent thought. Followers get their marching orders and, well, march without question. God forbid (irony intended) that you should exercise your own mind and say, “Maybe the Dear Leaders wanted all famous atheists out, not just one.”

    I do wonder about the Rent-a-Cops at the theater. Do the theater owners just throw out everyone they’re asked to? What was it about PZ? What if the KKK had rented out the theater for some white supremicist movie? Would they throw Abe Foxman or Jesse Jackson out?

    Not that arbitrarily tossing some professor out of a movie based on his religious beliefs (OK, lack of them) is the same as tossing out the head of the Anti-Defamation League or a prominent African-American leader.

    Or is it?

  • Flu update

    Continuing my series from WhiteCoat Underground, here is the latest influenza update.

    i-71ff2058c99656a050f7b3ae34ba49f7-usmap10.jpg

    While still widespread, numbers are finally starting to drop. I’m ready to drop myself. It’s been a terrible season—the worst I’ve ever seen. This is probably due, at least in part, to this year’s flu vaccine missing some unanticipated strains.

    For those of you out there who don’t “believe in” flu shots, remember that vaccination isn’t a religion. The anti-vaccination forces are, however, rather cult-like. Here’s some info for you.

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  • Disclaimers and such

    Last updated 09 October 2008

    When writing on medical topics, a few issues are important to address directly, conveniently laid out by the Health on the Net Foundation.

    Medical authority and complementarity, or, “I’m not your doctor”

    We don’t give advice here. Our posts represent our own opinions, thoughts, etc. and no one else’s. Neither our hospitals, partners, universities, nor anyone else has approved of anything we write. The information in our posts is intended for discussion purposes only and not as recommendations on how to diagnose or treat illnesses. Our writings do not claim to represent anyone’s opinions but the author.

    One our authors is a board-certified internist, one a medical student, and one an attorney. Any personal medical issues the reader may have should be referred to the reader’s physician. If the reader freely chooses to use some random anonymous blog to make medical decisions, well, that would be just foolish. See your own doctor, damn it, he’s got boat payments to make.

    Intended Audience

    This blog has a variety of posts written a varying levels of complexity. We have readers in high school, octogenarians, and many in between. Readers have indicated many levels of education from high school to doctorates. All are welcome. Some people will find some posts too simplistic, others too complex. Such is life.

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    Please remember that any information you submit through comments or email are inherently un-secure. If you wouldn’t shout it from the rooftops, don’t send it to me or post it in a comment. That being said, I will never intentionally divulge personal information or contact information of our visitors.

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  • Please Welcome PalMD

    Everyone please welcome PalMD of WhiteCoatUnderGround.

    I’ve been enjoying his writing for quite some time and think that he gets what the mission of denialism blog is all about.

    He has of course introduced himself, and I think in just a few posts you’ll see why he’s a wonderful asset to the sb team.

  • What Happened?

    Hello?
    (tap tap)
    Hello?
    (tap)
    Is this thing on?

    OK. I think it’s working.

    Wow. I mean, wow. Someone seems to have accidentally dropped the keys to denialism blog on my desk, so now I’m in ur blogz, messing with ur words and stuff.

    That’s really the only logical explanation. I mean, how else could I, a lowly Doctor of Medicine in a dreary Midwestern town, end up writing on Sb?

    I guess I owe you an explanation…
    (more…)

  • Bad Charlottesville News II

    Well, since we first wrote about losing Plan9, Higher Grounds, Satellite Ballroom and Just Curry for a worthless CVS, the C-Ville has picked up the story (here too) as well as the Hook. Good for them. I take back my sniping comments about them ignoring the Corner district.

    A few things are clear from these articles. One is that Terry Vassalos is using weasel-talk. He says in the C-Ville article:

    “They look at the space, yes,” says Vassalos. “I cannot go into the details. There are a lot of people involved, the people that are there, the new people, and I cannot say anything about the details of the contracts.”

    Weasel words if I’ve ever seen them. If Just Curry is already moving out it’s clear he’s made them unwelcome in that space, with or without a worthless CVS moving in. Second, he says:

    Vassalos says he understands that some people might be upset about Plan 9, Satellite, and Just Curry loosing their leases, and points out that he’s been a steward of small business on the Corner for years. “But as a business man…,” he says with a shrug and a smile. Indeed, considering that CVS would probably pay a hefty price for the space, and would likely renovate extensively, a deal with the chain might be too good to pass up.

    “Besides, I don’t think the Corner should be all bars and restaurants,” Vassalos adds, echoing his past statements. “…more retail will be good for the Corner.”

    This makes no sense. It should be perfectly possible for a store to move into the Plan 9 space and not displace the best music venue in town (where I saw TMBG last Sunday and it rocked). Why not divide the space up and lease them separately? The Plan9 space is completely separate from Satellite and Just Curry and there is more than enough room in Plan9 for a convenience store.

    It’s clear that CVS or not, this isn’t just a business decision. Vassalos wants these businesses that Plan9 sublet to out of his building. And does CVS really qualify as “retail”? Sure, they sell crap, but it’s the same stuff that’s at the 3 convenience stores and student bookstore already on the Corner. All this will do is hurt local businesses – the three businesses already in the space, the three local convenience stores on the corner that will have to compete with a national chain, and the restaurants and bars that benefit from having a music venue to draw people other than students to the Corner.

    I’m irritated that a small-minded landlord like Vassalos is willing to do so much damage to the culture of the Corner, and just shrug it off as a business decision. I call bullshit. As long as I live I won’t frequent what he moves in there, or his other businesses like Tip Top Diner or the College Inn. I’ll also encourage everyone I know to do the same. We don’t need to encourage landlords like Vassalos to hurt our community for an easy buck by frequenting his establishments.

  • Say it isn't so

    Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

    The NYT reports on a this article by Tomas Grim of the Dept of Zoology at Palacky Univ purporting to show a negative effect on numbers of scientific publications for scientists correlated with increasing beer consumption.

    According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.

    The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

    However, looking at the paper I’m somewhat confused, and not just from the willingness to generalize to all scientists from a single country’s avian ecologists. For one, the scales have to be a goof. Check out the first figure.
    i-4fd1c38060d2e0cc51fa3d5f3f89e27a-oik_16551_f1.gif

    Who drinks 2 liters of beer a year? That’s basically teetotalling. Even 6 liters a year (the high end of his effect) would be a very small amount. Is this just alcohol in the beer? At 18ml/12oz beer that would mean each liter corresponds to ~50 beers. At 6 liters that’s still only 300 beers or less than one a day. If instead the author means 2-6 liters/day/person/year that may make more sense. But 6 liters of alcohol a day? Maybe the Czech’s are worthy rivals for beer drinking but that’s now an unbelievably high amount for a non-hobo. How about 100-600 liters of beer a year? One liter is roughly 3 x 12oz beers. That would be a minimum of about 1 beers a day for the left side of the scale (although that starts at 2 so really about 1-2 beers a day is the lowest group), versus people who have about 5-6 beers a day.

    I’m having difficulties understanding the quantities of alcohol we’re talking about here. Can anyone enlighten me? If, as the NYT article suggests, the mid range was with 2 beers a day (which would fit with my 100L scaling above), I have even more trouble believing this silly hypothesis that the depressive effects of moderate alcohol negatively impact scientific work. After all the data is pretty level with a +/- bounce of 0.5 from 2-4 liters, or approximately 1-4 beers a day. Then there is a group of 5-6 beer/day drinkers who yank the line down giving it a pretty poor r-square value. I think this is a confusing paper with inadequate data and an improper line fit. At 5 or more beers a day you’re talking about pretty heavy use (not that I haven’t thrown back more than 5 in a day but not every day). Isn’t this really a study showing that alcoholic avian ecologists don’t publish as much as non-alcoholic avian ecologists?

    Tomáš Grim (2008)
    A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists
    doi:10.1111/j.2008.0030-1299.16551.x

  • Chris Mooney on ignoring the cranks

    Now that PZ, Brian, and ERV have all weighed in on whether Chris Mooney’s piece on crank enablers is right or not, let me lay out my operational strategy as an anti-denialist writer.

    It is true that repetition of denialist arguments is a strategic error, and that the repeition itself can reinforce their arguments. One has to consider this when dealing with nonsense and debunking it not to fall in the trap of just fisking it, which can defeat the purpose of your writing – to decrease the amount of BS in the world.

    However, a knowledge of the history of denialism is of utility in this discussion. Let us take, for example, the tobacco companies. The publication of internal memos from the tobacco companies has proven definitively that the companies were engaged in a strategy of willful deceit. Documents from as early as 1963 (PDF) demonstrate conclusively that the companies were aware that tobacco is addictive, that tobacco causes disease including emphysema and cancer, and that they were in the business of selling a unhealthy drug-delivery device.

    Despite these facts that were well known to them, they engaged in a campaign of disinformation to fight labelling information, smoking restrictions and regulatory control of cigarettes for over 30 years. Now that these documents have come to light their tactics have been studied in detail by various researchers and you see how effective denialism can be when unrecognized. Careful studies have definitively proven denialist tactics were being used to thwart public health for instance:

    ICOSI began as a conspiracy among seven tobacco company chief executives to promote internationally the fiction of a “controversy” regarding smoking and disease [15]. It quickly developed into a multi-million dollar global organization with a new name, expanding membership, and a broader mandate. Relying on a network of centralized staff, member company senior personnel, consultants, lawyers, and NMAs, ICOSI’s successor, INFOTAB, operated as an anti-WHO. Its mission was to systematically thwart public health by globalizing “doubt” not only about smoking and disease, but also about the economic costs of tobacco, the social costs of smoking, the motivations of tobacco control advocates, the relationship between smoking and advertising, and the need for smoking restrictions. Where it succeeded, INFOTAB unquestionably facilitated the spread of the global tobacco disease epidemic.

    In addition the documents have shown how tobacco companies carefully cherry-picked their research, bought “journalists” to promote their agenda (including Fumento and Milloy), created fake research organizations and used libertarian denialist think tanks such as Cato, the Heritage Foundation, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to further disseminate lies about the healthiness of smoking and the risks of environmental tobacco smoke (see here). All the while the tobacco companies hid their agenda, and their financial ties to these journals, organizations, and journalists.

    More below the fold…

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