Denialism Blog

Author: MarkH

  • Say Goodby to a Hack

    Chris DeMuth, the head of AEI, is announced he’s stepping down from the position in the WSJ Op-Ed page (article free here – at AEI). His farewell is a call to crankery:

    Every one of the right-of-center think tanks was founded in a spirit of opposition to the established order of things. Opposition is the natural proclivity of the intellectual (it’s what leads some smart people to become intellectuals rather than computer programmers), and is of course prerequisite to criticism and devotion to reform. And for conservatives, opposition lasted a very long time–in domestic policy, from the New Deal through 1980.

    These circumstances meant that the think tanks in their formative years attracted many contrarian characters who were strongly disaffected by some aspect of politics or policy. One of AEI’s founders was Raymond Moley, the FDR brain-truster who coined the term “New Deal” and then became disillusioned with the project (a liberal mugged by reality long before the 1960s, he was a proto-neoconservative). Milton Friedman was an active AEIer when he was still considered a crackpot in polite academic circles. Robert Bork and Jeane Kirkpatrick worked at AEI long before they became public personalities.

    You ask me, Milton Friedman still was a crackpot when he died this year – none of his ideas, no matter how widely adopted actually worked. Robert Bork is so embarrassing as an intellectual and a human being that when he wasn’t serving as a hit-man for Nixon during the Saturday Night Massacre, he wrote execrable legal opinions on reverting the constitution to a some antebellum ideal. He also cites Charles Murray, of Bell Curve fame, the most recent leader in the effort to abuse science to justify racism.

    This isn’t surprising talk from someone who championed the conversion of AEI from a conservative, but scholarly organization to a promoter of catastrophic idiocy. Basically, if you want to know who thought up the Iraq war – it’s these idiots. DeMuth takes credit for the surge in the essay:

    Sometimes the moment comes with astonishing speed. Last December, a group of military specialists closeted themselves at AEI to see if they could devise a new strategy for the war in Iraq, one that might have a reasonable prospect of victory following three years of catastrophic mistakes. Their plan was adopted within weeks by the White House, Pentagon, and new commanders in the field, with all credit due to our soldiers in action for their great success to date.

    But what he fails to remind us is that the strategy of the invasion and subsequent attempt to turn Iraq into a libertarian paradise was largely the intellectually aborted brainchild of AEI “thinkers”.

    Timothy Noah has the full scoop of the legacy of AEI in the DeMuth years in Slate. It’s a must-read for people to understand why I consider the global-warming denying, torture-promoting, stem-cell restricting, ultra-right, racist, and downright stupid nonsense coming from AEI to be the height of organized denialism.

  • 9/11 cranks sure are paranoid – of each other

    One of the latest discussions going on at the 9/11 conspiracy sites is the big question of who are the 9/11 disinformation agents being paid by the government to spread lies and confusion about the events of 9/11. George Washington gives the simple 5 d’s of disinformation to help you figure out who the splitters are:

    * Distracting, disrupting, or derailing 9/11 truth efforts;

    * Dividing the truth movement; or

    * Discrediting leading 9/11 activists

    What inflated egos they have to tihnk the government is actually afraid of them or cares enough about their crankery to pay money to influence their silly debates. I can’t help be amused at watching all the infighting between those who are embarrassed by holographic plane theories, to controlled demolition nonsense, to no-plane at the Pentagon etc. The whole discussion reminds me of this clip from Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian”:

    Splitters!

  • Uri Geller makes a comeback!

    Watching 30 Rock and the Office tonight I kept on seeing this commercial for a new show called “Phenomenon”. The story goes:

    The search for the impossible begins…there are those who claim special powers, but only one can be called the greatest. Now, the mind of Uri Geller, and the mastery of Chris Angel will test them all before the world, and everything you see will be live.

    I was cracking up because when they show Geller he’s got this sign that bends behind him. I can’t believe it, he still tries to milk this idea that he can bend metal like he’s some kind of spoon-bending genius.

    I’d think he’d give up that angle after James Randi busted his ass on the Carson show – see the video below.

    Even Geller’s blog has an idiotic banner with a bent-spoon prominently displayed. What an idiot.

    This new show is the American version of “the Successor”, and based on what I’ve seen, he’s continuing his idiotic shtick of presenting himself as a psychic, rather than an just an illusionist (and a crummy one at that). For a preview of the hoaxing you’re likely to see on NBC, friendly skeptic has posted videos from the Israeli show, in which you can see him stick a magnet on his thumb to make it appear that he can manipulate a compass with his mind.

    Geller has a history of using bogus copyright claims to try to suppress videos proving he’s a hack and a fake, so make sure to check these out before they disappear.

    This actually might be a lot of fun, because I bet other magicians, like Penn and Teller, like Johnny Carson before them, will have a blast showing how these guys are using simple illusions to provide proof of their claims of mystical abilities. From what I understand magicians get a little pissed when you try to claim supernatural powers for what is, in the end, just slight-of-hand. It might be fun to watch, and live blog with a magician to see who can spot the tricks. Anyone up for that? Anyone know a good magician? Preferably one who blogs? And who hates hacks?

  • Obesity – Primary vs. Secondary prevention

    I will never forget the very first patient history I ever took. Part of medical school training is they send you onto the wards to gather patient histories and physicals so you learn to gather information effectively as a clinician. My first patient history was on a woman about 35 years old on the orthopedics ward, who was a triple-amputee. She had her legs removed below the thigh, and one arm amputated below the elbow. The cause was imminently preventable. She had type II diabetes that was poorly controlled. She was obese, weighing about 180 lbs despite the removal of large parts of her body. A common problem with diabetics is that they are susceptible to infection in their bones. Diabetics have have poor pain perception from diabetic neuropathy and poor blood supply, the result is that cuts on their extremities go unnoticed, heal poorly, and ultimately result in infection that frequently goes into the bone. The result, osteomyelitis, is persistent infection of the bones from these infections, and, if antibiotics are ineffective, the only treatment is to surgery to remove the infected tissue and often amputation. Such was the case with my patient. She was poor, from Appalachia, had inadequate control of her diabetes, and as a result lost multiple limbs from infection (she was hospitalized for yet another infected bone).

    The major reason for the increase in Type II diabetes rates is obesity and lack of exercise. Disturbingly, younger and younger people are presenting with diseases often only seen with age, like type II diabetes and gout. This is unquestionably due to increasing rates of obesity in the US population. Thus, it is with dismay, that I read Sandy Szwarc’s blog Junkfood science, that seems to exist for the sole purpose of denying the health risks of obesity and of being overweight. Sandy, who is on CEI’s staff, routinely writes about obesity as a health-scare, that is not harmful as doctors and health scientists suggest.

    To illustrate the problems with her analysis, let’s go through one of her more recent posts on the Obesity Paradox – the apparent decrease in mortality in studies of the obese.
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  • Skeptics' Circle Number 71

    The Infophile has this week’s circle up at Infophilia. He has presented the posts in the context of logical puzzles, practically daring us to use our brains rather than just spoon-feeding us the skepticism.

    See if you can figure them all out!

  • The Short Memory of HIV/AIDS denialism

    Greta Christina has sent me this link to her wonderful essay discussing the short memory required for HIV/AIDS denialism.

    It is really a fantastic essay, personal and well-researched, and it covers a very important point. A lot of the anti-science attitudes we see are from people have no memory of what things were like before some medical intervention like vaccines, antibiotics, or in this case HAART. It’s easy to think there’s no problem with avoiding vaccination, or denying germ theory once the problem of these diseases are so well-controlled that there doesn’t seem to be a tangible benefit from the interventions anymore. Similar with HAART, HIV/AIDS denialists who for whatever reason have bought into the crankery, probably didn’t experience or can’t remember what a dramatic effect HAART had on survival rates of AIDS, or the sheer terror of the disease in the early days when no one knew the cause, or how it was transmitted. HAART and public health have been highly successful, and as a result AIDS awareness now occupies the back-burner. This will likely make HIV/AIDS denialism ripe for a resurgence as people ignorant of the history of the disease will have no personal experience to counter the lies of the cranks.

    Unless, of course, people go read Greta’s essay, and spread it around the web.

  • Two articles on building immunity in kids

    The first from the NYT discusses the fallacy that childhood illness somehow builds up the immune system making them healthier adults. Rather, it emphasizes correctly, that exposure to lots of harmless antigens seems to be the key to making kids less susceptible to asthma and allergies, not exposure to harmful ones. In other words, let your kids go outside and eat dirt, but don’t take them to chicken-pox parties (vaccinate them instead).

    In a similar vein, Slate has an articleon eating more crap. While the point is made more carelessly, the idea is the same, that exposure to common harmless antigens may be protective for later exposures in preventing auto-immunity and decreasing severity of illness.

    It reminds me, of All Creatures Great and Small, when Herriot is discussing the children of the local “knacker man” Mallock. The man spent all his time cutting up, and processing diseased carcasses of farm animals, and Herriot remarked that his kids, despite being surrounded with all the stinky filth imaginable, he were the healthiest children in the district.

  • Breast Cancer Crankery From Mike Adams

    The latest crankery from Adams is the evil male-chauvinist conspiracy to perpetuate breast cancer for fun and profit being led by none other than those dastardly villains of the American Cancer Society. With his stunning report and links to the thinkbeforeyoupink campaign, he rails against the ribbons that are a “symbol of male-dominated control over women”, and exposes the insidious lies of those who spend their lives looking for cures for this deadly disease.

    In this report, you’ll learn how the cancer industry — which is dominated by powerful men — uses the same tactics today to control women while pretending to serve them. You’ll learn truly shocking information about how the cancer industry exploits women’s bodies to generate profits for pharmaceutical companies while systematically denying those same women access to information that could teach them how to avoid breast cancer (and other cancers) in the first place. A single nutrient, for example, has been shown to prevent 77 percent of all cancers, and yet the cancer industry — including top cancer non-profits — refuse to recommend this nutrient.

    And unlike virtually every major cancer group in existence today (with a few exceptions that will be noted later), this report was not funded by a pharmaceutical company. That’s why it tells you the truth about an industry that prioritizes profits over public health — an industry that works hard to keep women ignorant about the real solutions to breast cancer (cancer-free women are no longer revenue-generating patients for cancer drug manufacturers.)

    Adams truly has a sick and warped mind, and this report is yet more evidence that the altie-med movement isn’t satisfied pushing their ineffective pharmaceuticals, they also must denigrate evidence-based medicine and scare people away from potentially life-saving treatments.
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  • No Imagination Without Religion? Lee Seigel is an idiot.

    Noted sockpuppet and sniveler Lee Siegel warns us that the new militant atheists may be closing the book on imagination. And for some reason the LA Times saw fit to publish this tripe.

    In the last few years, so many books have rolled off the presses challenging God, belief and religion itself (by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger and Christopher Hitchens, among others) that a visitor from another planet might think America was in the iron throes of priestly repression. You’d never know that we live in the age of Paris Hilton, HBO, Internet porn and flip-flops. The 17th century Catholic Church proscribed Galileo — just imagine what it would have done with the creators of “Entourage.”

    Here we start out poorly. One assumes you have to object to something only when being persecuted by it. Siegel is saying we can’t object to magical thinking unless we’re undergoing an inquisition? And that Paris Hilton is the symbol of our freedom? Atheism = tolerance of trashy whores and nudity on the TV (in the US)?

    …that the separation of church and state is inscribed in our Constitution; that no priest, minister or rabbi holds any top position in the federal government; and that even the state board of education in Kansas recently forbade the teaching of creationism. The Catholic Church imprisoned Galileo and hounded Voltaire and his fellow philosophers; Harris & Co., meanwhile, are dining out on their self-styled iconoclasm in every corner of the media.

    It’s true, atheism, in this country, does not result in imprisonment or persecution. We call this progress. But it’s also ignoring the points made by Dawkins and Hitchens about religion’s influence around the world, real persecution of those that are different in theocratic states, and the quieter discrimination and reviling of science and reason that we must constantly be vigilant of in this country. Siegel then goes on to acknowledge the problems he spends his first paragraphs saying don’t exist, and makes the idiotic argument that books about atheism don’t do any good unless they’re designed to convert opponents.

    Who, exactly, are they aimed at? Who is the ideal reader of these attacks on belief in God? Not Muslim or Christian fundamentalists, obviously, because one of the engines driving religious fundamentalism today is, precisely, a hostility toward modern science. If anyone thinks that Dawkins’ book, “The God Delusion” — with its “scientific” attempts to refute the existence of God — is going to persuade today’s religious fanatics, here or abroad, to loosen up and enjoy a little MTV, you have to ask yourself just who is “deluded.” It’s hard to imagine anyone abandoning his faith after reading Harris’ condescending polemic, or the science of Dawkins and Dennett, or Hitchens’ vitriol.

    I sincerely doubt that the goal of any of these writers is conversion of people like James Dobson or Ted Haggard, and no one realistically thinks that is the objective of the books. There are such things as people without their minds made up, people on the fence, and those that would like to solidify their arguments and understanding of atheist philosophy. Clearly they are selling though, so maybe Siegel should spend less time worrying about their audience.

    The attacks in the books often don’t make much sense either. For instance, Bush and his gang preach Christian values while lying us into a slaughterhouse overseas, ransacking our public coffers and ignoring social inequities and iniquities at home — and so our heroic anti-religionists attack . . . Christian values. But shouldn’t they be attacking Bush and Co.’s hypocrisy in betraying Christian values instead? Such polemics are a case of throwing the sacred bathwater out with the baby. The analytic philosophers used to call such arguments that so sorely miss the mark “category mistakes.”

    Ah yes, we call this argument the “Courtier’s Reply“. The problem is clearly not religion, because Dawkins et al., aren’t writing about true religion, you know, people helping out their neighbors and working in soup kitchens. Fanaticism has nothing to do with real religion which is all sweetness and light all the time. As J.J points out, this is a straw man, because the issue isn’t the moral lessons of each religion being obeyed (although as Hitch points out many of these are highly questionable). It’s much harder to defend what Dawkins actually attacks, the improbability of the existence of deities or the supernatural.

    Now so far, all we’ve seen is the usual tripe. But we haven’t really seen how far down Siegel can stoop in his criticism of the new atheists. Prepare to see, quite possibly, the most absurd and offensive arguments yet against the new atheists.
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  • The Greatest Generation and Interrogation

    A must-read from the Washington Post about how interrogations went in WWII.

    For six decades, they held their silence.

    The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.

    When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.
    …
    “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.

    What a disappointment this must be for men who sacrificed for their country in WWII to see George Bush’s management of this shameful war. I think it boils down to “keep shopping while we torture these guys and our mercenaries shoot civilians.” It’s embarrassing, and clearly disappointing to these men.

    Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army’s Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

    …

    “During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,” said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. “We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”